A Look Back at TMRE 2009: TMRE Keynote 2009: Crowdsourcing: Unleashing the Power of Crowds to Unveil Rich Insights
The Market Research Event 2010 is taking place this November 8-10, 2010 in San Diego, California. Every Friday leading up to the event, we'll be recapping one session from The Market Research Event 2009.
TMRE Keynote 2009: Crowdsourcing: Unleashing the Power of Crowds to Unveil Rich Insights
Crowdsourcing: Unleashing the Power of Crowds to Unveil Rich Insights
Jeff Howe, Author, Crowdsourcing
In 2005, Jeff Howe sent a story about MySpace to the Village Voice. MySpace had created a culture with musicians, which lead Jeff Howe to follow the Warped Tour to write a column for Wired Magazine. The Tour is about the music, but features a carnival culture. The Warped Tour kids engaged in amazing creativity throughout a summer tour of 30 bands traveling and playing in a different city every day. They published poetry, web design, paintings. None of the kids defined themselves as one certain thing like "musician" or "artist". The technology was not the story on the tour, it was what they could do with the technology. Their emphasis was on the products and the processes and how they released their creativity.
Crowdsourcing was not a strategy designed by academics, instead it was an accident. Two friends came together and created a shirt design business, the designs were voted on by the Internet users. This way, you don't have to be a designer to be a part of the system, but just like designs. Threadless came about this way. You have to give users tasks that take less than a minute to accomplish. They started this business because they loved people and wanted to share it with other users. It's a global community, and the shirts are sold to individuals around the world.
The Cardinal Rule of Crowdsoucing is: Ask not what your community can do for you ' Ask what You Can Do For Your Community.