Figure 8.1 Percentage of Customers Willing to Cocreate
Chapter 8
Crowdsourcing
Community-Powered Workforces
The notion of the Internet as the leading medium for self-expression and creativity certainly is no longer novel. Social media have shown that online services can tap into a wellspring of global innovation and change industry dynamics. As social business begins to show how innovative work can blur boundaries between organizations and customers on one side and business partners on the other, traditional businesses have found ways to use this shift to their advantage.
It's not an accident that some of the largest and most widely used online sites are Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia.1 The vast majority of all content on the last three services is entirely user generated, while the first, Google, is merely a reflection of the world's own information after passing through a highly secret patented algorithm. Collectively created content has become the most significant and popular part of the Web.
A new, slightly different take on user-generated content has emerged through what is known as crowdsourcing. Due to its increased popularity in both social and business circles, a growing range of online products and services specializes in meeting specific business needs by enlisting niche communities to tackle challenges, often in exchange for some form of compensation. At first, crowdsourcing might seem closely related to social product development, but whereas social product development focuses on a specific yet important step in a company's R&D effort, crowdsourcing focuses on less intellectual work and consists of literally any form of participation required to accomplish a business objective. The advantages are clear: extremely low-cost access to enthusiasts and experts on a given subject matter or task, broader input of new ideas, faster design of business solutions, and a quicker response to business needs. The disadvantages can often be less clear, but they do exist. These usually break down to the perceived lack of control, randomness of the process, quality of the outcome, ownership of intellectual property and the eventual result, and worries about security and privacy.
One of the earliest, most effective examples of corporate crowdsourcing occurred in 2006 when the company now known as SiriusXM decided, after many attempts at trying to make its less popular stations more appealing, that its customers might do better at programming its radio stations. It opened the playlist of one of its least popular radio stations to user voting online and by phone. Almost immediately, the resulting channel was a runaway hit, and despite periodic changes over the years to adjust the way customers participate, it remains the company's most popular station (and single content product).2
But can sourcing meaningful work to the social world be a repeatable, reliable way to run a business? Can organizations rely on largely unknown groups of contributors to predictably provide outputs to support day-to-day operations? While the fast-growing number of successful crowdsourcing examples in companies large and small speaks volumes, an important confirmation and new data point surfaced in 2010 that shows that the wellspring might indeed be as large as required for widespread application of crowdsourcing.3 A broad survey of consumers from Forrester Research showed that despite half of all companies at the time having yet to use social media to drive product design, creation, or strategy, approximately “sixty-one percent of all US online adults are willing co-creators” if they are so tapped (Figure 8.1).4
Figure 8.1 Percentage of Customers Willing to Cocreate
Crowdsourcing options exist to service the divergent needs of businesses small to large. For example, increasingly capable and mature enterprise crowdsourcing services such as Microtask are available to large companies with scale and security concerns. Microtask is an enterprise work platform that processes billions of crowdsourced tasks per year for businesses. In order to protect the intellectual property of its customers, businesses concerned with sending sensitive data outside the company can operate Microtask's software themselves yet still take advantage of remote distributed output. Other crowdsourcing services, such as Tongal and Whinot, support individuals and small businesses as the majority of their customer base. Crowdsourcing offers a less expensive option for conducting activities that small business may not be able to otherwise afford, such as tapping into expert advice or creative production resources (Figure 8.2).
Figure 8.2 Using Crowdsourcing for the Full Range of Business Activities
For organizations ready to shift more productive work to the network, there is an increasingly well-defined set of best practices emerging on how to apply crowdsourcing to their lines of business with the least disruption and most direct benefit. Businesses looking to explore this new approach to sourcing work can follow these commonsense steps:
While the crowdsourcing process is laden with change management implications as well as transformational challenges and opportunities, this new discipline is moving out of narrow areas such as graphics design, advertising creation, and image recognition and increasingly into mainstream business. In the early years of social media, it was unclear if the structure and direction needed to turn external participation into valuable business outcomes could be harnessed into something useful. Today crowdsourcing looks to be not only viable for a wide variety of business activities but also a strategic asset and competitive tool in the arsenal of the modern social business.
For now, this nascent approach to using social media models for work offers early adopters a powerful, scalable, and easy-to-use method for developing innovative, high-growth products and services that require an entirely different investment profile and can tackle problems that weren't possible to address using the conventional methods. In Part Three, we examine some of the specific methods for designing crowdsourcing into business processes.