A few years back Steve Olenski wrote an article on crowdsourcing which showed that 85% of the Best Global Brands have used crowdsourcing in the last ten years. AT&T T +0%, Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and 2XU are the three global brands who are using crowdsourcing to its fullest advantage. Each of these brands has worked with Zooppa, which provides a creative video crowdsourcing platform.

What is Crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing may be explained as the practice of borrowing ideas, knowledge, information or services for business growth. The term “crowdsourcing” may also be explained as a combination of crowds and outsourcing and was coined in 2006 by Wired magazine author Jeff Howe in his article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing.”

Of late crowdsourcing is a term mostly used by enterprises, large or small, to

Crowdsourcing Types

Crowd Contest is a popular form of crowdsourcing. An organization may use a crowd contest to create a killer logo or design. The best one is chosen from among hundreds and thousands of designs and eventually qualifies as the top design. Usually, prize money is paid and the designer might also be offered a full-time contract with the organization.

Companies also use crowdsourcing to seek out an individual who can handle a specific project — a type of crowdsourcing called macro-tasking. Or the entity can seek out many respondents, assigning each one some task or a smaller part within a larger project. This is called micro-tasking.

Another subset of crowdsourcing is crowdfunding, where nonprofit organizations ask for money to cover the costs of an identified endeavor.  Entrepreneurs often make use of crowdfunding to raise funds for their businesses.

The most important area of crowdsourcing is yet to be covered; borrowing of information or ideas. Larger organizations often build up a database with crowdsourced ideas or information. Many brands, especially online education brands owe their growth to intelligent crowdsourcing.

How is Crowdsourcing useful for Business?

Businesses of all kinds have used crowdsourcing to implore ideas and raise money as well as consolidate and promote information. This also allows them to engage with a broader spectrum of sources than they would if they had used employees, suppliers and other traditional sources of expertise via conventional routes of engagement.

• Faster results: The crowdsourcing approach helps businesses to go straight to the market with their design brief and invite a whole community of creative people to submit their unique ideas immediately. In fact, most customers receive their first designs within a couple of hours. This is an early indication of whether the brief is set up correctly and if you have directed the designers in the right way.
• More creative: Large business houses utilize crowdsourcing to tap into the knowledge, skills, and creativity of a massive network of potential brand advocates. Crowdsourcing opens up the design space to a readily available pool of talented creative genius, who is ready to contribute to your brand.
• More collaborative: Crowdsourcing enables you to enjoy a more streamlined process and present a brief that drills down on your key demands. Designers work faster and smarter when there are more competition and less pressure to deliver on a contract. You should provide feedback on the designs you like during the contest, but you are essentially left free to focus on developing your business while the creative elements flow in. What more, you can directly poll your friends, followers, colleagues, and customers online to help you choose the winner. You are also free to eliminate unsuitable designs and request changes from designers you feel are close to nailing it.

• More money-wise: Crowdsourcing utilizes a pool of qualified freelance designers for work, which significantly lowers the costs.

The process also comes with a lot more financial flexibly, as you can set your own budget. The competition between designers means the costs are kept down and you can choose additional features to ensure you get the most designs and best quality for the price.

Crowdsourcing Examples

Crowdsourcing platforms with global communities of filmmakers worldwide have offered attractive rewards for the best videos on a given brand brief, typically awarding cash or other brand relevant incentives. The WWF’s Earth Hour 2017 initiative was a classic instance of crowdsourcing for business advantage.

Celebrating Earth Hour’s 10th anniversary, WWF requested the global video crowd to produce engaging, emotional films about why and how people should act to #changeclimatechange. It provided the perfect formula for doubling organic reach and becoming a powerful vehicle for consumers, activists, and environmentalists to get their messages heard by a worldwide audience.

More than 40 videos were submitted from places like Namibia and Siberia, all with their own unique message.

For Nespresso, was another channel to convey messaging while building brand equity, by focusing on worldwide talent and the particularly the younger audience in the process. Since the younger generation is consuming more mobile content and, most of it is being watched vertically, it was easier to engage them in an online talent hunt.

Nespresso Talents was launched at the Berlinale Film Festival, amplified online with an exclusive content partner with the promise that the three winners’ efforts would be showcased at Cannes later in the year.

Nespresso recorded over 384 submissions from 38 different countries and all of these statistics was available even viewed the entries that the contest had been a success and the varied backgrounds and ideas behind the competitors made it a tough call to judge just three winners.

With 85 million impressions, 1,700 mentions and 99.7% positive sentiment towards the campaign, with no surprise that the press and bloggers fell for vertical format and at Cannes, attracting huge attention and giving the three winners a truly global showcase of their talents.

Nespresso enhanced credentials in film, building on innovation and engaging a wider audience beyond physical platforms. They also validated the emergence of vertical video as a credible medium, completely changing the snobbish attitude that had been prevalent for so long. The vertical films even won the gold medal for mobile content in France’s Online Video Awards.

PixelBenchmarks, for example, an initiative by Pixel Solutionz is an online mock test platform that is growing its question banks by accepting mock tests from teachers, trainers, tutors, tuition providers, and brilliant scholars. The resource providers submit their mock tests and are paid every time a purchase is made by a user.

EducationBengal.in, another initiative by Pixel Solutionz is building an online directory of city-based schools, colleges, academic institutions, coaching centers, and vocational centers. The institutions can list themselves for free and EducationBengal.in makes this information available for use.

Closing thoughts:

While speaking on the future of crowdsourcing, an immense increase in the number of brands that use crowdsourcing across categories is forecasted. also, crowdsourcing will evolve from a ‘take-only’ approach into much more of a two-way communication between brands and consumers.

According to experts you might consider giving your consumers a say in the process, so as to make them feel more connected with the bran. Be transparent and honest with them. I am sure the end result will be better than you expected it to be. The companies that can find a way to do that will have a much more loyal base than the ones which are not.

Today’s brands know they need a library of cost-effectively produced content to keep fans engaged. Turning consumers and fans into passionate brand advocates has so much value, if you can do that while energizing your brand’s content marketing it opens up a whole new world with a lot of promise.