Fosfo (previously known as Citizens Market) is a community-driven web site helping consumers to know which are the best companies to support. Annesley interviewed Stephane de Messieres from Fosfo.
Stephane told us that Fosfo team have always had the attitude that expert-driven models are absolutely required for good benchmarking and strong analysis on the largest companies BUT those organisations will always find it hard to have comprehensive coverage that includes smaller brands – so that’s where crowdsourcing comes in. Fosfo allows users to review any company, right down to small local stores. In theory, a single site could combine both approaches, but in practise it might be difficult because the organisational culture is necessarily very different. A key differentiator of Fosfo is their focus on building their community, including experimenting with offline events such as game-testing the mechanics of their site.
Stephane agrees that there’s a need to constantly focus on expanding beyond the “core niche” and engaging more ethical consumers.
He believes that although there’s a lot of useful third-party sources out there, but it’s important not just to “scrape” the data but instead to encourage your community to cultivate and support these data sources.
Stephane points out that taking a purely information-driven approach suffers from a huge chicken-and-egg problem: users won’t contribute to an empty site because initially they won’t believe in it. But if there’s a playful, social element, that can be a motivator, right from the start.
Like many projects in our field, Fosfo is struggling to make the organisation work financially and is currently looking at how they can continue by scaling back on staff. We wish them the best of luck with that and look forward to collaborating in the future!
Watch the interview on Youtube, download it as an Mp4 video or an Mp3 audio file.