Crowd Sourcing

Analytics
 Crowd Sourcing Analytics
• What Is Crowdsourcing?
• Crowdsourcing is the practice of utilizing the wisdom of a group for a
common goal. It is best applied when attempting to solve complex
problems in an innovative way or streamline intricate processes.
 Crowd Sourcing Analytics
• How Does Crowdsourcing Work?
• Crowdsourcing has become an important tool for businesses to leverage in a variety
of areas, including data collection, creating operational efficiencies, and general
problem-solving. It has allowed many companies to scale at an unprecedented rate,
to the point where the practice has revolutionized entire industries.
 Crowd Sourcing Analytics
• What Are the Benefits of Crowdsourcing?
• Crowdsourcing has a number of benefits that businesses can leverage to their advantage. Find out more
about why so many organizations are investing their resources into crowdsourcing.
• Increases Scalability
• Scaling is a difficult problem for any business to solve, particularly when it comes to
working on massive projects with inadequate resources at your disposal. However,
crowdsourcing provides an easy solution for scaling out any workforce by farming out
small portions of a project that can be completed by remote workers at any given time or
place. This flexibility is one of the top reasons businesses develop an interest in
crowdsourcing.
 Crowd Sourcing Analytics
• Fills Knowledge Gaps
• Unless a company is operating on a massive scale, most of them don't
staff all of the resources they need at any given time. Crowdsourcing
provides the ability to access people who have skill sets that are
unavailable within the company. This can be invaluable for projects or
problems that require specialized knowledge or skill sets that are scarce.
 Crowd Sourcing Analytics
• Accelerates Processes
• Crowdsourcing allows businesses to perform tasks more quickly than a
single employee. Breaking up a project into a collection of smaller pieces
and providing those pieces to a larger group of workers expedites the
completion of projects. Overall, crowdsourcing presents a more efficient
way to do work.
 Crowd Sourcing Analytics
• Reduces Operational Costs
• Crowdsourcing offers a cheaper way to complete projects. When a group of people
unite digitally to complete a task, businesses can bypass most of the costs typically
associated with operations. This includes the overhead costs of housing and paying
employees a full salary, as well as the costs that could be incurred from paying for
employees to learn new skills and more. Depending on the projects being
completed, faster turnaround times can also equate to increased profits.
 Crowd Sourcing Analytics
• Increases Consumer Engagement
• If a business chooses to seek out consumers in their crowdsourcing efforts, this can
result in an extraordinary level of consumer engagement. Most traditional
marketing media hold consumer attention for a short span of time. By asking
consumers to participate in solving a specific problem or provide much-coveted
data about their brand, the business is gaining valuable attention that many
companies pay big bucks to gain.
 Examples
• Open-Source Software
• One of the most common types of crowdsourcing comes in the form of
open-source software. Open-source development allows developers to
access the source code, permitting them to modify and improve the code
as they see fit. Ultimately, this allows many eyes to analyze the code and
utilize their unique skill sets to make it better.
 Examples
• Crowdfunding
• Many consumers have become accustomed to using crowdsourcing for
raising capital, a technique also called crowdfunding. This technique
allows anyone -- from an individual to a large company -- to engage
people who are interested in their ideas and raise capital without pitching
to large investors, banks, or other gatekeepers that could withhold
funding.
 Best Crowdsourcing Platforms

• While crowdsourcing can be done in a variety of different ways, most

businesses turn to an array of crowdsourcing platforms to access workers.
Some crowdsourcing platforms can also be used to help divide up projects
into micro-tasks. Finding the best crowdsourcing platform depends on
what sort of work the business needs to be completed. These are some of
the best crowdsourcing platforms for different kinds of tasks.
 Best Crowdsourcing Platforms

• For Micro-Tasks and Data Gathering: Amazon's Mechanical Turk

• For tasks like data entry, transcription, content creation, user studies, and
more, Amazon's Mechanical Turk offers the perfect solution. Workers
from around the globe log on to Mechanical Turk 24/7 to HITs, or "human
intelligence tasks." The site allows you to split your projects in micro-
tasks and can support a wide variety of project types
 Best Crowdsourcing Platforms

• For Creative Crowdsourcing: 99Designs

• There is a wide variety of creative crowdsourcing platforms out there that
can provide a number of different designs for logos, websites,
advertisements, product packaging, and more. 99Designs is one of the
most well-known for a reason. Pulling together designers from around the
world, 99Designs uses crowdsourcing to provide unique and affordable
creative services to companies both large and small
 Best Crowdsourcing Platforms

