Many people still confuse crowdsourcing with outsourcing or think that is merely a way to pay workers less money for more work or believe that it is hard to do. It is actually none of those things.
Crowdsourcing is a way of employing specialised workers, people with special skills, that you might not be able to find in your neighbourhood.
Crowdsourcing is easy to do because it is related to things that you already know how to do, such as contests, polls and fund raising. However, it expands all of those activities through the power of the internet and allows you to harness the skills and talent of the global crowd. So here is what you can do:
1. Learn the main types of crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing has five major forms, which are all related to things that you already know.They are:
I. Crowdcontests, which are merely contests held on the Internet to create an object for find a piece of information.
II. Crowd Innovation, which is similar to holding a poll on the Internet to find what people think of a new idea.
III. Macrotasking, which is similar to freelancing.
IV. Microtasking, which divides large jobs into tiny tasks and offers these tasks to the crowd.
V. Crowdfunding, which is merely fund raising over the Internet.
2. Run a Crowdcontest
In a crowdcontest, you tell the crowd that you need something, you ask for submissions, you choose the one that seems best, and you reward the winner. You can run a crowdcontest on your own web site, a specialised site, or even Facebook. You describe what you want, set a deadline, and start the contest. Some companies, such as 99Designs, have sites that offer crowdcontests for specialised services, such as graphic designs.
3. Do some Innovation
You want to know what the crowd thinks of your new idea? You can ask them. Again, you can do this on Facebook or Twitter, or you can use a special crowdsourcing site such as AHHHA.com. You describe your idea and ask the crowd what they think.
4. Hire a Freelancer
You need someone to help you with WordPress? Or build a web page? Or write a mobile app? You might think that you have to hire a student or ask a favour of your neighbour’s niece. Instead, you can hire a freelancer from the crowd. You can do so on sites such as LinkedIn, freelancer.co.uk, eLance.com or Topcoder.com.
5. Microtasking
If you want to see crowdsourcing in action, you can go to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com) and see thousands of small tasks available for anyone who wants to do them. You will see people transcribing business cards, or characterising tweets, or reviewing web pages to make sure the content is not objectionable. If you think you want to do microtasking, you can turn to a number of companies that can help you prepare such tasks, including Crowdflower.com, Serv.io or Trada.com.
6. Raise some Funds
Crowdfunding almost needs no introduction as most people understand what it is. We have many well-known crowdfunding web sites: Crowdcube.com, Crowdfunder.co.uk are UK-based. Global sites include Kickstarter, Whenyouwish, and Indigogo. You describe what you are doing, set a figure that you need and start promoting your idea.
David Alan Grier is author of Crowdsourcing For Dummies read our review here