Crowdswooping
I’m going to more and more meetings at the moment where I’m selling crowdsourcing. The pitch goes like this:
One of the major trends in marketing is ‘deeper’ not ‘wider’, as is the shift from perceived value to trading through ‘thick’ tangible value. Crowdsourcing, talking generally, engages people in creative problem solving, within an incentivised, well structured process.
This delivers that deeper engagement and thick value by providing a meaningful activity and an end product. This converts customers into advocates, which provides a highly effecting word-of-mouth distribution asset.
I’d suggest, to a point, that this is true. Crowdsourcing is a step in the right direction for most top down, traditional marketeers. However, I’d suggest it’s neither as radical or as valuable as some might say.
Crowdsourcing works when lots of people do it. Nathan Waterhouse from the team working on openIDEO.com reckons around 1% of contributions to a challenge are likely to be any good. So, if you have 500 entries, you might get 5 to choose from.
Now, large brands and NGOs can drum up 500 people for a competition. The problem is sustainability. If you look at crowdsourcing poster boy Top Coder, their website copy is pretty compelling:
In the real world, it would be unreasonable for you to expect 100% effort from 100% of your employees 100% of the time. But when every piece of an application comes as the result of a TopCoder competition, that means a few things happen that you’ve never seen before:
Every little piece:
- was built by a person who chose to work on it, as opposed to being assigned to it
- was a result of that person’s 100% effort – because anything less would be second best
- was delivered on time – because it had to be to win
- was delivered at budget – because you paid the predetermined prize amount for the result, not for the hours
- is totally documented, transparent, clean code – because it had to be to win
- has undergone a thorough peer-review process to ensure it meets every requirement – because it has to to win
Every little component in that application is literally award-winning, and every one has a story. Browse a couple in our catalog to see for yourself, but don’t get lost, there’s over 1400 of them!
Yet dig into that catalog and what do you find? Mediocre to poor work. The same standard you get using elance to find a designer. Why? Well, it’s pretty simple when you crunch the numbers.
Say there’s a logo competition on Top Coder with $2,000 for the best logo. You enter, along with 50 other designers. That’s $2,000 to go across 50 people. That’s $40 each. That’s not going to buy you much of a logo. (Contrast, for example, that rather more realistic price points of Sortfolio).
The economics simply don’t make sense. If you’re any good you don’t get involved. Or maybe you do once or twice. But after a while you twig. It’s a mugs game.
The parallel I’d draw is with Swoopo. Swoopo, to the uninitiated, looks like it’s offering a Macbook Air for $199 when it’s actually selling it for more like $10,000. An internet sensation, usage surged when it launched in 2009, spawning “evil genius”, “wish I’d thought of it” comments across the blogosphere. But where’s the traffic now? Nearly 50% down in 2010.
So, you wonder, how’s this crowdsourcing thing going to play out? There’s some making the case for the superiority of the open source model. Collaboration rather than competition. But the problem then reduces to the old issue of incentivising participation.
No prize means niche audience: the activists, not the mainstream. We’re stuck between an age old rock and a hard place and I, for one, am trying to see what the opportunities are.
