What is Crowdsourcing?
Posted on May 19, 2008Filed Under Business |
What is Crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing is a practice of getting passionate contributors to create content for websites, make designs for new products, perform important business tasks for companies such as research, product development, and marketing.
Online forums, YouTube and MySpace are a few examples that are mainly based on crowdsourcing and members’ contributions. Indeed, there are many other websites and businesses which are applying crowdsourcing as a way for building their online content or developing their products, we can’t forget the famous digg as an excellent example of using the crowds of members for building a content of web pages bookmarks.
Open Source Footwear?!
This is one of the cool implementations of crowdsourcing for product development, where the visitors are encouraged to submit their own ideas for shoe designs, after voting, the winning design goes into production, great idea for reducing development costs and launching a successful product that is more likely to gain customers acceptance.
Additional example of crowdsourcing websites
This is another example of crowdsourcing websites, it contains a lot of creative ideas & projects submitted by their members, winning projects are chosen by the buyers who might be influenced to some extent by the crowd rating.
Is crowdsourcing effective?
Crowdsourcing can create a good and creative content for your website or blog, however, crowds or contributors aren’t employees, they aren’t obliged to do work for you, they have to be recognized and satsified in someway to keep them motivated. While being unable to guarantee an ongoing community of active contributors, crowdsourcing can’t be considered as the best choice.
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Hi and thanks so much for the mention of crowdSPRING. cS is a marketplace for buyers and providers of creative services; buyers can post projects and creatives from around the world contribute ideas crafted to the buyers specifications.
True crowdsourcing is characterized the collaborative participation of a wide network of individuals to solve a given problem. We like to think of crowdSPRING as more than just that - we are part of the “open innovation” movement, wherein a level playing field is provided for competition. On cS creatives compete purely on the quality of their ideas, not on their experience, training, location, or education.
Best regards and thanks again,
Mike
Thanks Mike for the rich comment and the additional information you provided.
You are welcome.
Crowdsourcing: Your Visitors As Creators…
Are you among the ones who are getting their members or visitors to do the work for their websites or blogs?Read more about crowdsourcing as a practice for building an online content and developing new ideas & products….
Crowdsourcing can create a good and creative content for your website or blog, however this requires building an ongoing community.
Hey,
We at FixYa believe in the power of the individual to lend their expertise no matter what it is. I truly believe if the user can get enough value out of a community, they will be willing to put something back in. I’m sure one day soon on our site, we’ll be able to see a Mom from Kansas getting help for her computer while offering help in fixing a microwave that someone else has a problem with.
Hiren
Absolutely fascinating concept - maybe a bit more research? - to come up with some practical tips??
Hi Hiren,
Nice thinking! As you mentioned, if users believe they can benefit from a community, they will be willing to contribute to it. In my opinion, that’s the most important point to build your contributing community.
Thanks for your valuable comment.
Hi Rhys,
That’s what i was thinking of; Covering the concept in more detail since it’s really worth it. Most probably, this is going to be the next post.
Thanks for your nice comment and suggestion, feel free to send any other feedback or suggestions when needed.
This is an interesting concept and I see how it works on Digg. Get enough Diggs and your blog traffic skyrockets, and you possibly gain more loyal readers.
I can also see how it wouldn’t work. If someone submits an idea, the idea could easily be copied and someone else could make money off of it, leaving the original contributor completely out of the mix.
The case may be different when talking about digg, the contributors are getting real benefits and not just some kind of recognition, they are receiving traffic to their websites or blogs.
This is one of the reasons that make contributors to such kind of web sites keep going with their contributions.
For other crowdsourcing web sites or blogs, it’s very important to build a community that won’t let you down at any time, that’s why it’s important to pay attention to how much your contributors feel satisfied, otherwise, they won’t feel like submitting their ideas for nothing.
I think this depends on the contributors and what would make them feel rewarded and satisfied. In this case communicating with the contributors on a regular basis and full awareness of their needs is a must to keep your community alive.
Thanks Barbara for your thoughtful comment!
[…] Crowdsourcing is an interesting business model. In this article I am highlighting a few practical tips for understanding the process of building a crowdsourcing website. […]