Crowdsourcing initiatives are used by companies to obtain
knowledge or creativity from external users. Today I will show examples of crowdsourcing for the purposes of labor, capital and evangelism.
3. Labor
Computers have taken over a lot of tasks once performed by men. The idea of labor as a resource has significantly changed since then. Still, there are tasks out there which can be more reliably or easily fulfilled by human beings. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk offers a platform designed to crowdsource labor-intensive ‘Human Intelligents Tasks’ (HITs) which are also called ‘pico-jobs’ or 'micro-task'.
A prominent example of how the Mechanical Turk platform can be used is the search for Jim Gray, a renowned Silicon Valley computer scientist. Jim Gray disappeared on a sailing trip outside San Francisco Bay. Friends coordinated the search utilizing Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform and
“turned the eyes of the global network onto the Pacific“. Up-to-date satellite images of the area were posted on the platform with a reference image showing the size/shape of the boat on a satellite image. Users were asked to go through images and mark those which may contain a boat to be further inspected by experts. In total, 12.000 volunteers signed up, screened 30.000 square miles of water captured in approximately 100.000 assignments. Despite the efforts, Jim Gray was not found.
source: http://hoppsan.org/jamesb/blogger/uploaded_images/JimGray-797616.png
4. Capital
Any entrepreneur needs it at some point to realize his/her venture: capital. Usually, venture capitalists or business angels support start-ups. More recently, ‘crowdfunding’ platforms such as
Kickstarter use crowdsourcing principles to gather capital for entrepreneurial projects from individuals.
Scott Wilson from a Chicago-based design agency had the idea to
turn Apple’s iPod Nano into a multi-touch wrist watch. In order to realize it they placed their project on Kickstarter and asked people to fund their idea. Six different investments could be done starting at $1 pledges (idealistic support with no return) up to $500 pledges (serialized signed edition including iPod Nano plus additional 5 regular holders). The goal of collecting $15.000 was topped by far: 13.512 backers invested $942.578 and really did kickstart this project.
source: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1104350651/tiktok-lunatik-multi-touch-watch-kits?ref=live
5. Evangelism
The crowdsourcing initiatives so far have focused resources and skills people possess (knowledge, creativity, labor, capital). One last benefit for companies arising from crowdsourcing is evangelism or positive word-of-mouth which results from people's position within a social network (both online and offline). People's network centrality in their community or opinion leadership among peers are qualities which may constitute evangelism for a product or a company. It is key to crowdsourcing initiatives designed to create word-of-mouth to (1) contain game-based elements inducing a playful way of interacting with a brand and (2) provide share functionalities so that individuals can spread the word in their network. Quite often, evangelism is a side-product of crowdsourcing initiatives primarily aiming at people's creativity or capital. However, some examples out there managed to come up with a compelling narrative without asking for any of the other benefits.
Edding's Wall-of-Fame is an inspiring example of how crowdsourcing can make use of the crowd's evangelism. The platform provided a big blank virtual wall and several Edding markers inviting users to contribute a little sketch or drawing. Individuals can then share their drawings in social media applications or via e-mail. On the platform people can also interact with others who are drawing at that moment via a chat functionality. A small fraction of the crowdsourced wall full of scribbles and drawings can be seen below. Due to the perfect brand-fit of the "story" behind the campaign, both engagement levels and reach were impressive.
source: http://wall-of-fame.com/
Also look at my previous
blog post on crowdsourcing for knowledge and creativity.
In German marketing magazine "Horizont" Andreas-Christoph Hofmann, Head of BMW Brand Communication, speaks about the role crowdsourcing plays at BMW and the Co-Creation Lab based on HYVE IdeaNet.
