Influx

Jim Buckminster of Craigslist took part in a Web2.0 conference panel on collective intelligence and explained just how much the company relies on its users.

As the chart above shows, Craigslist’s users are a little different from the users of other sites; they’re the extended workforce.

As Buckmastrer explained, Craigslist users;

- Police the site and keep the bad listings off
- Advise the company on how to raise finance,
- Decide if they should have a sales force, pricing
- Say no to changing the logo
- Say no to putting text ads on the pages- that could have generated millions for the company

Jim explained that Craigslist is the result of the actions of millions of its users.

How the 23 employees learn what the users want is by sitting in online user forums and listening to he chatter. Sometimes this gets tough to hear, but importantly, they listen.

There were other speakers from Facebook, Demand Media and Auttomatic who had a lot of interesting things to say, that we will cover another posting.

One of the most incisive comments came from Owen Van Natta, the COO of Facebook, who said for his brand, marketing = new product features. They would rather invest all their money on this, rather than doing any other form of marketing.