What is Crowdsourcing?
Crowd sourcing is a new trend surfacing all over the internet were companies actively seek out groups of people to run ideas by. It is a collective calling of ideas and reviews. Wikipedia defines crowdsourcing as,
"Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call."
I think this is a very generic definition. Crowdsourcing makes your client/customer a part of the action. Crowdsourcing is a newer trend that developed roughly four years ago in Wired Magazine. Basically it said that electronics have become so cheap and easy to make that companies are taking advantage of releasing them into the market and waiting for the feedback they recieve on the the item before making changed or re-releasing the model. They are also taking the ideas from this feedback and putting it into the next year's model.
Crowdsourcing layed dormant for a few years and exploded this year with major companies getting into the idea. Recently, the GAP released a logo without word to the public and waited for feedback from the populous. This was met with mix reactions.
Crowdsourcing heavily relies on social media to make it spread and travel. It often employs tactics such as twitter feeds, facebook links and blogs to gain feedback from an informed audience that knows of their products. It also allows for a specific target audience to have insight gained from.
No comments:
Post a Comment