When TED Lost Control of Its Crowd
分析了TED在开放TEDx活动后，因失去对品牌和内容的控制而面临信誉危机，并总结了通过积极倾听、共同目标对齐和战略控制来扭转局面的经验。
In 2009, TED, an organizer of highly respected conferences on ideas worth spreading, threw its doors open, allowing anyone, anywhere, to manage and stage local, independent events under its banner. In the next few years, an army of volunteers produced some 5,000 such TEDx events in more than 130 countries. The brand extension and new content TED gained through these gatherings would have cost millions to produce by traditional means. But they came with a risk: TED no longer completely controlled its brand, and an extended community of people who didn't work for TED were now capable of damaging it. And when TEDx licensees began putting dubious pseudoscientific presentations on their programs, that risk became a real threat. The blogosphere trashed TED for producing dumb content and questioned its overall credibility. In this article, Nilofer Merchant describes the uproar and the lessons it offers: (i) that open does not mean easy or free and (2) that you need to get the crowd working with you, not against you. TED did that, turning things around by adopting three practices: listening loudly, realigning the community through shared purpose, and being strategic about the parts of the business it opened to the crowd and the parts it kept under tight control.