• For Crowdfunding: Kickstarter

• Crowdfunding has grown in popularity tremendously, so there are many reputable platforms to
choose from. One of the best known is Kickstarter. Kickstarter is geared primarily toward
creative projects such as music, art, film, and more.
• This crowdfunding platform offers reasonable fees for their services, making them stand out
among other crowdfunding platforms. Many Kickstarter campaigns have gone on to raise
thousands, and sometimes even millions, of dollars.
 Crowd Sourcing Analytics
• In October 2006, Netfl ix, an online DVD rental business, announced a
contest to create a new predictive model for recommending movies based
on past user ratings.
• The grand prize was $1,000,000! While this may seem like a PR gimmick,
it wasn ’t.
• Netfl ix already had an algorithm to solve the problem but thought there
was an opportunity to realize additional model “lift,” which would
translate to huge top-line revenue.
 Crowd Sourcing Analytics
• Crowdsourcing involves obtaining work, information, or opinions from a large
group of people who submit their data via the Internet, social media, and
smartphone apps. People involved in crowdsourcing sometimes work as paid
freelancers, while others perform small tasks on a voluntary basis.
• Crowdsourcing allows you to select the best result not from a single provider
but from a sea of talents. Results can also be delivered much quicker than
traditional or conventional methods since it is a form of
freelancing. Crowdsourcing can also improve the creative process and
enhance productivity.
 Crowd Sourcing Analytics
• Disadvantages of Crowdsourcing
• No confidentiality. This is the deadliest downfall of crowdsourcing. ...
• Poor quality entries. ...
• Wrong direction. ...
• Popularity misleads. ...
• Stolen or recycled names. ...
• Coming up empty. ...
• Derailment. ...
• Missing the best talent
 Why is crowdsourcing so popular?
• By turning to a large group of people for ideas and
solutions, crowdsourcing can generate a lot of benefits over internal
ideation processes. Not only can businesses get access to great ideas, but
they can also drive marketing buzz and engage their customers.
 Risks of Crowdsourcing
• The 3 Risks of Crowdsourcing — And How to Avoid Them
• Risk #1: Receiving Low-quality Work. Whether you
use crowdsourcing for development, design, content creation
or some other type of work, you are putting your faith in people that you
don't know, with unfamiliar backgrounds and skills. ...
• Risk #2: Turbulence in Your Business. ...
• Risk #3: Intellectual Property Right Infringement.
 Taking the Six Steps to
Successful Crowdsourcing
• Design the job and divide the labour.
• Write clear instructions.
• Choose a web platform to serve as your crowdmarket.
• Release the job and recruit the crowd.
• Listen to the crowd and manage the job.
• Assemble the work of the crowd and create the final product.
 How does Amazon use crowdsourcing?
• Amazon launched a new program, “Build It,” that in
a crowdsourcing scheme enables consumers to vote on which Alexa-
enabled products will be developed. ... If the concept reaches its pre-order
goal in 30 days, Amazon will build it and those pre-ordering over the 30-
day period receive the item at the discount price.
 Crowd Sourcing Analytics
• Netfl ix was an innovator in a space now being termed crowdsourcing .
• Crowdsourcing is a recognition that you can ’t possibly always have the
best and brightest internal people to solve all your big problems.
• By creating an open, competitive environment with clear rules and goals,
Netfl ix realized their objective and, yes, they did create a lot of buzz
about their organization in the process.
 Crowd Sourcing Analytics
• Crowdsourcing is a great way to capitalize on the resources that can build algorithms
and predictive models.
• Let ’s face it, you can’ t “grow” a Ph.D. (or big brain) overnight. It takes years of
learning and experience to get the knowledge to create algorithms and predictive
models.
• So crowd sourcing is a way to capitalize on the limited resources that are available in
the marketplace.
• It’ s often been said that competition brings out the best in us. We are all attracted to
contests; our passion for competing seems hardwired into our souls.
 Crowd Sourcing Analytics
• Kaggle describes itself as “an innovative solution for statistical/analytics
outsourcing.” That ’s a very formal way of saying that Kaggle manages
competitions among the world ’s best data scientists.
• Here’ s how it works: Corporations, governments, and research
laboratories are confronted with complex statistical challenges. They
describe the problems to Kaggle and provide data sets. Kaggle converts
the problems and the data into contests that are posted on its web site.
• The contests feature cash prizes ranging in value from $100 to $3 million.
 Crowd Sourcing Analytics
• Kaggle ’s clients range in size from tiny start-ups to multinational
corporations such as Ford Motor Company and government agencies such
as NASA.
• According to Anthony Goldbloom, Kaggle’ s founder and CEO, “The
idea is that someone comes to us with a problem, we put it up on our
website, and then people from all over the world can compete to see who
can produce the best solution.”
 Crowd Sourcing Analytics
• In essence, Kaggle has developed a remarkably effective global platform
for crowdsourcing thorny analytic problems. What’ s especially attractive
about Kaggle ’s approach is that it is truly a win-win scenario—
contestants get access to real-world data (that has been carefully
“anonymized” to eliminate privacy concerns) and prize sponsors reap the
benefi ts of the contestants’ creativity.
 Crowd Sourcing Analytics
• Crowdsourcing is a disruptive business model whose roots are in technology but is
extending beyond technology to other areas. There are various types of
crowdsourcing, such as crowd voting, crowd purchasing, wisdom of crowds,
crowd funding, and contests. Take for example:
• ■ 99designs.com/ , which does crowdsourcing of graphic design
• ■ agentanything.com/, which posts “missions” where agents vie for to run errands
• ■ 33needs.com/, which allows people to contribute to charitable programs that
make a social impact