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In this blogpost I am going to talk about my home assignment about crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. So I will start with the four articles that were all related to that weeks topic.

Jeff Howe (2006) described Crowdsourcing as ‘the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated employee and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large of people in the form of an open call.’ He divides crowdsourcing into five different kinds of platforms: Crowdvoting, wisdom of crowds, crowdfunding, microwork and inducement prize contests.

Malone, Laubacher & Dellarocas (2012) maps out different collective intelligence systems with four questions ‘Who is doing it?, What is being done?, Why are they doing it? and How is it being done?’. The authors of the article provide with a framework which identifies the underlying building blocks ‘the genes’ that are the center of the collective intelligence systems.

Pisano, Verganti (2008) discusses four basic modes of collaboration. They present it in a framework where two issues are being raised. ‘Should membership in a network be open or closed?’ (Participation) and ‘Should the network’s governance structure for selecting problems and solutions be flat or hierarchical?’ (Governance)

Afuah & Tucci (2012) gives reasons why it makes sense that a ‘seeker’ will use crowdfunding. Crowdsourcing transforms distant search into local search. For a seeker organization is a distant search costly and risky. Crowdsourcing however is easy to broadcast to a large crowd. The knowledge required to solve a problem mostly falls outside the seeker’s knowledge environment.

Jeppesen & Lakhani (2010) describes in ‘Marginality and Problem Solving Effectiveness in Broadcast Search’ several findings about the submissions of ‘crowdsourced’ open innovation projects. This article gives an interesting perspective as it gives a perspective of the solver instead of the seeker in the other articles.

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a popular crowdsourcing marketplace for small tasks that cannot be easily automated by computers. Amazon Mechanical Turk uses a network of humans to perform tasks that computers are ill-suited for, but easy for humans to do. Employers are known as ‘requester’ post tasks, which are called Human Intelligence Tasks (HIT). These are picked up by online users, ‘the workers’ who complete them in exchange for a small payment, usually a few cents per HIT. (Ipeirotis, 2010)

Strengths: It is very low cost, it is anonymous, the mTurk service doesn’t allow asking for identifying information.

Weaknesses: HIT are very simple, repetitive, boring tasks and users are often only paid a few cents to complete them.

CrowdSpring is a crowdsourcing platform which allows buyers to run competitions for company logos, website designs, t-shirts. For the buyer of the design it means they have more choice of choosing the design for the fraction of the costs. For aspiring designers, it means a shot at stealing work from entrenched design firms. (Steiner 2009)

Strengths: Crowdflower reduces the cost of having an actual design firm design your logo.

Weaknesses: When you have to do a complex job it is not recommended to use CrowdSpring.

The designs are not always copyrighted, where people can use stolen work to submit.

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One of the platforms that came across for the topic of last week ‘Diffusion & Social Influence’ was a platform called SocialAmp. In this blogpost I’m going to elaborate about this platform.

This platform provides marketers and developers with the tools they need to create personalized, social experiences on their brand websites. Social Amp’s platform allows brands to build applications that customize features and services for individual users based on their distinct interests. The Social Amp platform allows any domain to leverage existing site users to build an instant viral community enriched by their users’ social graph connections.

For example this community seamlessly integrates with your Facebook page to amplify your overall social presence, while social graph information is used to create a personalized experience of a brand’s site for each user.  An increase in product page views, referral traffic from social networks, and social conversions that can be tracked via Social Amp’s dashboard is the result of using this application.

Smashbox Cosmetics, has partnered up with SocialAmp to develop a custom shopping experience based on the preferences of consumers and their friends. “We’ve really brought Facebook to Smashbox.com,” says Beth DiNardo, General Manager of Smashbox Cosmetics. “As we move forward in an industry where social media is essential for growth, we are excited to be the first beauty brand to implement a comprehensive shopping experience driven by social popularity and consumers’ social connections.”

Want to know which lip gloss your friends love, or which eye shadow color is hot right now? Social Shop will show you the products trending among your own social circle, as well what’s most popular among the Smashbox community at large.

