Crowdsourcing: Giving Power and Control to the Public

The crowdsourcing term was first coined in 2006 by Jeff Howe in a Wired magazine article about the ability of companies to take advantage of the talent of the public. Howe later went on to write a book titled “Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business”, where he describes in detail just how this phenomenon is revolutionizing the relationship between companies and their customers. In crowdsourcing, a task is completed, or a problem is solved, by utilizing the group intelligence and diversity of the community rather than the expertise of a select few.

Many industries have realized the value of crowdsourcing. In each case, the use of crowdsourcing has altered the balance of power in significant, game-changing ways. Threadless.com relinquished control of clothing design to the opinion and diversity of the community, creating better product in much shorter timeframes. iStockPhoto financially rewards amateur photographers for stock photos, and simultaneously drove down costs for usage of these photos for the consumer. Innocentive has allowed large companies to financially reward anyone from a college student to a high school teacher for solving unusual problems, increasing opportunities for individuals to demonstrate their problem-solving skills without having to work in a large corporate environment. Open-source software endeavors like Sourceforge, TopCoder, and GNU have given amateur software developers the opportunity to show their skills without working directly for large companies as well. Citizen journalism projects like NowPublic, Cincymoms.com, Wikipedia, and DailyCrowdsource.com have given anyone in the public the opportunity to be published on topics of their own choosing.

More and more companies are also turning to crowdsourcing to meet their marketing and advertising problems. Most of these services are geared toward the creative aspects of marketing (i.e. logo design), but crowdsourcing is also becoming a viable model for actual message distribution. Why pay google or facebook to promote an advertisement if you can tap into a passionate crowd of users to spread the message? Time will tell on whether this form of crowdsourcing will work as well as others have. If it does, it will be incredibly disruptive to the balance of power online just like every other successful crowdsourcing model has proven to be.