I was settling in to my first bite of overstuffed pastrami and corned beef sandwich—apologies to the vegetablists.  One of the four octogenarians seated in the booth next to me was speaking loudly to the other three about the catheterization he underwent the prior day.

Thankfully, his friend, who was eating the egg salad special interrupted him and asked, “How long have you known Bernie Westoff?”

“I don’t know Bernie Westoff,” replied the cath patient.

“He is one of your LinkedIn contacts.”

“How do you know that?”

Egg Salad stated, “I looked at your contacts.”

“Who told you you could look at my contacts?”

“You set it up that way.  Everyone can look at them”

This conversation continued for the next several minutes.  I was tempted to pull out my iPad, open the LinkedIn app, and join the fray, but instead I kept my eyes straight ahead and worried about the Russian dressing dripping down my arm.  Crowdsourcing 101.

I think the one application of crowdsourcing most overlooked is one which hardly fits the definition. This type is not premeditated and it does not originate within a company. More often than not, the company is the target of this type of crowdsourcing—Social-CRM.

Most definitions of crowdsourcing involve a call going out to a group of individuals who are then gathered via the call to solve a complex problem—problem solving—much like the Law of Large Numbers.  The crowd is likely to have an upper limit in terms of the number of members. By default, traditional crowdsourcing is fashioned to work from the top down; it is outbound, a push model.

Social-CRM (S-CRM) tends to work from the bottom up. There are no boundaries to the number of members; in fact, there can be thousands of members. Also atypical is the fact with S-CRM no single event or call to action drives the formation of the crowd. The crowd can have as many events as it has members.

The unifying force around S-CRM is each member’s perspective of a given firm or organization. Members are often knitted together by having felt wronged or put-off by an action, product, or service provided or not provided by an organization. Most organizations do not listen to, nor do they have a means by which they can communicate with the S-CRM crowdsource. This in turn causes the membership to grow, and to become even more steadfast in the individual missions of their members.

In traditional crowdsourcing, once the problem solving ends, the crowd no longer has a reason to exist, and it disbands. With S-CRM crowdsourcing, since the problem never seems to go away, neither does the crowd.

Every hospital and payer has one or more S-CRM groups biting at its ankles, hurting its image, hurting the brand, causing customers to flee, and disrupting the business model. Even so, most organizations ignore the S-CRM crowd just like someone ignores their crazy Uncle Pete who disrupts every family gathering.

The fact that your hospital may have a Facebook page and a Twitter account managed by two people who are officed in what used to be a supply closet will not do much to dampen the whinge factor created online by those individuals wondering digitally about why the hospital seems to have so much difficulty even answering its phone to schedule an appointment.

Social-CRM is not a fair fight. Perhaps the best approach is to find out why people are complaining, and then develop a plan to fix those issues that have them screaming the loudest.