Crowdsourcing: Getty Images and Traditional Market Feedback Essay Example

people who know each other from work or who are friends which each other don’t fulfill the above mentioned criteria. They probably have a similar background (work, interests,…) and might not make their decisions independent from each other, as they probably talk about it, discuss the ‘issue’ and most likely even influence each other, which can lead to “information cascade”. The independent judgment of the participants is not guaranteed and a failure made out of collective judgment might occur. To avoid this, the four above mentioned criteria should be met.

However this sounds pretty easy, in a time where everybody is kind of connected to the internet this isn’t as easy as it seems. Millions of people are using the internet to blog, network, email, etc. and are connected to others, which reduces the independence of the participants and makes them more susceptible to manipulate and hysteria. 3. Can you think of other examples of crowdsourcing besides photography? Is photography a good example? What kinds of products or services might not lend themselves to crowdsourcing? The one example I was thinking of right away was Tripadvisor.

Tripadvisor relies on the opinions and reviews of its members to provide information to people interested in a flight, trip or vacation. With over 40 million reviews, it has become the first port of call for many travelers. The reasons why so many people feel that the Tripadvisor crowd is reliable is a) because of its very high number of users ( 45m+ travel reviews/opinions; 7m+ candid traveler photos) and b) because of the quality of the reviews itself. I think TripAdvisor is a good example of

crowdsourcing working to create the leading travel destination.

In the past, people would pick hotels on limited personal recommendations or go with the "safe" choice of big brands. Crowdsourcing allows users to pick the hotel that suits their exact preference (singles, seniors, honeymooners ... etc. ) as chosen by thousands of others ( And in fact 3 of the top 5 hotels in the world are not 5 star hotels). While researching on the internet for further examples I realized that there already are hundreds of other examples, which honestly impressed me. The following three examples seemed to be very interesting to me: • Oxford English Dictionary (OED) may provide one of the earliest examples of crowdsourcing.

An open call was made to the community for contributions by volunteers to index all words in the English language and example quotations for each and every one of their usages. In the 70 year project, they received over 6 million submissions. • Facebook has used crowdsourcing since 2008 to create different language versions of its site. The company claims this method offers the advantage of providing site versions that are more compatible with local cultures. • Lufthansa's Air Cargo Innovation Challenge for Customer Service as another example.

Lufthansa was looking for creative ideas about the future form and function of customer service as it related to cargo and in particular the touch points between a customer and Lufthansa customer service representatives. Lufthansa also seized the opportunity to find “out of the box ideas” from the crowd. Members registered to join this crowdsourcing community and created a pool of ideas for consideration by a corporate

jury. I think photography and iStockphoto is a good example, because it is an area in which crowdsourcing has essentially matured to become a significant part of an entire industry.

Looking at iStockphoto into detail: iStockphoto was started in 2000 by Bruce Livingstone simply as a way of avoiding paying licensing fees for stock photos. So he decided to post his photos on the internet and other users can use them, as long as they upload their own photos in exchange. Then it became so popular that Bruce could no longer afford to pay the hosting costs and so he started charging a quarter per image. And it seems that without ever really intending to, he was suddenly competing with professional stock photo agencies and undercutting them by well over 99 percent.

The popularity of the site grew from there, and for several years the professionals really arrayed themselves against what came to be known as microstock, as opposed to stock, because of the small price of the images. Professionals, of course, claimed, that these images weren't very good—that the pictures were just amateur pictures, which was absolutely true. But the fact is, many just didn’t care about them just being amateur pictures. Further factor driving this trend were: Digital cameras had come down in price; Photo-editing software was easy to get and easy to use.

What iStock really offered was a community of like-minded people—what sociologists would call a community of practice. Photographers could hang out with other people who are doing the same thing, trade tips and find out the right way to capture good images in a certain situations,

etc. I think there are some services that can’t be crowdsourced, like legal services, medical services, etc. In areas like these, people should further rely on the expertise of a doctor or an attorney. Who wants the opinion of a group of people about an important surgery or a trial?

