#mda20009 week8

[alif615]

Week 8: Crowdsourcing & crowdfunding

What is Crowdsourcing? 

Crowdsourcing is the process of gathering work, information, or opinions from a large group of people via the Internet, social media, or smartphone apps. Crowdsourcing participants work as paid freelancers in some cases, while others perform small tasks for free. Traffic apps, for example, encourage drivers to report accidents and other road incidents so that app users can get real-time updates (Hargrave 2019). 

Two great examples provided by Kearns (2015) are:

1. Waze is one of the most successful crowd-sourced start-ups. It's an app that lets users report traffic jams and gives them automatic directions for the best route to take. Waze gathers data by measuring drivers' speeds to determine traffic jams and asking users to report road closures. It's a fantastic app that demonstrates how a dedicated crowd can sometimes be all a company requires.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TyhmaQt3ZU

2. McDonald's decided to give their customers free rein in 2014, allowing them to submit ideas for new burgers they'd like to see in stores. They could design their ideal burgers online and have the rest of the country vote on which ones were the best. In Germany, creators were also encouraged to launch their own campaigns, which included viral videos and other valuable content marketing, all of which came at no cost to McDonald's. McDonald's released the burgers weekly after the winners were announced, along with a picture and brief bio of the creator.

In an era filled with fake news, what effect can this have on crowdsourced information?

Reviews are also a good example of crowdsourcing and reviews done by the public under companies are an important way for customers to choose a certain company they want their work to be done by. Unfair and negative reviews can have a negative impact on sales. Unfairly positive reviews, on the other hand, are a problem that can lead to buyer's remorse.

Michael and Diana, a retired couple from southwest London, needed a roofer to repair their leaking roof. They used RatedPeople to find a good builder and paid him £2,000 to complete the job. A week later, the roof began to leak again. He refused to come back and finish it properly. A subsequent survey revealed that he had exacerbated the problem. The couple later discovered that the person they had chosen had subcontracted the work to someone else without their knowledge, implying that the reviews they had read did not apply to the person who had visited their home.

According to Giorgos Zervas, an assistant professor of marketing at Boston University, the number of suspicious reviews has been increasing. Mr Zervas stated, "Reviews are becoming a more integral part of consumer decision-making. I believe algorithms can only detect fake reviews to a certain extent." In the end, creating a legitimate-looking fake review isn't difficult, and review fraudsters are becoming more sophisticated." (Gordon 2014).

Crowdfunding - Small money making big changes : 

Crowdfunding is the practice of raising small amounts of money from a large number of people to fund a project or venture. Similar concepts can also be implemented through mail-order subscriptions, benefit events, and other methods. Crowdfunding is a type of alternative finance and crowdsourcing.

Examples of successful crowdfunding are : 

Since 2009, Kickstarter has been a rewards-based donation platform that has assisted businesses in raising funds. More than $5 billion has been raised for more than 182,000 projects thanks to it. The ease of use of Kickstarter is one of the reasons for its success. You choose a monetary goal and a time frame for achieving it, then tell the story of your campaign (Business News Daily Staff 2021). 

The Pebble E-Paper Watch is famous for being Kickstarter's breakout success, raising $10,266,845 in 37 days. Backers of the Pebble watch, one of the first affordable smartwatches on the market, jumped at the chance to be among the first to own one. Pebble started shipping smartwatches 10 months after their Kickstarter campaign ended (Business News Daily Staff 2021).  

In Conclusion:

Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding are amazing ways for things to move forward. Such as crowdsourcing provides information from a large number of people which helps to analyze information but the same way fake crowdsourced news will cause problems of the same level. Crowdfunding is a great way for small companies to get funds and get the push they need to start, but misuse of crowdfunding is also present which might cause trust issues among people to further help in the future.

References : 

Hargrave,M (2019), Crowdsourcing, Investopedia, viewed 1 May 2021 <https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/crowdsourcing.asp>.

Kearns,K (2015), 9 Great Examples Of Crowding In The Age Of Empowered Consumers, TYB, viewed 2 May 2021 <https://tweakyourbiz.com/marketing/9-great-examples-crowdsourcing-age-empowered-consumers>.

Johnson,S (2021), What Is Crowdfunding?, Business News Daily, viewed 1 May 20121 <https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/4134-what-is-crowdfunding.html>.

Schroter.W (2014), Top 10 Business Crowding Campaigns Of All Time, Forbes, viewed 2 2021 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/wilschroter/2014/04/16/top-10-business-crowdfunding-campaigns-of-all-time/?sh=7932c65f3e9f>.

Gordon.O (2014), Keeping Crowdsourcing Honest: Can We Trust The Reviewa? , BBC, viewed 2 May 2021 <https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26182642>.

[aquilaamber]

“CROWDSOURCING & CROWDFUNDING”

Crowdsourcing can be defined as “involves obtaining work, information, or opinions from a large group of people who submit their data via the Internet, social media, and smartphone apps”, whereas, crowdfunding can be defined as “a financing method that involves funding a project with relatively modest contributions from a large group of individuals, rather than seeking substantial sums from a small number of investors”.

