Tap into the global talent pool Crowdsourcing leverages such social networking tools as Facebook and Twitter to tap into the power of many people to distribute one's work load or gain input. Aliza Sherman, crowdsourcing innovator, has helped her clients harness the incredible power of "crowd-think" and "crowd-do" to achieve goals as diverse as designing new products to test-marketing services to fundraising. In this guide, she explains the theory and practice of crowdsourcing and actually shows readers how to use it. • A practical, prescriptive guide for those who want to put the ideas in such books as The Wisdom of Crowds and Here Comes Everybody into action. • Step-by-step instructions. • Insightful anecdotes from the world of crowdsourcing.
Give your business the edge with crowd-power! Crowdsourcing is an innovative way of outsourcing tasks, problems or requests to a group or community online. There are lots of ways business can use crowdsourcing to their advantage: be it crowdsourcing product ideas and development, design tasks, market research, testing, capturing or analyzing data, and even raising funds. It offers access to a wide pool of talent and ideas, and is an exciting way to engage the public with your business. Crowdsourcing For Dummies is your plain-English guide to making crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and open innovation work for you. It gives step-by-step advice on how to plan, start and manage a crowdsourcing project, where to crowdsource, how to find the perfect audience, how best to motivate your crowd, and tips for troubleshooting.
Twitter has tens of millions of users and its active "tweeters" and followers look to it to answer to the question, "What's happening?" Businesses both large and small can quickly and easily send out highly targeted messages to key customers using Twitter. However, simply grasping only the mechanics of Twitter and flogging a message nobody cares about isn't enough to make a measurable difference. Worse, using Twitter the wrong way can damage a company's brand. The Complete Idiot's Guide® to Twitter Marketing blends an understanding of Twitter's powerful tools and reach with marketing savvy and the key to really engaging followers and converting them to customers. It also covers new features such as the increasing importance of search engine optimization.
A concise introduction to crowdsourcing that goes beyond social media buzzwords to explain what crowdsourcing really is and how it works. Ever since the term “crowdsourcing” was coined in 2006 by Wired writer Jeff Howe, group activities ranging from the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary to the choosing of new colors for M&Ms have been labeled with this most buzz-generating of media buzzwords. In this accessible but authoritative account, grounded in the empirical literature, Daren Brabham explains what crowdsourcing is, what it is not, and how it works. Crowdsourcing, Brabham tells us, is an online, distributed problem solving and production model that leverages the collective intelligence of online communities for specific purposes set forth by a crowdsourcing organization—corporate, government, or volunteer. Uniquely, it combines a bottom-up, open, creative process with top-down organizational goals. Crowdsourcing is not open source production, which lacks the top-down component; it is not a market research survey that offers participants a short list of choices; and it is qualitatively different from predigital open innovation and collaborative production processes, which lacked the speed, reach, rich capability, and lowered barriers to entry enabled by the Internet. Brabham describes the intellectual roots of the idea of crowdsourcing in such concepts as collective intelligence, the wisdom of crowds, and distributed computing. He surveys the major issues in crowdsourcing, including crowd motivation, the misconception of the amateur participant, crowdfunding, and the danger of “crowdsploitation” of volunteer labor, citing real-world examples from Threadless, InnoCentive, and other organizations. And he considers the future of crowdsourcing in both theory and practice, describing its possible roles in journalism, governance, national security, and science and health.
A leading innovation scholar explains the growing phenomenon and impact of free innovation, in which innovations developed by consumers and given away “for free.” In this book, Eric von Hippel, author of the influential Democratizing Innovation, integrates new theory and research findings into the framework of a “free innovation paradigm.” Free innovation, as he defines it, involves innovations developed by consumers who are self-rewarded for their efforts, and who give their designs away “for free.” It is an inherently simple grassroots innovation process, unencumbered by compensated transactions and intellectual property rights. Free innovation is already widespread in national economies and is steadily increasing in both scale and scope. Today, tens of millions of consumers are collectively spending tens of billions of dollars annually on innovation development. However, because free innovations are developed during consumers' unpaid, discretionary time and are given away rather than sold, their collective impact and value have until very recently been hidden from view. This has caused researchers, governments, and firms to focus too much on the Schumpeterian idea of innovation as a producer-dominated activity. Free innovation has both advantages and drawbacks. Because free innovators are self-rewarded by such factors as personal utility, learning, and fun, they often pioneer new areas before producers see commercial potential. At the same time, because they give away their innovations, free innovators generally have very little incentive to invest in diffusing what they create, which reduces the social value of their efforts. The best solution, von Hippel and his colleagues argue, is a division of labor between free innovators and producers, enabling each to do what they do best. The result will be both increased producer profits and increased social welfare—a gain for all.