Using Facebook profile data, Facebook “Likes” and consumers’ “Wants,” Social Amp provides Smashbox shoppers with personalized recommendations based on their friends’ preferences, as well as their own. Social Amp’s platform and applications embed the social graph and users’ social connections directly into Smashbox.com for brand-focused interaction.

http://www.smashbox.com/socialshop/index.tmpl

Please check it out!

 

Sources:

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/social-amp

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/smashbox-cosmetics-and-social-amp-partner-to-provide-personalized-community-online-126166493.html

 

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(I have found an interesting article in Dutch which I translated roughly for this blogpost. If you want, you can check below for the link)

You hear all kind of things about crowdsourcing nowadays like ‘Crowdsourcing is trending’, ‘Crowdsourcing grows exponentially.’ and so on.

But the big question is how hot is crowdsourcing actually and how much is this phenomenon growing?

A lot of big companies have been adapting this platform in recent years, nationally as internationally.

“More than 50% of Fortune 500 companies have made open innovation an integral part of their innovation strategy.” Open innovation extends to consumers, embracing their “knowledge, experiences, creativity and ideas are understood as valuable partners.”

A good example of a crowdsourcing initiative is the Lay’s ‘Maak de Smaak’ competition, where 5,8 million times have been ‘battled’ for the best taste in chips. It has been a good exposure for Lay’s marketing.

If you look through Google Insights you can see that the amount of links and articles increased which have mentioned ‘crowdsourcing’.

Also, when you are talking about the insights and trends, the Gartner’s Hype Cycle cannot be missed out. Every year the company Gartner places important ’emerging’ technologies on a curve, to determine in what stadium a hype the certain technology is in. In 2012 you can see that ‘crowdsourcing’ is in the curve, but has not reached it’s peak yet. It will be another 5-10 years before crowdsourcing will be a irreplaceable technology in the business, according to Gartner.

There has been a lot of crowdsourcing platforms worldwide. According to the American crowdsourcing company ‘Massolution’ there are some remarkable factors given in their industry report 2012 about these platforms.

• The crowdsourcing market is booming. In 2011 there has been nearly $300 million invested in platforms and the earnings of these crowdsourcing platforms have been increased with 75% in one year time
• Especially big companies with capital above 1 billion dollar are the early adopters of crowdsourcing.
• 60% of the crowd comes from either USA or Europe, where a big part are high educated and having a fulltime job.
• 52% of the companies who has used a crowdsourcing platform, will be using it at least one time again in the future.

It is undeniable that crowdsourcing platforms are here to stay in the future. The variety of crowdsourcing platforms have been growing every day. Also the interest is growing exponentially, which is seen in the amount of investment and sales which have been realized through these platforms. What this phenomenon will bring in the future, we don’t know, but all we know is that it has given some brilliant and creative solutions from the customers.

Sources:

http://www.marketingfacts.nl/berichten/crowdsourcing-de-stand-van-zaken

http://www.affinnova.com/blog/bid/103589/Review-of-a-Decade-of-Netnography-Research

http://www.crowdsourcing.org/editorial/enterprise-crowdsourcing-research-report-by-massolution/11736

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In 2012, TED is granting ten awards of $10,000 to fund local projects likely to spur the creation of the City 2.0. They are looking for the brightest minds and biggest hearts working at the grassroots to make cities more sustainable, equitable, and beautiful.

The City 2.0, is a kind of global Wikipedia connecting citizens, political leaders, urban experts, companies, and organizations, with the goal of improving the 21st century city using up-to-the-minute crowdsourcing techniques. The ambitious goal is to create a clearinghouse for tools and methodologies and best practices to reshape cities around the world.

“This has been designed as a big collaborative process – not us deciding who’s in and who’s out,” said TED curator Chris Anderson, who described the new platform, at this website, as a “big open tent” to collect and share successes, resources, and insights.*

The TED Prize has for the last five years been awarded to individuals, ranging from Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson to create the Encylopedia of Life to the street artist JR and his initiative to encourage portraits of people plastered on walls and buildings. This year marks the first time the prize has gone to a broader concept.

