Salesforce.com to add “Crowdsourcing”

While sites such as Flickr, Wikipedia and Digg have become a staple of many people’s day, the idea of opening up business functions traditionally delegated to a small group of people is a foreign concept to many organizations.

With the Winter ’08 release of Salesforce.com, concepts similar to what drive those and other “Web 2.0” sites are being added to Salesforce Ideas (open submissions and voting) as well as Salesforce Content (open publishing as well as a rating system and tags).

Incorporating the “wisdom of crowds” into these types of areas has proven effective time and time again on public facing websites, and it’s great to see similar functionality being incorporated into backend-business systems as well.  While you need to be careful to not confuse “popular” with “quality”, these and similar tools not only “automate” many business functions but often can perform them more accurately than traditional methods. 

The Salesforce Ideas and Salesforce Content sites both offer impressive use cases and case studies that demonstrate how crowdsourcing has helped solve real business problems.