The idea of soliciting input, whether from customers, associates or the general public, is hardly new. Yet crowdsourcing (the soliciting of collective wisdom) is a relatively new term which has quickly become an important business concept. The spike in the ability to crowdsource, driven by web technologies, has enabled the concept to assume center stage in business strategy. A strong ability to tap into the collective intelligence of the public, or a well-defined segment of the public, enables businesses to greatly expand the talent pool available at their disposal. Typically, crowdsourcing helps organizations complete tasks faster, more efficiently and often simply better. "Kiruba Shankar" and "Mitchell Levy" are both firm believers in the concept of collaborative wisdom. In their very diverse and singularly successful careers, crowdsourcing has helped them accomplish many tasks successfully while having fun along the way. Now they bring you "#CROWDSOURCING tweet Book01," in which they share with you smart ideas (crowdsourced, of course!) that teach you to tap into the wisdom of the crowd. Kiruba and Mitchell can convince the most vociferous skeptic. Here's a sample: "Doubt the value of crowdsourcing? Encyclopedia Britannica took 200 years to write 80,000 articles. Wikipedia: 9 years, 10 million+ articles." Through the book, their personal experiences and their ability to tap into the experiences of others comes clearly through. For example: "I crowdsourced the creation of my logo and got 95 logo concepts for $300. My graphics agency just lost a customer to crowdsourcing." And lest you start thinking of crowdsourcing as a silver bullet, here's a reality check: "Crowdsourcing is a democratic process. However, just like in any democracy, it needs leaders to hold the flag and lead." "#CROWDSOURCING tweet Book01" is "the" book on leveraging the experience of the crowd, brought to you by two experienced authors who are comfortable with walking their talk. Replete with bite-sized wisdom from start to finish, you will surely find yourself flipping through its pages time and again as you tap into the collective wisdom of your crowd. "#CROWDSOURCING tweet Book01" is part of the THiNKaha series whose 112-page books contain 140 well-thought-out quotes (tweets/ahas).
Many data-intensive applications that use machine learning or artificial intelligence techniques depend on humans providing the initial dataset, enabling algorithms to process the rest or for other humans to evaluate the performance of such algorithms. Not only can labeled data for training and evaluation be collected faster, cheaper, and easier than ever before, but we now see the emergence of hybrid human-machine software that combines computations performed by humans and machines in conjunction. There are, however, real-world practical issues with the adoption of human computation and crowdsourcing. Building systems and data processing pipelines that require crowd computing remains difficult. In this book, we present practical considerations for designing and implementing tasks that require the use of humans and machines in combination with the goal of producing high-quality labels.
Whether we need to make better financial choices, find the love of our life, or transform our career, crowdsourcing is the key to making quicker, wiser, more objective decisions. But few of us even come close to tapping the full potential of our online personal networks. Lior Zoref offers proven guidelines for applying what he calls "mind sharing" in new ways. For instance, he shows how a mother's Facebook update saved the life of a four-year-old boy, and how a manager used LinkedIn to create a year's worth of market research in less than a day. Zoref's clients are using his techniques to innovate and problem-solve in record time. Now he reveals how crowdsourcing has the ability to supercharge our thinking and upgrade every aspect of our lives.
This Element is an excerpt from We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business (ISBN: 9780132244794) by Barry Libert and Jon Spector. Available in print and digital formats. Use crowdsourcing to create marketable new products and content--and blow away your traditional competitors! When communities help manufacture companies’ products or content, the advantages over traditional business models are huge. At iStock, for instance, contributors create the product and deliver it in market-ready format. With little inventory expense or traditional overhead, the company can price the product far below old-model competitors. Here are more examples of crowdsourcing at work....
