Bringing The Crowd To Your Business: Crowd Sourcing

Today, you have cut-throat competition to get your business across people and connect with them.  But there is a hitch – how do you strike the right chord with the public? The best way would be to involve them in your business.

Now, in the current economic scenario, where your financial planning does not allow hiring more, and yet your business needs creative ideas, Crowd sourcing is the way to go.

What is crowd sourcing? In a lay mans’ language, it means outsourcing the work to the crowd, the general public.  A simple example of this would be Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia, which uses open source software to allow its users to read as well contribute and edit articles on the site.

On a larger scale, you have Victor & Spoils, the first advertising agency built on crowd sourcing principles. Providing an alternative to the present model of advertising agencies, it intends to engage their customers for creative solution and build up a creative department made up of the world’s most talented people. The co-founders of Victor & Spoils are John Winsor, Claudia Batten and Evan Fry.

There are a number of ways you could go about crowd sourcing. Here are a few of them.

1. Competitions

   You could organize contests and invite people for, say designing a graphic or a print ad for your business.

2. Customization

   You could offer your customers personalized products by engaging them to design a product keeping their interests in mind.

3. Inviting suggestions

   You could ask the customers for feedback and ask them for their suggestions. You could use these suggestions for the improvement of your business.

Why crowd sourcing works?

Crowd sourcing works well for both your business and the crowd.

Here is how your business would benefit:

1. Get more from your employees

   When you open a particular department for the crowd, and you promise an incentive for the selected idea, it’s likely to get you responses from your own employees. This helps you harness the talent present in your own organization.

2. Get an insight on consumer desires

   Crowd sourcing would perhaps be a more effective way of getting to know what the consumers want rather than a survey.

3. Allowing innovation

   Consumers are attracted to things that are new in the market. Repetition bores them and puts them away. By crowd sourcing, you give space to innovative ideas. That way, you also allow your business to grow.

4. Pocket friendly resource

   Crowd sourcing would fit in even if you haven’t planned a large budget for your business. Here, you just have to reward a customer for his/her idea once and not pay a nice salary to a copywriter or a graphic designer.

Crowd sourcing has its reasons to attract the crowd as well.

1. Space for unemployed workers

   There is a large population of unemployed workers, who would like to participate where their area of interest lie. They definitely wouldn’t mind showing off their creative skills to perhaps their prospective employers!

2. Opportunity for amateurs

   Most of the places while hiring look for experience. This is where crowd sourcing can come to the rescue of freshers. They are desperate to get their talent across and remuneration is not a big issue for them at the initial stages. Crowd sourcing helps them do exactly that and get some experience as well.

3. Helps create a market

   Crowd sourcing helps create a market for both your business as you have a new idea in your kitty that will help you extend your business and your customer as he gets a market for his talent.

4. Revenue for talent

   Many of the ideas you need might be what others’ hobbies/talent revolve around.  Crowd sourcing might just get the customer value for his talent.

So you see, crowd sourcing could perhaps lead your business to a new level al-together. What you do need be careful about is extracting the right kind of idea from the crowd that will boost your business and compensating fairly to the participants.