Working with Crowds and Learning the Loops

In today’s readings the one topic that stuck out the most to me is crowdsourcing. What is crowdsurcing you may ask? Crowdsourcing is the process of organizing many people to participate in a joint project. Now lets look at the different types of crowdsourcing:

• Crowd Wisdom- a group of people working together is better than just one.
• Crowd creation- crowds can create original works of knowledge or art.
• Crowd voting- crowds love to vote on their favorite things like ideas, artwork, essays, and people.
• Crowd funding- this category taps the collective pocketbook, encouraging groups to fund an effort that benefits many people.

Crowds can be hard to work with, however once you find your crowd you have to understand how to use them. You don’t want the task to be to large this will make individuals become uninterested in the task. At the same time you don’t want to make the task to be to simple because this can have the same affect as the task being to large, you have to find the right project that is in the middle not to simple but not to hard.

When thinking of examples of crowdsourcing I remembered a project that I had seen that was really cool called the Johnny Cash Project. What they do is artist go to a website, johnnycashproject.com and they make a portrait of Cash and then all the pictures are put together and made into frames and the frames were created into a music video of Cash’s song “Ain’t No Grave” so check it out real cool way of using crowdsourcing to pay tribute to a grate musician.  

Now lets take a look at the next step, microplanning this is a tool that is used when crowdsourcing that allows you to make the most of your crowd. Microplanning has benefits such as:

1. Creating buy-in for efforts sooner by including larger numbers of people in an unfolding implementation process
2. Unhooking organizations from needing all of the answers before they can get started
3. Reducing risk by focusing on short strategic bursts of activity that can be altered in real time and scaled without huge financial expenditures.

Now we have to learn the loops of social media, here we are talking about the loops. Here you will be tracking the results of your project in real time and analyzing the results. When an organization is learning the loops of social media they must first think about what they want to learn. To do that they should start here:

• Picking a specific narrow topic
• Designing low-cost, low-risk experiments
• Articulating key learning questions

Now that the organization has considered these issues they will be ready to begin watching how social media is working for a particular effort they are working on. I feel that the social media tools discussed in these chapters is information that could be helpful to organizations of any size.