How to Manage Successful Crowdsourcing Projects

By Lukas Biewald  |  Posted 2010-09-29 Email Print this article Print

As more companies tap into crowdsourcing to meet their needs, knowing how to motivate and engage a crowdsourced workforce becomes increasingly important to every crowdsourcing project. To help you successfully manage your next crowdsourcing initiative, Knowledge Center contributor Lukas Biewald shares here the advantages as well as unforeseen pitfalls inherent in many crowdsourcing projects.

Crowdsourcing is a hot industry buzzword but what does it actually mean? How can it help your business? So many things get called "crowdsourcing" these days, from users voting on content to customer service centers being routed to volunteers. As a result, the term "crowdsourcing" has become tricky to define.

I view crowdsourcing as harnessing the talent with which your business does not have a trusted relationship. These people might be your users or they might be strangers. They might be motivated by money, recognition or the desire to see your product improve. Across the many different crowdsourcing approaches, there are some common themes, both advantages and pitfalls.

Crowdsourcing advantages

Why are businesses relying on the crowd to do important jobs? A simple explanation is cost. In many cases, businesses use incentives other than money to get people to perform jobs that are prohibitively expensive otherwise. For example, Facebook used its users to translate the Website into many of the world's languages. It worked because its users really wanted to experience Facebook in their native language and they were excited about the opportunity to help make it happen.

Another common reason for using the crowd is speed or volume of work. Crowds can often scale up or down as needed, in ways that internal staff cannot. For example, the news aggregator Reddit controls spam by having its users quickly flag inappropriate articles 24/7.

A third key reason companies turn to the crowd is to access many different perspectives. Threadless makes consistently great T-shirts by letting anyone submit a design. Users vote on the best one and the T-shirt is then sold on their Website.

Aside from human perspectives, companies often need access to diverse operating systems and browsers. The Website uTest sources real people to test your Website on different computing platforms around the world.

Lukas Biewald is the co-founder and CEO of CrowdFlower. Before co-founding CrowdFlower, Lukas was a senior scientist and manager within the ranking and management team at Powerset, a natural language search technology company later acquired by Microsoft in 2008. Lukas has also led the search relevance team for Yahoo Japan. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and a Master's degree in Computer Science, both from Stanford University. Recently, Lukas won the Netexplorateur Award for Give Work, a collaboration with Samasource that brings digital work to refugees worldwide. He can be reached at info@crowdflower.com.

Submit a Comment

Loading Comments...
Manage your Newsletters: Login   Register My Newsletters

Rocket Fuel