What is crowdsourcing? Why should you use crowdsourced research?

Crowdsourcing is a blend of two words: “crowd” and “outsourcing”. It was first coined by Jeff Howe in his 2006 Wired magazine article, The Rise of Crowdsourcing. It involves tapping into the collective intelligence of a broad audience to complete tasks that are traditionally done by a single person or a group.

According to Howe, since crowdsourcing is an open call to an undefined group of people, it attracts those who are most fit to perform the tasks, solve problems, and most importantly, contribute with the most relevant, creative and fresh thoughts. For instance, the public may be invited to design a particular task, improve an algorithm, analyze data or just simply asked to share their thoughts about a certain product or brand.

When it comes to doing market research at an expansion stage software company, crowdsourcing can be very useful. Sometimes smaller companies do not perform market research because it is very expensive. Other times, due to the fast paced nature of the technology world, there might be a time crunch for such research projects which make them difficult to implement. Traditional market research requires recruiting participants, creating surveys, executing studies and analyzing results – all of which takes time. Moreover, there can also be the issue of research findings being stale from the time lapse between data collection and data reporting.

Crowdsourced research can eliminate a lot of these problems by filling the time gap and providing results that are not only timely, but also very extensive; all of these can be extremely valuable in constructing or fine tuning marketing and/or sales strategies.

Traditional market research is scientific and reliable. However, it is also rigid and one-way in nature, where the brand or the company carrying out research has control over the study and utilizes a one-way methodology to learn about its consumers. Thus, adding crowdsourced research alongside traditional market research makes the process between consumers and brands more collaborative and continuous. Nowadays, monitoring tools, video chat capabilities, social networks and mobile devices make private communities and other crowdsourced research cheaper, faster and more insightful.

Here are some reasons why you should incorporate crowdsourced research as an aside to your traditional market research:

• It is economic. Crowdsourced research costs very little compared to traditional market research.
• The turnaround time is short. This means you can quickly gather and analyze data.
• It is very flexible. As you see trends emerging and shaping up, you can quickly change or make adjustments to capture more of some data over others.
• The process is very collaborative. Brands can ideate and improve upon products and test concepts and product functionalities to understand consumer needs and motivations and so on. In general, you can understand consumer experiences and have conversations with them over a long time.
• It is very high velocity, meaning that it allows for real-time consumer behavior analysis for new technologies, trends and conversations.

In all, crowdsourced research is good for giving you a quick pulse on a strategy, concept or product idea before you release it to the public. If used alongside traditional market research, it can quickly test and validate results from traditional studies.
 
Hear Jeff Howe talk about crowdsourcing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0-UtNg3ots