Crowdsourcing is becoming increasingly popular. Once upon a time, it was restricted solely to people getting help on IT related questions. This quickly changed into people asking questions about any topic they could come up with, and this developed further into businesses starting to understand its benefits. So much so, in fact, that there are now many different crowd sourcing software developers that have helped people and organizations all over the world develop new and innovative solutions. At its heart, crowdsourcing means getting a question out in the public domain, and allowing anyone to come up with an answer. These answers are then reviewed and evaluated and, if something successful is identified (and it usually is), it can get implemented. Few people understand just how much this concept has changed the world, so let’s take a look at five areas in which crowdsourcing has truly changed the world.
Five Areas Where Crowd Sourcing Software Has Been Successfully Used
- Research.
One example is the book Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day, for which the author created a page on Twibes, known as HollisTwitterArmy. In so doing, they asked people from all over the world to come up with research for interviews and specific case studies. They utilized the hashtag #HTArmy, which went viral and engaged thousands of different recruits all over the world. The information they raised enabled the author to create the entire book, well before their deadline as well. This is one example of a research project, but there are many others as well. Every survey or poll is essentially a crowdsourcing effort, including finding participants for clinical trials, for example.
- Sharing Information.
Did you know that you can access around 7 million different college study materials online through CourseHero? They actually turned crowdsourcing into a popular business model. Universities all over the world have gotten on board with this, with universities like the Open University and MIT all following suit.
- Labor.
It is even possible to find labor for certain tasks. There are Tenerr and Fiverr, for instance, which are geared towards the United Kingdom, or the Mechanical Turk that was launched by Amazon and enables people to find skilled labor.
- Generating Content.
There are thousands of examples to demonstrate how crowdsourcing has enabled people to generate high quality content, in a range of different niches. Spot.us and NewsIT, for instance, are designed for citizen journalism and other types of news. Enterprise Social Technology crowdsources the content of entire books. Scripted generates any type of content that someone could come up with.
- Fundraising.
Last but not least, crowdsourcing software has made it possible for peers to lend money to others, or to evaluate their business models. If someone is creative in their venture, they could list with Kickstarter, for instance. Businesses, meanwhile, can go to Lending Club or Prosper and crowdsource funding there.
As you can see, crowdsourcing is hugely important and it can be applied to just about anything.
