[David Strom's Web Informant] 30 November 2009: Time to consider crowdsourcing

[David Strom]

David Strom's Web Informant 30 November 2009:
Time to consider crowdsourcing

We all know about outsourcing, the ability to farm out work to people,
often overseas, that will work for less, and sometimes for a lot less.
But a not-so-new trend is changing the way that outsourcing happens,
called crowdsourcing.

The idea is to take a job and divide it into small enough pieces that
someone can do it quickly in their spare time. Think about
transcribing an audio recording. Or Photoshopping a series of
photographs. The difference between regular outsourcing and
crowdsourcing is that you don't necessarily know your contractors, and
they mostly are here in the good ole U S of A. Think of it as stimulus
package for our troubled times, but based entirely on the private
sector.

The idea isn't all that new, but is catching on due to some important
trends. First off, there is a critical mass of people who are willing
to do the work, and probably more people are going to be interested
because of high unemployment over the past year. Second, the
Internet-based tools that are used to farm out jobs and track
completions and manage the crowds is getting better all the time.
Broadband penetration helps: now most people don't do dial-up, which
is great if you are going to be online for hours at a time working the
crowd-based tasks. Finally, many crowds have developed a solid track
record, so it is more compelling for project managers looking for
workers.

As a result, crowdsourcing is big business. There are several dozen
firms that help organize the crowds of people that offer up their
services, and some of them are making millions of dollars a year in
fees that they collect from being brokers between buyer and provider.
Amazon's Mechanical Turk and eLance.com are two of the more well-known
ones, and if you want to find out others I suggest you first listen to
my podcast with my partner Paul Gillin and Brent Frei, the author of
one of the first industry reports on crowdsourcing. You can find the
links to his report and our podcast if you go to:
http://MediaBlather.com/103.html

Frei runs a company that provides crowdsourcing, so it isn't too
difficult to see his self-interest. But the report opened my eyes to
see the power and the promise behind the idea. For example, you can
leverage your own billable time by farming out tedious tasks to
someone else that would gladly do it for a lot less than your rates.
Or compiling a list of vendors by doing online research of their Web
sites. With a $10/hour intern, this project would have taken 12 hours
or $120 to complete the task. By divvying it up among a crowd, Frei
was able to get it done for about $18 total.

Now, I know what you are going to say. How can you ensure quality of
the crowd-based researchers? What about the time and cost to manage
them? There are ways to build in redundancy and have the results
cross-checked, and with the right kind of project management, you can
piece things apart in such a way that makes sense for your crowd.

By the way, Paul and I have been doing our MediaBlather podcasts for
several years, and always on the lookout for someone interesting to
interview, particularly on social media and new marketing tools. If
you are interested in being on our show, let us know.