By Leigh Andrews

Mass collaboration; click workers; ‘the long tail’; wikinomics; open innovation… call it what you will, crowdsourcing (defined as recently as 2006) is definitely creating a buzz. From a creative campaign mindset, it’s often the case that the same ideas go round and round the proverbial fish tank, meaning we end up with ‘much of a muchness’, even when ‘brainstorming’ and ‘thinktanking’ has taken place internally. It’s when these ideas/ briefs/ campaign ideas are opened up for the public to expand on that we reach something truly creative and ‘different’ - mainly because the initial idea has been put out there and built upon by others who have no link to the project - this means that their ideas are fresh and have not been re-hashed. Already big news already overseas and in social media applications, South Africans love the concept of crowdsourcing. As we’ve had quite a bit of interest in last week’s Editorial Desk article on the topic, this week we delve deeper into it.

Mike Stopforth of Cerebra recently engaged with his blog readers to attempt to save the Cape Town City Ballet through donations. He comments that the Mother City’s blogging community rallied around the Cape Town City Ballet in its moment of dire need, based on a call-to-action campaign encouraging people to save the arts in Cape Town. This relates to the ‘generosity’ that underlies Generation G, and links to crowdfunding, or asking your potential audience for financial assistance – usually online.

Crowdfunding, alluded to earlier, is a form of crowdsourcing with specific relevance to the publicity campaign industry, referring to the “collective co-operation; attention; and trust by people who network pooling their money together,” usually via the internet, in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organisations. Crowdfunding occurs for any variety of purposes, from disaster relief to citizen journalism; to artists seeking support from fans; or political campaigns. One of the most publicised and successful cases to-date is Age of Stupid. This British movie, a drama-documentary-animation hybrid, focused on the effects of climate change and raised lots of money via crowdfunding. It also made use of crowdsourcing to distribute and exhibit the film and its message around the world. The Age of Stupid team also staged a guerrilla production at the Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change Conference from 7 December to 18 December 2009, called The Stupid Show, to ‘help demystify the geo-political intricacies surrounding climate change’. An offshoot of The Age of Stupid project is 10:10. This is a UK-wide campaign encouraging everyone in Britain to reduce their carbon emissions by at least 10% during 2010. Definitely using the ‘crowd’ to spread the message and ‘do good’ for the environment then.

Stopforth adds, “brands ought to remember that customers are not just numbers, but instead smart; informed; connected individuals who in many cases are extremely knowledgeable about the products and services we sell to them.” As such, customers/ consumers should be seen more as partners in research and development – “people who can make a marked impact on the intelligence; operations; processes; and ultimately, profit of our organisations. Crowdsourcing is just one powerful method of tapping into this collective intellectual capital.”

So, how does crowdsourcing differ from open source? There are many areas that overlap. According to Wikipedia, the main difference between crowdsourcing and open source is that open source production is a co-operative activity initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of the public. In crowdsourcing the activity is initiated by a client and the work may be undertaken on an individual, as well as a group, basis. There’s another distinction when we think of ‘Collaboratition’ (collaborative competition), which denotes a specific form of crowdsourcing which uses competition as a motivator for participation in the collaboration efforts.

While crowdsourcing has become ‘shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration, enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals’, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticisms.

On this ‘not so good’ side of crowdsourcing, Curt Hopkins writes on ReadWriteWeb that North Africa has become a testing ground for a new sort of online harassment. He states that groups of Islamists are targeting users they consider to be ‘ideologically unorthodox’ from Facebook’s numerous group/ fan pages, most of which are open and people join without a second thought. The kicker is that the harassers then use Facebook's ‘public ban process’ to silence the group members, taking advantage of what has been called ‘a loophole in Facebook’s crowd-sourced moderation process when it comes to banning profiles’ - if enough members alert Facebook about a profile being ‘fake’, it is automatically de-activated. So crowdsourcing gives everyone a say… but perhaps this particular aspect should be given a re-think, as it brings to mind elitism/ bullying.

Huladude on the Mediabuzz.monster forum adds that it seems like every big brand is crowdsourcing nowadays in order to use the public to build their brands. I definitely feel that the internet is the way to go for answers these days, and who better to ask for new ideas than the very people you’d like to target, once your product is launched? It definitely has implications for social networking sites, and I have noticed a rise in people using popular sites such as Twitter; LinkedIn; and even Facebook to discuss new ideas and ask their friends for suggestions. The communication model has definitely evolved over the years, even since the first-year communication lectures where I recall very little interaction – the message was sent/ encoded by the sender, received/ decoded by the receiver, and interaction was kept to the bare minimum. This is no longer the case, and communications professionals would do well to incorporate more feedback channels with their audiences to ensure the message that is sent is one that will be well accepted.

What are your thoughts on crowdsourcing and the changing face of communications? Leave your comments on our blog.