Fans know best
By Marty Carroll
How often have footie fans stood on the terraces, shaking their fists in the air and berating the manager’s choices? So-and-so shouldn’t be playing today, so soon after his injury! Can’t believe how much they spent on that useless goalie! Everyone’s a critic, it seems.
Now one football club will find out whether the fans really do know best. 20,000 members of MyFootballClub have chipped in to buy Ebbsfleet United, raising a total of £700,000 between them. The joint owners will vote on all major decisions, including player selection and transfers.
There is a theory that crowds are smarter than even the brightest experts, in certain circumstances. The book ‘The Wisdom of Crowds‘ by James Surowiecki says that four conditions must be satisfied for a group to be smarter than its most able members: it needs to be diverse so that members bring different information to the table, it needs to be decentralised so there’s nobody dictating the crowd’s answer, it needs a way of summarising opinions into a collective verdict, and the people in the crowd must be independent so that they’re not swayed by the opinions of others.
The new owners of Ebbsfleet United satisfy all those requirements, so they should be able to make much better decisions than the previous manager.
A similar selection process takes place online. Google rose to prominence, despite entrenched competition from the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo, because it offered a better user experience. It was faster, adverts were less intrusive and the results returned were higher quality. The crowd chose Google.
Internet users worldwide continue to pick the winners of the web, without consulting each other. They return to sites that offer the best user experience and neglect those that don’t. Because the internet offers near perfect information, price is a secondary consideration to the user experience. According to the wisdom of crowds theory, internet users can identify the best sites much more easily than experts can. That underscores the importance of listening to your customers, undertaking user testing and responding to their feedback. Only then can sites truly evolve. Only the fittest will survive.