The Power of Crowdsourcing
Ever heard the saying “too many cooks spoil the broth”? Traditional wisdom holds that the more people that are involved in a task, the more likely it is that something will go wrong. The concept of crowdsourcing is turning this logic on its head by involving as many people as possible in efforts ranging from product design, to idea generation, to branding – kind of a “many hands make light work” approach.
What is crowdsourcing? First coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing”, crowdsourcing is a distributed problem solving or production model. Or – put more simply – it is the act of outsourcing tasks that are typically performanced by a single employee or contractor to a large group of people or community through an open call.
Crowdsourcing is already being used by marketers in a variety of ways:
- T-shirt maker Threadless asked fans to nominate their favorite Twitter posts to be turned into t-shirts (for more on this, read our blog).
- Beverage brand Mountain Dew turned to consumers through its Dewmocracy campaign to design three new drinks, crowdsourcing everything from the flavors, to the names, the package designs, and the ad campaigns.
- Dorito’s invited fans to submit commercials to air during the Superbowl as part of its “Crash the Superbowl” contest.
The beauty of crowdsourcing is that it can be done for little to no cost and by companies large or small, and the internet – and social marketing platforms like Facebook – provides the perfect platform for reaching large audiences quickly.
As to how many cooks should make the broth? We say, “the more the merrier!”