Riding on the Trend of Business Crowdsourcing

Wired Magazine’s contributing editor Jeff Howe may have coined the term in 2006, but crowdsourcing has been in existence long before that. As early as 2000, companies like iStockphoto have been tapping into the skills and expertise of individual professionals on a freelance basis. Even the Associated Press has turned to crowdsourcing for particular news stories such as last year’s Sotomayor courtside coverage. The company utilized Twitter to encourage feedback from their readers. Also during that same year, the New York Times crowdsourced data from its readership to further explore details on the United States Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s diary.

Some say that crowdsourcing is a natural product of the evolving communication paradigm brought on by new technologies during the internet era. Social networking sites open fresh channels of opportunities by connecting a wide population of people around the world, from business professionals and companies, to average folks coming from a highly diverse demographic pool. Yet, how effective is this collaborative model in the execution of creative projects?

Crowdsourcing for business

The saying that too many cooks may spoil the broth has an element of truth here, which is why, as New York Times’ Steve Lohr put it, there needs to be a focus. Collective creativity and innovation, as it is, gathers from a large resource that has to be filtered for quality. Each contribution should be driven by a strong theme or group objective to churn out coherent results.

Harvard Business School Professor Karim Lakhani says that hiring independent freelancers through a collaborative medium can further broaden the scope and expertise available to the company. It also gives the organization access to a wider database. Done correctly, Lakhani believes that this community-driven archetype can deliver optimum results.

For those interested in this sort of open cooperation, Communications Strategist Tac Anderson has defined four fundamental requirements; namely, inspiration, a central web-based platform, a principal workforce, and a system to break down larger job orders into smaller portions that individual freelancers can manage with minimal supervision.

Crowdsourcing is not as easy as it seems. Quality control for larger volumes of work has become a major issue. With so many participants, monitoring the standards of each piece of work could be daunting. Nonetheless, it does increase the likelihood of getting some stellar results.

Photo Credit: Celel Teber