Crowdsourcing Undefined
As the term crowdsourcing gains more attention and buzz, a phenomenon has occured. While the term becomes familiar to a larger number of people it actually starts to lose meaning as more people apply it to more activities. So now the blogosphere is full of crowdsourcing experts debating and defining the rules of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is not social media. It’s not market research. It must involve experts. The lists go on.
This isn’t a new occurrence, it’s happened throughout the history of business. Take the term “guerrilla marketing”, for example. One definition for this practice is “an unconventional system of promotions that relies on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketing budget.” Back in the early years of this decade, the concept was all the buzz as businesses competed to find new and fresh ways to advertise whether by spray painting tag lines on the streets of New York City or releasing a pack of logoed-underwear clad women into the subways. Whatever it took to get noticed and even better, to get a viral video launched.
While the concept trigged a shift in how companies promote themselves, it’s no surprise that there was expert debate over what defined guerrilla marketing. One expert might cite as an example, the case of McDonald’s sending employees out on the street to hand out samples. Another expert might counter that this is simply an example of product sampling that doesn’t justify a different title just because employees are outside the store and not inside it. In fact, there are still articles trying to sort out what plain old “marketing” is and isn’t.
The point is that regardless of semantics, the core concept of guerrilla marketing has endured. And so will crowdsourcing. Of course there are techniques to get better results from crowdsourcing initiatives, just like with any business concept. And businesses will probably get more out of studying best practices than simply trying to sort out precisely what crowdsourcing is and isn’t.
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