Henry Ford is famous for the statement ‘Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black’. Anyone that wanted to buy his automobile in 1914 was stuck with black. Today consumers not only want to have a choice, they also want you to respond to their wishes. People want to have a voice, be heard, participate, co-create and influence the decision making process. Does this sound difficult, time consuming and expensive to you? It doesn’t have to be and it can even be fun! We’ve developed a cost-efficient fun method to assess the voice of the customer using social media and scientifically validated algorithms.

Which products will be sold successfully? Which prototypes should be taken into production? What colors and models do our customers prefer? These are tough choices to make. If you make the wrong decision you cannot deliver the products your audience wants leading to unsatisfied customers. On top of that you are left with unpopular items to be sold in outlet stores at the lowest possible price. A wrong decision greatly decreases your profit margin so we need tools to help you choose. Knowing your customer’s expectations, preferences and aversions will enhance customer satisfaction and save you a lot of money. It enables you to make the right decision every time.

With Rank Your Pins you can easily assess the voice of your audience and act on it. There is no need for time consuming focus groups or expensive individual interviews. Instead you need a group of people willing to participate in a fun ‘battle’. To encourage participation you can organize an online raffle. A person entering the battle is presented with two pictures at a time. He or she must choose which one they prefer and is then presented with the next pair. One can choose to leave the battle at any time. There is no need to rank all items in the battle by the same person. As more people enter the battle the precision of the ranking improves. You can harvest your results any time you wish. [Content to be placed outside of the “stream”]: What is pinterest? Pinterest is an online pinboard where people can organize and share pictures of things (pins) they like. It’s highly visual, social and growing rapidly.

Rank Your Pins makes smart use of social media platforms for crowdsourced decision making. It employs scientifically validated algorithms and the theory of paired comparison analysis to indisputably determine the ranking of a series of pins. This is a very reliable method which outperforms grading items separately.

Several applications for Rank Your Pins are:

• [Car prototypes] Ranking prototypes and choose which ones will be taken into production based on popularity.
• [Fashion] Ranking items and choose which ones to buy so you’ll have enough popular items to sell and won’t have to discount as much as last season.
• [Logo design] Ranking designs and have the audience choose which one is the best fit.
• [Wardrobe] Clean out your closet: Photograph the items in your overcrowded wardrobe and have your friends rank them. You can then make the right choice, keep the top items and get rid of the unpopular ones.
• [Elections] Elections.
• [Beauty contest] Example: faceranked.com

The possibilities are endless.

1. Create a pinboard on Pinterest. You need a Pinterest account and a minimum of one board with pins. If you don’t have an account yet just go to www.pinterest.com and create one. Your next assignment is to create a board and “pin” images onto it via your own website (using the ‘pin it’ button which you can install on your bookmarks toolbar) or by simply uploading them yourself.
2. Create a ‘battle’ in Rank Your Pins. If you have created your pinboard it’s time to sign up with Rank Your Pins, create a new ‘battle’ and import the pins directly from Pinterest.
3. Invite people to play the battle. Now you have to find people to play this battle. Go to your Facebook Fanpage, Twitter account or mailing list and invite your fans, followers and friends to participate in the ranking. It’s fun, it’s democratic, it doesn’t take much time and there’s a win for everyone involved.