Notice: the WebSM website has not been updated since the beginning of 2018.

Blog of the month, June 2012: Is crowdsourcing right for your organization?

Aug 10 2012

For the blog of the month, June 2012, we have selected the Infosurv blog and their article, Is crowdsourcing right for your organization?

The author is pointing out the new approach to the market research called crowdsourcing. According to Wikipedia, “Crowdsourcing is a type of participative online activity in which a company or organization proposes to a group of individuals of varying knowledge, heterogeneity, and number, via an open call, to voluntarily undertake a task.” (Infosurv, 2012)

Author points out a few key points for conducting the proper crowdsourcing project:

  1. Your participants must be diverse.  Include employees from all business units within the organization, and tapping into outside stakeholders (customers/potential customers) is critical.
  2. Participants must be encouraged to share their unique ideas.  Avoid “group think” by providing incentive for unique  perspective and contributions.
  3. Determine the best method for collecting, organizing, and aggregating the information you receive.  Prediction markets, online forums, and wikis are useful tools, but often serve a different purpose.  Remember, the best ideas come from collective wisdom and are often not represented in any individual contribution.
  4. Throughout the process, constantly communicate with participants to provide new considerations, feedback on ideas, and information on how their ideas are being used. (Infosurv, 2012)

It is also important that you have defined the problem fully, that you have enough participants checked-in to give you the right input and to give the online forum enough time for getting the information you need (Infosurv, 2012). You can read more about crowdsourcing in the link above.

Short statistics of the June articles on blogs in our database in general:

  • From the 114 blogs in our database, there were 66 blogs with one or more blog articles posted in June 2012.
  • The biggest count was 180 articles in June, posted on MRweb blog.
  • There were 128 relevant posts about web-survey methodology; and from those 128 posts, there were 29 quality articles in terms of web-survey methodology.

Links:

 

Author: Marko Širec

This article has been read 2677 times

Comments