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What is Crowdsourcing?
First coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” crowdsourcing refers to the increasing ability, especially facilitated by new media technologies, to leverage the knowledge, talent, expertise and interest of large groups of people — customers, employees, audiences, interest groups. ”It’s not outsourcing; it’scrowdsourcing,” says Howe.
“When you look at the future of companies I think you’re about to see the most fundamental change in businesses and government on a global basis that you’ve ever seen, moving from command-and-control to true collaboration and team work, and it will be a combination of the two. The result of that, enabled by technology especially around visual connectivity, will allow for a generation of productivity and new models. Which companies and which countries lead in this will have the highest standard of living.” Cisco’s John Chambers October 2008 speech at MIT
Around the same time, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams were writingWikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Wikinomics is based on four core concepts: Openness, Peering, Sharing, and Acting Globally. The kind of mass collaboration described by crowdsourcing relies on free individual agents voluntarily working together, cooperating to create something, improve a given operation, or solve a particular challenge.
Before that, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More was based on an idea first articulated by Clay Shirky and popularized by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com and Netflix as examples of businesses applying the strategy of reaching a far greater number of customers with lower volume per item sales of a far greater number of items. We’ve also heard the term The Long Tail refer to accessing, listening and responding to a far greater number of customers or clients for product and process feedback. That’s where crowdsourcing and The Long Tail meet.
Mass collaboration is used successfully internally and in external communication to generate new ideas, facilitate workflows and develop new processes, build cross-functional teams and better addresses the needs and desires of customers.
In this video, Chambers shares a snapshot look at the benefits of dispersing leadership throughout Cisco’s teams and organizational structure:
As for the Long Tail concept, an Amazon.com employee reported, “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.”
Online marketplaces from eBay to Etsy may be considered part of the phenomenon, so is Internet-facilitated microfinance as seen on Kiva.org, President Barack Obama’s grassroots online fundraising and voluntary viral campaign promotion are evidence that creative, voluntary, new media-driven contribution is transforming not just the way we do business but the very world in which we live. PepsiCo’s DEWmocracy and Refresh Projects highlight the democratization of business:
How do we train & develop for crowdsourcing?
Listening is more important than ever before. Here are some ways to listen:
1. Set up a social media listening station for your brand or organization.
Gen Y Social Media Guru Amy Sample Ward provides simple instructions here for setting up a listening dashboard for your organization.
2. Train leaders to listen more than command.
Our client companies use coach training across all leadership levels from frontline leaders to the C-suite to develop and embed new leadership and communication styles, techniques and skills. Going from command-and-control to crowdsourcing marks and organizational shift; it also requires individuals in the organization to lead and interact differently. TNM helps facilitate that shift globally.
3. Create listening times, systems and structures for them to do so.
Command-and-control to crowdsourcing can be an organizational shift of gargantuan proportions. Creating new practices, norms and strategies will further embed new behaviors into the organization. How can you smooth the way for better performing cross-functional teams? Which current organizational practices and standards keep command-and-control management in place? How can you replace those? How can you best access and respond to customer needs? These are crucial questions to answer.
Engagement and activation are more valuable than ever before.
This is good news! There are myriad examples to consult as you consider how to best move from command-and-control to crowdsourcing. Contests, crowdcasting, grassroots fundraising and microfinance, dispersed leadership and socially networked working groups all provide valuable feedback and opportunities for growth, paving the way toward organizational sustainability in the new Crowdsourced World.
Crowdsourcing is good consumer-facing marketing; it’s good for employee morale, retention and innovation. From philanthropy to Pepsi, the shift from command-and-control to crowsourcing is well underway. What does your organization need to do to keep up?