Please check it out, it’s very inspirational! http://www.thecity2.org/

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2012/03/how-2012-ted-prize-city-20-aims-crowdsource-future/1373/

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Today in the discussion group, we talked about why senior managers are feeling so resistent towards social network services. In this blogpost I want to talk in dept why senior management are so resistent to social media to incorporate in their companies and how they have been doing so far.

In a research of MIT Sloan Management review, they had an interesting survey where they asked the following questions:

 “What factors do you see facilitating the adoption of social software in your organization?” The top two answers were clear vision for how social media supports business strategy, and senior management support. Lack of management understanding was the top answer to the question “What internal barriers do you see impeding the adoption of social software in your organization?”  (Risk and security concerns are the top external barriers to social software adoption.)”

For the following question MIT’s Andrew McAfee asked, ‘Do your leaders have the right mindset for integrating social business into your organization?’ He notes that someone’s receptivity to social business has a lot to do with his or her qualities as a leader. For those who encourage the free exchange of ideas, there’s no conflict. But for those who prefer to suppress opinions, social business can be seen as a threat:

Social business can undermine people’s power. Especially if you’re a jerk boss who has thrived on being the gatekeeper for information and suppressing your people’s opinions, this could be unpleasant for you. If you’re the boss of a project that’s behind schedule and you try to convince your higher-ups that it’s on schedule, these new social tools will be uncomfortable for you. For what I would call high-quality or more enlightened leaders, there is no conflict here. For command-and-control bureaucrats who are afraid of having a more multivoiced organization, this stuff is scary. But I don’t want a lot of those managers in my organization.

Having the right leadership mindset — being open to new ideas and encouraging others to share rather than hold onto information — is an important determinant of whether social business will gain traction in your organization. 

So the support of senior management is a key factor to be able to adapt social media succesfully. But why are managers so resistive to social media?

• Social media technologies have the potential to transform the way companies build and manage relationships with their customers.
• Apathy, fear and uncertainty – more than costs – are preventing companies from formally adopting social media technologies.
• Social media technologies are invading the workplace. Companies know this, but most have no formal plan to manage them.

Like it or not, social media platforms have entered the business world as important components of an effective communications strategy. While it’s true excellent management can be delivered without the use of social media, experts agree that it behooves all managers to at least dip their toes in the water and start familiarizing themselves with the different available platforms and their capabilities. “It’s not a must-do for everybody, but at a minimum you need to be educating yourself on the channels and what their potential is for the future so you can be continually investigating whether it makes sense for you or your company,”

Actually nowadays the social media adaption has been high. Companies around the world are adopting social media as part of their business practices, with 61% in 6 US and European markets on Facebook, 39% on Twitter and 29% on LinkedIn. However only 12% of the companies have fully integrated social media into their business processes.

“Integration” signifies that social media are incorporated into business processes, rather than bolted on. In an integrated company, all employees tend to have access to social media (52% of companies currently claim this), employees are empowered to discuss their work on social media (41%), and employees are encouraged to communicate online with customers and consumers (44%).

Data from the research indicates that while 29% of companies claim to be doing nothing with social media and 12% claim to have integrated it fully, the remaining 59% are somewhere along the continuum between. Some 27% are in the first steps in social media, while 17% have moved on to the pilot stage. The remaining 15% have completed the pilot, and are integrating social media.

Some Management Holds Out Based On Values

The research concludes that a misalignment between management and company values blocks social media integration. About half of top management feel that their personal values do not fit those of the companies they work for, and 37% claim that their company values are not clear to all employees. These managers tend to invest less in social media. The researchers speculate that those managers are intimidated by the “transparency, openness and authenticity” of the media, even internally: just 38% companies claim to share the results of customer conversations with their employees, leaving the employees in the dark as to customer complaints or satisfaction.

 

http://www.avanade.com/us/about/avanade-news/press-releases/Pages/Most-Companies-Avoid-Integrating-Social-Media-Despite-Evidence-of-Benefits-page.aspx

http://sloanreview.mit.edu/feature/social-business-value-organizational-issues/#side9

http://www.facilitiesnet.com/facilitiesmanagement/article/Why-Facility-Managers-Are-Not-Adopting-Social-Media–13195

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