Crowdsourcing in a Digital Era

 Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog. This week in class we talked about different topics related to communications such as politics, crowdsourcing, and the global impact of emerging media. Although we discussed a range of topics, I want to focus this blog posting specifically on crowdsourcing. With the emergence of social media and our world become more digital by the day, crowdsourcing is a tool that can benefit communication professionals around the world. 

picture from gep.com

What is crowdsourcing?

According to the Oxford dictionary, crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining information or input into into a task or project by enlisting the services of a large number of people, either paid or unpaid, typically via the internet. Crowdsourcing is a relatively new marketing tool and according to gep.com "crowdsourcing is still in the infancy stage, and in the future marketers will likely strive to adopt this model for other marketing subcategories," (2021). 

Examples of crowdsourcing:

Have you ever used a crowdsourcing app? If you've ever used the app WAZE (much like google maps but better in my opinion) then you have used a crowdsourcing application. WAZE allows users to directly report traffic during their routes. WAZE crowdsources information by tracking their users speed, by doing this WAZE determines where traffic jams are occurring and allows its users to report on road closures. 

Have you ever witnessed a company advertise a campaign where they want you to submit ideas for different flavors of their products? Companies such as Starbucks, McDonald's and Lays are all companies that have asked their consumers to submit their ideas for different flavors on their products. They solicit information from their consumers and use their feedback to improve. These are only a few examples of crowdsourcing that I believe that most of us have seen. 

Crowdsourcing in Communications 

picture from innovation observer

Crowdsourcing was created to help companies/organizations organize large groups of data. With the vast emergence of various social media platforms, communication professionals can use crowdsourcing tools for their companies social media pages. Social media has become a vast outlet for  crowdsourcing for companies and organizations. Crowdsourcing helps companies/organizations in various ways but I'm only going to highlight four of them today. Crowdsourcing helps companies/organizations gain a better understanding of their consumers, helps improve the companies product or service, optimizes companies service on social media, and it helps companies assess their performance. 

 Gain a Better Understanding of their Consumers 

I read an article by Jacqueline Zote on Sprout Social about crowdsourcing and social media. Zote stated that she believes that crowdsourcing on social media is the most effective way to develop and learn who your target audience is. I agree! As consumers, we engage what we like and are attracted to on social media. Therefore I believe that it is one of the most effective ways to determine what my target audience would be because I can see who engages with the content. 

Improve your Product or Service

If you have a presence on social media, I'm sure that you have seen a consumer calling out a company about their goods or services or you've seen a consumer boasting about how good they feel about a company or product. This type of feedback gives companies the opportunity to see how they can improve or what they should implement more of. In the comment section or through shares, companies can see what consumers have to say about their goods or services. 

Optimize Social Media Customer Service

This tactic coincides with the previous one. Customer feedback is essential for companies to thrive. Without feedback companies won't know what products consumers like and what they don't. According to Zote, "if you're seeing recurring issues with your product or service, such as many customers experiencing shipping issues, you can start to diagnose problems affecting your business and improve," (2019). By noticing and diagnosing the problem early it can help the company prevent similar issues in the future. 

Assess Performance

Earlier in this term I talked about analytics and how they help consumers analyze their performance. Although this is good for companies, analytics don't analyze customer's opinions, but crowdsourcing can. Crowdsourcing can tell you exactly how a consumer feels through what they share and post. 

Hopefully this discussion has made crowdsourcing easier to understand. Do you think you will use it in your profession? Let me know in the comments! I included links to the articles within the text of this post! See y'all online next week!