All About Crowdsourcing
Last night, I attended a very thought-provoking Ad Club (#adclub) event, “All About Crowdsourcing,” featuring authors Edward Boches and John Winsor. John, VP of Strategy & Innovation at Crispin, Porter & Bogusky, recently wrote a piece in BusinessWeek about what crowdsourcing means for innovation. Edward, Chief Creative Officer/Chief Social Media Officer at Mullen, is a marketing guru and has a very cool blog called creativity_unbound.
I was surprised to see so many people have such strong opinions on crowdsourcing. But whether they liked it or not, it was obvious the model is having a big impact on businesses today. As Edward pointed out, “Crowdsourcing is here to stay.”
Using examples such as CrowdSpring, PopTent, Innocentive, and uTest (in addition to Dell and Starbucks), John emphasized how crowdsourcing truly offers people more opportunities to innovate, build a reputation in their field of expertise, and make some money too.
With more and more companies tapping into the wisdom of crowds, they are really allowing people to be creative in new ways. People no longer need to move to NYC or San Fran to have a creative voice – crowdsourcing platforms give them equal opportunity no matter where they are.
Edward went so far as to say the paradigm shift has been so relevant that soon we’ll have the title – “Director of Crowdsourcing” – in companies worldwide. It’s true that just a couple years ago people were saying blogs and social media were irrelevant, and now the titles of Community Manager and Social Media Manager are becoming mainstream.
Steve Lohr of the New York Times recently wrote that crowdsourcing “models succeed only when carefully designed for a particular task and when the incentives are tailored to attract the most effective collaborators.”
What do you think?
Jenny:
Thanks for attending and continuing the conversation. I think everyone learns from each other. John told me that even Jeff Howe, who wrote the book, realizes he doesn’t really know that much about it. In fact, he’s off to Harvard to study the subject. I do, however, think there are some things we can all do right: plan, source from right people, allow crowd to participate in selection, reward them, and learn which platforms (public or private) will be most effective, and remember to guide the process so the outcome is worth the effort.
Edward:
Thank you for your thoughtful insights on crowdsourcing. It was very nice to meet you at the event. I hope you do more like this one in the future. Looking forward to it!
Jennifer – thanks for posting this summary. I was bummed that I wasn’t in Boston to attend the event in person. It sounds like it was a wonderful discussion. It’s Interesting to hear Edward’s perspective about the “Director of Crowdsourcing”. I haven’t really thought about companies creating such a position but it really does start to make sense when you see how successful some companies have been in leveraging crowdsourcing.
Best,
Ross Kimbarovsky
co-Founder
http://www.crowdspring.com
Ross – It’s my pleasure! Thanks for your note. It will be very interesting to continue following these organizational developments. Seeing as crowdSPRING and uTest are at the forefront of B2B crowdsourcing innovation, we are well positioned to see how it all pans out!
Hi,
the big problem in crowd sourcing is turning the information into something coherent. I have built a system which does that for Semitic information http://www.alexlib.info. It allows the crowd to build and manage ontologies. -Tom
@edwardboches said:
“I do, however, think there are some things we can all do right: plan, source from right people, …reward them, …and remember to guide the process so the outcome is worth the effort.”
I’ll second this list based on what I’m seeing so far with various forms of freelancing/crowdsourcing sites. The ‘free-for-all’ sites are poor quality in opportunity for the crowd, and in outcome and trust for the customer (my opinions of course).
Having used the uTest platform (as a tester) for a few weeks, I feel that it is a model that will drive the success of crowdsourcing attracting a competent crowd and building a reputation of being trustworthy and reliable, which in turn will attract more and more customers (and in turn more competent crowd, etc).
I feel the success of uTest is based significantly on the people there doing the guiding.
Jennifer -
It was great to see you in Boston. What a great session we had. Thanks to Edward for leading the discussion. I like the idea of a “Director of Crowdsourcing.” But I wonder if it should be Director of Co-creation instead. Think about all of the other opportunities there are to collaborate with customers, suppliers and employees.
Brad — I agree that free-for-all sites (at least in B2B crowdsourcing) are often a lose-lose for both the crowd and customers.
There’s an enormous difference between a structured, professional community that’s properly incented vs. a loosely assembled, unfiltered mob that’s poorly incented. This distinction will become more clear over time as some companies execute crowdsourcing well and others don’t.
Matt