Small businesses are using crowdsourcing to solve their business challenges and execute their projects in an economic manner. Here are a few stories on crowdsourcing:
Cooltownstudios.com is a unique crowdsourcing sourcing which publishes different stories every month not only on crowdsourcing, but how the technique is being applied in placemaking for developing community-oriented places for people. Placemaking can be defined as the difference between competitive crowdsourcing which often receives negative feedback, and purposeful crowdsourcing which is collaborative and inspires people as a community.
Quirky is a company for social product development and it uses crowdsourcing for launching new consumer products in the market. Launched in 2009, crowdsourcing is used here to develop a new product every week and share the revenue with the influencers who helped in developing each of the products. Since its inception, it has developed 48 new products collaboratively and raised $6 million in the Series A financing led by RRE Ventures.
Every week, Quirky engages the online community of over 30000 individuals from all over the world in a bid to collaborate in different aspects of product creation right from the idea and design to the naming and marketing. They also evaluate or contribute to others’ ideas. The final product is available for pre sale in the online Quirky store and if it attains a certain threshold, it goes for production and is available worldwide. The site then shares its product revenue with the members of the community which influenced the creation of the product.
Zferral.com, a company by Jeff Epstein, helps companies to crowdsource their marketing and sales with the help of affiliate programs. Crowdsourcing is naturally used for logo design so that the product is well recognized. About $320 is paid and there are about 100 choices which are received within the period of a week. Now, the company plans crowdsourcing banner ads.
GiftTRAP was founded by Nick Kellet who started sourcing gift ideas and images for products with the help of crowdsourcing. Creative Commons licensing is used to credit the sources who contributed in the effort. The website is available in 12 languages. Creative Commons used GiftTRAP as a poster image of crowdsourcing for creating a commercial product.
The Fundraising Coach is a website by Marc Pitman. It helps people raise money for different causes. Marc has written his book Ask without Fear where he enumerates that he did not use capital but social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for directing people to surveys. This created a buzz and helped him sell his book. |
