Jan Willem Alphenaar (the crowdsourced DSB Movie) has a new presentation over at Slideshare about tips for successful crowdsourcing based on his experience so far. We’ve had another one from him on the blog before, about Crowdsourcing and Humanistic Psychology dealing with incentives in crowdsourcing.
This one has a set of 10 tips that are all very useful when to think about a crowdsourcing initiative, and they’re not only good to guide planning but also as a starting point for a good brainstorming.
So without further ado, here you have it:
10 tips for Successful Crowdsourcing……
And the best thing about all of this is that the methodolgies he recommends in the above video apply regardless of the area in which you operate. So they can be successfully implemented by fashion businesses such as Saveongoods who specialise in the sale of fun items like animal hats and wilds hats, as well as in the case of professional services such as domestic cleaning (see www.proclean-glasgow.com by way of example)
With all the interest crowdsourcing is getting by being used by major corporations nowadays (the Doritos commercials, the Pepsi project and several others, including Blue Sky Loans, it’s worth taking a closer look at things.
The author of the post starts by dividing the several tasks of competitive crowdsourcing into four main ones:
Crowdsourcing submissions (provided by individuals)
Crowdsourced feedback (by the users, once the submissions are in)
Selection by Experts (chosen by an organization, selecting upon the users’ submissions)
Crowdsourced selection (by the users).
Then the author rearranges these four blocks into four different models for Competitive Crowdsourcing.
The first one is called “Crowd Sentiment, Expert Decision” in which users submit ideas for the contest, give feedback to it, but then a panel of experts on that given area choose the winner. The crowdsourcing here goes only to a certain degree, leaving the final decision out of the users’ control.
The second one is “Crowd Decision“, where the crowd both submits ideas and chooses the winners. This model is potencially more engaging to consumers since they are involved in every part of the process.
The third model is “Expert Decision“, where users only submit ideas, leaving the feedback and selection to a group of experts.
The final model is called “American Idol” by the author, and it includes the elements of Crowdsourced Submissions, followed by the Selection of Experts (the jury in American Idol example), and finally a Crowsourced selection.
But then I started thinking about it and thought there may be more models of Competitive Crowdsourcing. Like for instance having a group of experts submit ideas and then let the crowd provide feedback (which could be the case of some types of market research, for example), or even choose the winner (Crowdsourced selection).
The important this here is looking at these building blogs and figuring out what control you want to give to the crowd, what type of consensus do you want, etc, according to the needs and complexity of the project or business at hand. Great article and great breakdown.
