Last week I got a call from an agency who thought they needed to run some creative development research - only they were in a hurry and the budget was small. Why not use a webjam I askd them. What's a webjam? Well you're on one. This is a tool for creating social media networks as open or private as you wish. And you drag and drop the different elements onto a few pages in a few minutes. What took the longest time was getting hold of respondents (a couple of days) and they used friends and family to keep costs down. Instead of writing a discussion guide or designing a questionnaire I set up the webjam so there was a route so visitors who click select the artwork that interested them and follow through to the relevant page to answer some questions about each route. Because it is like a social network people had the afternoon to work through the concepts and to write about them in the forums. And then in the evening we asked them to visit a second time and to comment on other people's comments. So the board was open in total for 12 hours.  The great thing about allowing it to go on that long was that it made it easy for people to participate when it suited them. And I was able to see from the first couple of respondents that there were comprehension issues so I added some additional information to one of the pages. So we could observe and make adjustments as we went.

I grabbed all the input off the webjam the following morning, wrote a summary and that was it done and dusted.  What I have done for research could just as easily be done inside the office or between different offices with your colleagues. Its a very straightforward way to work.  The great thing about webjams is that you include  polls if you want but basically participants can say what they like and do it at their convenience. A good rolling method for developing creative ideas.  

Its not a cheap book but here's Thomas Seeley's exploration of the inner workings of the Hive. In case you have the curiosity and spare pocket money! Wisdom of the Hive

Found this rather useful quotation from the James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds in the Decker Marketing blog which I would recommend that you read. Which shows that the waggledancing idea is n established one and is gaining traction.

"What is important is the way a colony gets to that collectively intelligent solution to find nectar. It does not get there by first rationally considering all the alternatives and then determining an ideal foraging pattern. It can’t do this, because it doesn’t have any idea what the possible alternatives – that is, where the different flower patches – are. So instead, it sends out scouts in many different directions and trusts that at least one of them will find the best patch, return, and do a good [waggle] dance so that the hive will know where the good food is.

This result is an optimal distribution of bees per nectar source, and the most efficient model of production for the hive.

As a bee (consumer) I too would follow the waggle with the highest chance of finding what I want (replace “nectar” with the “right cell phone” I’m looking for right now)."