Homework assignment: Crowdsourcing

24

October

2013

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This week’s topic is about crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. These are two phenomena which are increasingly used by companies for projects, new products or even company start-ups.

One of the biggest challenges companies face with crowdsourcing is to figure out what the best way of gathering the crowd is: How can you get the ‘crowd’ to do what you want? I took an example of the Lay’s ‘maak de smaak’ campaign and put it in a genetable as described in the article titled: ‘The Collective Intelligence Genome’ to help find out why this campaign was such a success. The big success factor was the decision making process were they combined the crowd with a professional jury to get people engaged with the campaign.

Next I compared Threadless with another quite similar company named: Redbubble. Instead of using a competition to decide which design should be printed, they simply market every design that is submitted. I compared to two companies and tried to figure were they differentiate and which business model is better.

Although Threadless has a huge fan base and a lot of engaged customers, Redbubble also seems promising with rising revenues ever since its start-up in 2006.

Tennis players threatened on Twitter

3

October

2013

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Last summer Dutch tennis player Robin Haase received numerous death threats on Twitter and other (social) media, such as his personal E-mail and his on website.

An example of one of those tweets directly after he lost a match in an Italian competition:

‘M*****F*****. I’ve lost a lot of money on you because you sold your match. I’ll finish you off.’

It later turned out most of ‘death’ threats such as this tweet were posted by frustrated gamblers.

Robin hoped that the players’ union ATP could do something about this situation, but it seems not much is changed. In an interview he said that the chances of something really happening to him are very small, but you never know. The situation didn’t help him focus on the sport; that’s for sure.

I looked in the comment section of a news post on this matter on nu.nl. The opinions seemed to be very versatile. Some people say he shouldn’t be such a ‘baby’ and he always whines about everything, while others were very compassionate and agreed with him.

So how serious should we take tweets and threats like this. With social media it’s so easy to express your opinion and anger, but would someone actually go as far as killing an athlete because of a lost bet?

Do you know more examples like this for known athletes or celebrities?

Social media; Social or antisocial

15

September

2013

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Social media such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp (whether WhatsApp is actually social media is debatable but for the purpose of this article let’s assume it is a form of social media) provide great ways to communicate with your friends and families. Social media lowered several boundaries; for communicating with an old friend, or even meeting new people online.

But…. I’m quite sure most of us have been or even participated in a situation like this: (http://imgur.com/gallery/fMRGF)

Ever been in the situation were you don’t feel like talking to the person next to you at a party? Solution, grab your phone!

A birthday party or just hanging out with your friends and suddenly everybody is playing (Chatting? On Facebook or Twitter?) with their phones. We could consider this an example of antisocial-behavior. Let’s take a look at a definition of both social and antisocial:

Social: Inclined to seek out or enjoy the company of others; sociable

Antisocial: avoiding the company of other people; unsociable

If we take a look at the definition of social, you could conclude that we are in fact enjoying the online attention and company of others with the use of social media. You could say that online we’re indeed becoming more social.

On the other hand, I believe we’ve become so addicted to our smartphones (partly due to social media) that, in certain situations such as the picture shows, we are behaving anti-social without us even noticing it.

Now I’m not the only one who believes this is a problem in modern society. You can even argue that children growing up with social media and chatting nowadays don’t properly learn how to communicate face-to-face.

What do you think of this problem? Did social media make as more social or antisocial? Do you think it is a problem?

A possible solution for this problem when you and your friends go out to dinner or for a drink is as follows. At the beginning of the evening everybody has to turn in their phones and put them somewhere everybody can see them; let’s say on the middle of the table. The first one to grab their phone pays the bill! Try it if you dare, you might get a free dinner 😉

If you do consider this a problem, did you and your friends came up with a solution??

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