I recently came across a new buzzword within the tech industry named: CrowdSourcing.
This new buzzword has been placed on something that has been going on a lot since the web 2.0 explosion the past year and a half now. According to bNET Crowdsourcing is simply put: “the basic idea is to tap into the collective intelligence of the public at large to complete business-related tasks that a company would normally either perform itself or outsource to a third-party provider. Yet free labor is only a narrow part of crowdsourcing’s appeal. More importantly, it enables managers to expand the size of their talent pool while also gaining deeper insight into what customers really want.”
One web company that has launched that tackles crowdsourcing exclusively is: CrowdSpirit.org . CrowdSpirit basically applies crowdsourcing to products. Products have been using crowdsourcing since the introduction of “reviews” and “comments” for websites that sold products or allowed such feedback from users and visitors.
Truthfully many times when I would comparison shop I would look at the reviews and/or comments for a particular product and in many times use that as the trump card to make a purchase on a specific brand or model. CrowdSpirit takes crowdsourcing and placed it in a nice schema:
Of course crowdsourcing as originally mentioned is just a buzzword currently. This idea can be applied to various other buzzwords such as:
- Fansourcing
- Crowdcasting
- Open sourcing
- Open innovation
- Crowdfunding
- Mass collaboration
- Collective customer commitment
- Wikinomics
Some enablers of crowdsourcing can be used such as:
- Email
- Blogs
- Wikis
- Online forums and mailing lists
- Internet services such as YouTube and MySpace
So we may be witnessing the beginning of a new phenomenon in marketing and enabling of success online. One thing is for certain, crowdsourcing is officially here.
