Crowdsourcing is fun. It’s like a Suggestion Box 2.0 that helps corporations find out what their consumers want, lets hobbyists vent their stories, and citizens fulfill their humanitarian impulses.
For big corporations the information is big money, and, upon analysis it seems more like a reverse Robin Hood effect (taking from the poor, giving to the rich) than anything else. For smaller entities it is a great way to engage audiences and use the feedback to give back more, even though there sites are making little or no profit. Lets take look at who's using crowdsourcing and who's profiting from it....
Starbucks – www.mystarbucksidea.com is an perfect example of a customer-to-company crowd sourcing portal. It was hatched-up to help increase company profits and is a place where customers, employees and market researchers can meet up. Here they work on improving existing products and brainstorm for future ones. Topics can be as minor as voting for a new Starbucks muffin flavor, or as significant as working out a company plan to print less paper. Essentially, participants get nothing out of this than reaffirmation that they're a loyal customer. The company exploits the information and makes a wicked profit.
Kindertrauma– Utilizes user-participation to create content for their site, and only makes petty cash from advertising revenues. Kindertrauma is a pop culture niche blog that asks readers what scared them as a child. As a reward for the trauma confessions, participant gets to see their submissions on the blog and read other stories. The site gives back more than it takes, as it hosts a free entertainment service, making only a little bit of money from GoogleAds.
So why do some people give their information away for free? Maybe it's just the humanitarian in us. In the article "Crowdsourcing the humanitarian impulse," Cindy Gallop, marketing executive for Zooomr says, "The single largest pool of untapped resource in this world is human good intentions that never translate into action."
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