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While I was surfing on the net, I found out two more funny examples of crowdsourcing: Digital IPA and My Burger.

Digital IPA is the first crowdsourced beer. It is made by Yestie Boys that is settled in New Zeland. Given its slogan “Established in the future”, it chose to make the recipe of the beer freely available on the web allowing to everyone to gain knowledge of it and try to make it better. It won the Sutton Group Brewers Guild of New Zealand Beer Awards in 2012 for the innovative label of the beer. It has a QR code where people can find some information about the company and its beer, allowing them to experiment and change the recipe on the basis of their preferences.

If you want to make your own Digital IPA, here is the recipe: http://yeastieboys.posterous.com/private/yCmgJxeHrs

My Burger was a campaign of McDonald’s to celebrate its 40^th year of being “Germany’s favourite restaurant” where users could create its own burger. McDonald’s launched an online platform where everyone could choose the name of the burger and its ingredients, shape and dimensions. Furthermore, all users competed with each other: most voted burgers were produced, distributed and sold in McDonald’s restaurant. This is a good example of how people can provide to firms a low-cost marketing campaign. Results were impressive: 7 million people visited the website, 116000 burgers were created and 12000 communication campaigns were developed, and everything was made only thanks to users’ engagement.

If you want to know more about it, see the video… http://vimeo.com/40618555#

Claudio

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This weeks subject was crowdsourcing and crowdfunding and I found a fun example about how crowdfunding kept a 129 years old business from going bankrupt.

http://www.crowdcube.com/blog/2012/03/01/darlington-fc-turns-to-crowdfunding-to-save-its-football-club/

UK based football club Darlington FC went bankrupt and there were no interested buyers. The fans therefore connected with crowdfunding platform Crowcube to raise ₤ 750.000 to buy the club. The managed to raise ₤ 291.450 (39%) in the first two weeks.

In times were a lot of football clubs can not manage to keep their finance healthy this is a interesting way of staying alive. I think that this fan based ownership will happen more often and is a good thing. The fans now have power to decide what happens to their beloved club and it shows that a community (crowd) is willing to help and involve themselves with saving old clubs and companies like Darlington FC

 In times where social entrepreneurship is in demand I think that crowdfunding is a good tool to help such starts ups to get financed. I think that through crowdfunding the world could become a better place.

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Volga Verdi clothing have a really nice social media campaign. They give customers a discount based on their social reach; the more followers, friends or connections you have, the more discount you get. In other words, the more influential you are in your social media circles, the more you will save at Volga Verdi. I think this is an interesting campaign.

source: http://www.marketingsavant.com/2012/08/discounts-based-on-your-social-influence

In the picture above is an example with Facebook. Facebook users get $5 discount if they have between 30 and 150 friends, $7 if they have between 150 and 1000 friends and $15 discount if they have 1000 friends or more. To get the discount, they must add Volga Verdi on Facebook, send them a prespecified message about the brand, and then email Volga Verdi to confirm they have taken part. This also applies for Twitter, Google+, tumblr. and more other social media platforms. You can check it out on http://www.volgaverdi.com.

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The topic for this week was Crowdsourcing. Sincerely, I had never heard this word before reading articles, so I was really interested in understanding what the word means and its features.. But first, what does crowdsourcing means? Howe stated that crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing a task to a “crowd”, rather than to a designated “agent”, such as a contractor, in the form of an open call.

The first article, by A. Afuah and C. L. Tucci, attempt to explain when crowdsource a problem-solving process could bring to better results than solve it internally or designing an external agent. If the problem-holder has enough knowledge to solve the problem internally, he is conducting a local search, if not, he needs to acquire that knowledge which could be found outside. In this case he should conduct an external search that sometimes could be time-consuming and expensive. The best advantage of crowdsourcing is that external agents self-select and try to solve independently a problem transforming a distant search in a local search. They found five key factors that influence the choice of crowdsource a problem or not.

1. Characteristics of the problem;
2. Characteristics of knowledge required for the solution;
3. Characteristics of the crowd;
4. Characteristics of Solution to be evaluated and evaluators;
5. Characteristics of IT.

For each factor authors made some proposition. For example:

Proposition 1a: The easier it is to delineate and transmit a focal agent’s problem, the higher the probability the agent will crowd source the problem.

The second reading, by Lars B. Jeppensen and Karim R. Lakhani (2010), is a statistical study on the impact of marginality on problem-solving process in a broadcast search. In fact “marginal” people have no pre-existing knowledge or theory. Thus, they can solve a problem in different and novel ways. Two kind of marginality are individuated:

• Technical marginality: people are distant from the field of knowledge required to solve a problem;
• Social marginality: people are excluded from the field of the problem.

To evaluate the impact of marginality on the success of problem solving, they used two different regression models. Given the positive relationship between technical marginality and problem solving success, they found that successful solvers could bring new perspectives and heuristics into problem solving process. Furthermore, they studied women’s social marginality. In fact, they found that women are more cautious than men in submitting a solution, and that they do it only if they are pretty sure to have a good solution which could be the winner. Thus, they state that successful solutions are positive correlated with being women.

The third article, by T. W. Malone, R. Laubacher and C. Dellarocas (2010), defines the elementary parts, called “genes”, of collective intelligence systems. These genes can be combined and recombined to explore new ways of collective intelligence. They found that any activity needs some “genes” to answer to four key questions:

• What is being done?
• Who is doing it?
• Why are they doing it?
• How is it being done?

They found sixteen genes. For example: “How genes” for a create task (the actors in the system generate something new) are: Collection and Collaboration. The first one allows everyone to create content independently. The second one occurs when there are strong interdependences among single contributions that should be managed to perform a single task.

The fourth reading, by G. P. Pisano and R. Verganti (2008), analyses different forms of collaboration. They state that the kind of collaboration depends on two dimensions: Participation and Governance. The first one can be open or closed depending on whether or not everyone could participate. An open platform best suits if problems or situations could be separated into small “pieces”. The second one can be Hierarchic or Flat: Hierarchic if only one group has the last decision on a matter, while Flat when everyone can participate to decisions.

The two examples I used are: Yahoo! Answer and OpenStreetMap.

I think that everyone of you knows so well Yahoo! Answer. Basically, it is a database where every registered user can post its own questions or answer to other members’ questions. It’s the classical example of a collection gene: everyone is encouraged to participate or to find his or her question on the database. It’s easy, funny, easy accessible (it’s available in 12 languages) and well integrated with other Yahoo!’s services. But remember: the community is not made by expert. Furthermore, it’s not unusual to receive silly or joking answers.

OpenStreetMap is also known as Wikipedia of road maps. Basically, this is a crowdsource project born on 2004 which goal is to create a free and crowdsourced map of the entire world. It allows to registered users to contribute adding or editing maps. In fact, users can use their GPS peripherals, such as smartphones or laptop, to add maps, or they can use their “local knowledge” to add just details or point of interests. Its greatest advantage is that is distributed under ODbL license allowing users to use, share or edit freely maps. For this reason, many affirmed firms, such as Apple, Flickr, Joomla and Foursquare, employed it. Given its wide community that is now reaching 700000 users around the world, one more advantage is that it provides a constantly updated service. If you are planning to develop a map-based service this could be an optimal solution. Finally, this is an example of collaboration gene because everyone contributes independently, but there are strong interdependences among contributions that must be managed.

 

Claudio