Crowd sourcing is a concept that has been around for a long time, but has become very popular in the past few years. Websites like IndiGoGo and KickStarter are sites that have become enormously successful (Kickstarter raising over $901M since inception) and trendy. So what can we learn from these businesses?
A brief explanation for those that have no clue what I’m talking about: Crowd sourcing is the idea of distributed work/investing/ideas/pictures to crowds versus individuals. The website Kickstarter allows people to put their projects (music, video games, films, books, art, etc.) on a stage, tell the world what it is using the ‘Kickstarter microphone,’ and asks for support. When an individual gives money to a project they may receive something in return for their monetary support like a copy of the book to be published or a signed copy of the album a band needs funding for. Not all websites have the same perk system, but many offer rewards for the supporters.
One website described it as, “marrying the worlds of entrepreneurship and philanthropy.” Other websites that incorporate crowd sourcing are Wikipedia, StumbleUpon, and iStockPhoto.com – A website that encourages users to buy and sell images for dirt cheap while iStockPhoto makes a little bit of money on each transaction.
As I’ve mentioned before I am running a marathon on Dec 14th and training for this requires 20-40 miles per week of running. Since I’ve been spending so much time outside I have come to notice more and more trash outside and it grosses me out. It would take me hours to walk through my routes and pick up all the trash I see each day. However, if everyone I passed on a run just picked up 1 piece of trash each time they were outside (as I do), we would have a cleaner world in no time. The basic idea of crowd sourcing is that we can accomplish more together as a ‘crowd’ of amateurs than as 1 professional.
So what can we learn from crowd sourcing? First off, that there are opportunities to save money all around us. Instead of paying $100 per image for high quality stock photos, go to iStockPhoto.com and get them for $1. Instead of paying for someone to transcribe an interview for $85/hour go to Fiverr and pay $15 for 3 people to do it. Instead of paying a secretary to answer the phones all day, we can find services on ODesk or Elance that we pay 1/2 the price for 24 hours phone support. Depending on our industry there is probably a crowd sourcing website that will help us save money in some way, shape, or form when we do some digging. Each of them is slightly different, so find out what each one specializes in before diving in head first.
Next, we can look internally to see how we can use this idea. Use our own ‘crowds’ to our advantage, there’s lots of ways to do this. We can ask our customers for ideas on what types of products to carry and pre-sell them. If we use social media we can ask all of our employees to share/retweet all of our posts so the outreach is greater. In a company where sales people outnumber managers, owners, and secretaries it would be extremely beneficial to set up a blog for sales people by sales people to share their experiences and help each other out. And if we really are looking to start a new project that we need massive funds for, we can get on one of these sites and begin asking for money.
Sites like Kickstarter are not just for people starting out, even a figurehead like Seth Godin has used sites like this. He published his most recent book through Kickstarter, not because he needed the money, but because he saw the opportunity.
Where is our opportunity?
If you liked this post do me a favor and pick up just one piece of trash next time you’re outside, it’s the best way to clean things up!
