Paper Example on Crowdsourcing

Introduction

Crowdsourcing is the practice of engaging a crowd or group of people for a common objective which can either be problem-solving, innovation and efficiency. The term crowdsourcing was introduced by Jeff Howe and Mark Robbinson in June 2006 in an article which was featured in the Wired magazine (Estelles-Arolas & Gonzalez-Ladron-De-Guevara, 2012). Crowdsourcing entails getting information, work and opinions from a large group of people who can share their ideas through the use of social media, internet or mobile applications. The individuals who take part in crowdsourcing can either be paid or work on a voluntary basis. The people who take part in crowdsourcing are given the opportunity to respond to the crowdsourcing activities which are promoted by the organization. The organization comes up identities a task that is currently being conducted in-house and then releases it to a crowd of outsiders who are then invited to undertake the task on the firm's behalf. When the task is completed, the group will then submit the task to the firm and then the firm will assess the quality of work and if it is satisfactory make payments to those who should be paid. Crowdsourcing can take place on many different levels and across various industries.

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Crowdsourcing in Culture

Social media has become a huge part of people lives. In the same way, social media is transforming the way people think about crowdsourcing. Social media has become an essential part of crowdsourcing because it helps organizations to reach more audience in a fast way, cheaply and more efficiently than before. Most of the crowdsourcing campaigns today use social media to get more contributions which leads to better quality of ideas or whatever result is expected. Most of the organizations have realized how important social media can be used to push their crowdsourcing campaigns and they are paying more and more attention to it. Social media gives organizations an important channel that will enable them to reach the masses and make their crowdsourcing efforts a success. As social media is becoming more sophisticated, they have realized the importance of social media monitoring, and they understand its contribution to their crowdsourcing effort. Social media has boosted crowdsourcing in these three significant ways. First, the organizations are able to ask for feedback from their customers. A company is able to ask open-ended questions on their social media sites which turn into a program of collecting and reacting to feedback from their customers. Secondly, social media has enabled the organization to be able to create contests and giveaways. Social media enables organizations to implement promotions, offer free products & services, and also offer reduced prices to customers who take in online contests. The contests can be created and managed using a contest application. The main benefit of these contests and giveaways is that they turn the participants into promoters. Lastly, social media will enable organizations to undertake polls or surveys for their fans (Brabham, 2013). Customers love to give their opinions, share their feelings, ideas and opinions in an easy way and social media provides just that. Social media offers a quick and easy medium which connects them to the brand. Use of social media polls allows organizations to structure a conversation around an idea that they encourage. Polls are also important because they offer companies the opportunity to poll on anything. Therefore, social media has become an ideal space for anyone who wants to begin crowdsourcing projects.

Technology has enabled firms to reach to get their audience on a wider scale and speed which facilitates crowdsourcing. The development of the internet has been very instrumental in promoting crowdsourcing. There a number of crowdsourcing technologies which have up to support this practice. Some of these technologies include Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTUK) which connects links businesses with individuals in a process known as the human intelligence tasks. There are also crowdsourcing platforms for niche markets such as nonprofit organizations. These platforms are tailored to a number of activists' issues and companies try to get in touch with their employees for help innovating new business ideas (Estelles-Arolas & Gonzalez-Ladron-De-Guevara, 2012). With the constant growth of technology and the emerging of new business models, crowdsourcing has emerged as a valuable tool. Technology has enabled connections between people to be more convenient and accurate. Technology development has become the precondition of crowdsourcing extension. As information becomes totally social idle the resources eventually get people's attention. Technology has enabled organizations to be able to save their resources and costs through crowdsourcing. Technology has also enabled crowdsourcing to be conducted on mobile devices and smartphones. It also allows real-time data collection and gives organizations a greater reach and accessibility.

Crowdsourcing in a Company

A Chicago based company known as Threadless is one of the most quoted examples of companies using the crowdsourcing model. The company deals with clothing and mainly sells silk-screened graphic t-shirts on their website threadless.com. The organization came up with a campaign to get t-shirt graphics from their online community. Those who submit the winning designs are awarded a prize value of $2,500 and the design is also printed and sold back to the community (Brabham, 2013).

Threadless crowdsourcing was successful because once the designers submitted their designs on the website the one which obtains the highest ranking wins. Therefore, the designers need to ask their friends, followers, and family to vote for their designs. This criterion is very effective for the company because it helps spread the word about their design and also drives traffic to the Threadless website. Threadless run this competition weekly, therefore, they get new t-shirts designs every week. The prize offered to the winners is also broken into two whereby we have $2000 in cash and the other $500 is offered in terms of store credit. This model enables Threadless not to have any designers and not to follow any set parameters to get their desired end-product.

The ethical considerations in this model are what the company terms as the brand filter. The company allows anyone to freely submit their designs and the community to vote in for the best design submitted. However, the Threadless staff make the final call on the process which ensures that they get the best quality and achieve the company mission.

Threadless can improve their business and expand to other products besides just t-shirts. With such a big community of designers, they can include other clothing apparels to be part of the competition. By focusing on t-shirts printing only they limit the designers' creativity. The company should venture into producing as many clothing apparels as their designers can develop.

References

Brabham, D. C. (2013). Crowdsourcing. John Wiley & Sons, Inc..

Estelles-Arolas, E., & Gonzalez-Ladron-De-Guevara, F. (2012). Towards an integrated crowdsourcing definition. Journal of Information science, 38(2), 189-200.