What I further believe can’t really be crowdsourced are a company’s strategy. No one knows a business as well as the owner, and that’s why I think this shouldn’t be fully crowdsourced. However getting some opinions about the strategy and long-term goals might be helpful. 4. What is the impact of crowdsourcing on business? Can a "crowdsourced" business be profitable? Is iStockphoto. com profitable? As an innovative force, crowdsourcing shifts our attention from people to ideas. It breaks the egotism that leader always have to be at the center of any organization.

It changes the locus of control from an internal one to an external one, which can be liberating, opening up the organization to new possibilities in terms of governance and operations that it wouldn’t have considered otherwise. It further helps the companies to be near the customers and to respond better to their desires and it enables them further to explore problems quickly and at little costs. Yes, a crowdsourced business can be profitable. Regarding iStockphoto: In early 2006, Getty Images—which was a public company at the time, by far the largest company in the industry—reversed course and bought iStockphoto for $50 million.

And revenues have grown rapidly from there. It's now expected to bring in some $260 million by 2012. In fact, measured on its own, it would be

the third-largest stock photo company in the world, if it wasn't part of Getty. 5. Why does the IdeaScale video criticize online surveys? What's wrong with online surveys? How does IdeaScale do any better? IdeaScale is an easy-to-use, yet powerful solution for the collection of feedback and ideas. Contrary to Online Surveys, IdeaScale enables companies to build Digg style communities, which is based on the model of Crowdsourcing.

It all starts with simply posting an idea to an IdeaScale community. All posted ideas can be expanded through comments by the community and the ultimate measure of an idea is determined by a voting system. Through this, any idea can be voted to the top or buried back down to the bottom. IdeaScale brings people together, that share interests and passion. It combines the “wisdom of the crowds” concept with Web 2. 0 models like Digg. 6. IdeaScale claims to produce "actionable" ideas when compared to traditional market feedback mechanisms like online surveys, focus groups, and reviews of customer comments on Web sites.

Do you think this might be true? Yes, I think that this might be true. There are several tools out there. But a recent case study shows that IdeaScale's iPhone App has outperformed the others: OpenMaps is a feature rich app that creates and edits open map data. OpenMaps wanted to get feedback from their audience and decided that mobile apps would be a great way to do it. They used several applications; IdeaScale was one of them. When the data came back they learned that IdeaScale outperformed the others! In contrast to traditional market feedback mechanism, IdeaScale collects feedback via

email, Twitter, Facebook, etc. nd therefore uses a wide variety. And as more and more people are used to delivering feedback on these interfaces and prefer giving feedback that way, this gives IdeaScale a competitive advantage against other traditional market feedback mechanism. And according to Gongos Research, “smartphone-based surveys also offer the potential for researchers to reach segments of the population not as inclined to complete online surveys, such as non-acculturated Hispanics and ‘digital natives. ’” 7. Pick an online product or service you would like to deliver as a business firm. Outline how you would use IdeaScale.

How would you select the people for your online community? How would you prompt them to participate? What new ideas would you propose to them, or what questions would you ask them to respond to? Every business should take the time to ask their customers what’s important to them and what other alternatives they are considering to solve their problems. IdeaScale can help a Business to get more Information about its customers. Thinking about Selling Toys online, I would select Parents and Grandparents, as well as random Individuals. I would ask questions about the website like “How do you like the website? ; “Did you find everything you were looking for? ”; “How can we make the website more attractive”. I would further ask some questions about the products and the product range, like: “Did you find the product you were looking for? ”; “Are there any toys or toy categories missing”. And of course would like to ask some general questions too “How do you like the website? ”; “Do you have any ideas to

improve our appearance? ”; “Are you satisfied with us”,… Every participant gets the chance to win one of 5 $50 coupons for my website. With this I hope to motivate more people of participating in my survey.