Published on April 30, 2010 Crowdsourcing: a new way of doing business or pure recklessness?
When an employee or external party completes a task on your behalf, that’s outsourcing. But what if the general public does it for you instead of someone you manage or control? It’s a novel and interesting thought and is called crowdsourcing in modern web 2.0 speak.
A US blog website called TechCrunch that was hacked recently took the crowdsourcing concept to a new level when it asked its readers to make a key business decision on its behalf: should they press charges against the hackers?
The full report can be read on the news.com.au technology blog. If businesses are using consumers to shape their products and business decisions, does this mean that crowdsourcing is the future of business marketing? Or is it just another fad that will vanish the way that ’80s and ’90s concepts like “peak performance” or “in search of excellence” did?
As with any management approach, crowdsourcing has its pros and cons. On the pros side, your end users are shaping the products and services they will buy. That’s got to ultimately be good for customer satisfaction and retention. On the negative side, could you be stifling individual creativity by melting it down over a number of people, or giving away your ideas to your competitors?
Our opinion is that crowdsourcing, used in conjunction with good management sense and your own creative input is a good thing for business. Why wouldn’t your customers want to buy something they helped shape? Crowdsourcing is a modern take on the old fashioned suggestion box – and if it isn’t here to stay why are the corporate mega-giants like Nike, Procter and Gamble, LG and Starbucks all investing big money on using its principles?
You don’t have to go as far as TechCrunch did and put the entire decision in the hands of the public, but it seems that crowdsourcing is more than just a passing fad in business management.
How can you put this into practice for your online business? Here are some practical crowdsourcing ideas:
- Set up a feature discussion forum for your business. Forums have traditionally been used for support or general discussion but are increasingly being used by businesses for feature requests. Let any of your customers comment. You can still filter out the obvious comments from competitors trying to tarnish your reputation without stifling the level of conversation.
- Ask your customers for design input. Communicate with them via your regular email newsletters and get their input. Ask them to vote on the top ideas.
- Start a feature voting system. We have just launched one for Ozcart – visit it here and contact us.
- Run a contest to get input into a product name, graphic, icon or idea
- Use one of the many crowdsourcing service websites to help you do repetitive tasks. A US site called Mechanical Turk from Amazon is an example of a site where you can submit small tasks like data entry for your products and attributes and get a network of people to do them for you for a highly competitive price.
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