Crowdsourcing: How, What, and WHY!
Marketing is a large ‘Buzz-Word’ Industry, Crowdsourcing, happens to be one of those words.
Crowdsourcing was coined by Jeff Howe from Wired in 2006. It can be defined with different terminology, but essentially Crowdsourcing is when a company releases a problem to the public, asks for help or feedback, gets the public opinion, and then uses one of the submitted answers to solve their problem.
Crowdsourcing is also an amazing way to increase community involvement with your company/brand.
Crowdsourcing has been used for all kinds of company issues from renaming a company, creating new products, and new product or company innovations. Take YouTubes Symphony Orchestra.
YouTube put out a call for musicians all over the world to video themselves playing a classical piece composed by Chinese composer, Tan Dun. Video’s were uploaded and then YouTube created a panel of judges to screen the videos, while users were allowed to pick favorites.
YouTube took social media and Crowdsourcing to a new level in order to create and introduce this global orchestra. Videos from all of the contestants were put together in a mash up shown below:
Users that uploaded videos for consideration then further spread the event by inviting friends on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and more, to go to YouTube and vote for them as their favorite. This engaged multiple communities and thousands of participants.
The winners were then chosen, flown to New York, and preformed a series of concerts. This, had never been done before and is a prime example of a company/brand using the masses to create something.