#PULANGMENGUNDI

In times of need, social media movement like #pulangmengundi can benefit the communities. In 2018, Malaysia held its 14th general election, which arises a lot of issues. Its unusual voting day, which is on a weekday and the costs of flight suddenly began to climb and even sold out when there are many demands from the voters living outside of their hometown to come back to vote. Then users of Twitter started the #UndiRabu (Wednesday Vote) which is founded by the volunteers and they started to collect from the public and distributing it the people in need to come back home to vote. Their primary target was MYR50,000, but then managed to raise it to MYR65,000 in just a day upon launching. In two weeks, the funds reached MYR195,000 and stopped collecting after that. This has such a big impact on the voting day, which the opposition won for the first time in history Malaysia (Chia & Augustin 2019). Social media movements like #pulangmengundi does benefit the communities through crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, which also made a big impact on the political side because the people want a change in the government and they made it happened.

EFFECTS OF CROWDSOURCED INFORMATION

In an era filled with fake news, the effect on crowdsourced information is that it could be working well if crowdsourced judgements are implemented correctly. A new study shows that the quality of new sources can effectively disregard false new stories and other kinds of information by crowdsourced judgements. In recent years, false new stories have grown online, and Facebook has given them more chances to do it, which in return faces criticism and backlash for it (Dizikes 2019). Although crowdsourced judgements are still being studied to prevent more fake news, the studies have shown good effect on preventing fake news. When there are so many fake news going around, something should be done!

CROWDSOURCING IN FUTURE!

In my opinion, crowdsourcing can overtake traditional funding mechanisms for the creative industries. The reason why I said this is because most people has already been crowdsourced and people are going online most of time. Giving their information online with or without their knowledge. This will then be taken advantage of the organizations that will collect their data and use it for their purpose. People are relying on technology more than ever today and in the future.

References:

Hargrave, M 2019, Crowdsourcing, Investopedia, viewed 2 November 2019 <https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/crowdsourcing.asp>.

Rouse, M 2012, crowdfunding, Tech Target, viewed 2 November 2019 <https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/crowdfunding>.

Chia, J & Augustin, D 2019, Malaysians Prepare to #PulangMengundi, New Naratif, viewed 2 November 2019 < https://newnaratif.com/journalism/malaysians-prepare-pulangmengundi/>.

Dizikes, P 2019, Could this be the solution to stop the spread of fake news?, World Economic Forum, viewed 2 November 2019 < https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/want-to-squelch-fake-news-let-the-readers-take-charge>.

[omgsocialmediastudentme]

Week 8: Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding

Social network sites have become an integral part of how information is being spread about a certain event or a disaster. It is a platform for information transfer, communication, reaction and other forms of action.

What is Crowdsourcing?

It is a term that has been coined by Jeff Howe in Wired Magazine 2006. It is the practice of gaining information on something by enlisting the services of a large crowd of people this can be either paid or unpaid and through the use of internet (What is Crowdsourcing? 2019).

Now that we know what crowd sourcing is let’s talk about some of the advantages of crowdsourcing. Market research is very important in all life-cycle phases of a product, it provides a higher probability of success. In addition, it saves time and money because most of it is done digitally so there is no need to bring people together to a same location. Moreover, it is a way to build up customer contacts and collect data nowadays the attention span of people is very low. So, to be able to capture a person’s attention and be able to maintain it is critical with traditional advertising this is not possible, but it has been found that they do focus on an idea or a product. However, everything is not rainbow and sunshine when it comes to crowdsourcing there is always the danger of manipulation in the data such as a competitor may give a false feedback on a certain product to influence the data negatively. It should be noted that crowdsourcing doesn’t only influence only a certain form of company.

It also helps in Journalism it provided the dispersed point of view this can be through the use of mobile camera footage, YouTube and other video sharing platforms not only that but also through the personal social networks. People are no longer reliant on official channels for information they have started to move on to crowd-sourced info due to the faster transfer of information.

Crowdfunding

Is an extension to crowdfunding. As described by the quote

“grassroots [creative] projects are funded by the masses through websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo” (Bennett, Chin & Jones, 2015).

It should be noted that the meaning of Crowdfunding means differently to different people. Non-profits usually use it gather donation. A part of crowdfunding is peer-to-peer fundraising this is where the crowdfunding it led by the donors itself. It has also been seen that it is used by individuals to use crowdfunding to raise money to solve personal tragedy. In addition, it has been utilized by public institutions to increase their funds. However, humans being humans they find a way to twist something good there are cases where the project developers/makers have duped the backers by not delivering the product or delivering a cheap product than the one that was promised. Moreover, celebrities and movie studio may use it to exploit their fans and audience.

Reference:

Capati, M 2015, 5 Crowdsourced News Platforms Shaping The Future of Journalism and Reporting - Crowdsourcing Week, viewed 2 June, 2019, <https://crowdsourcingweek.com/blog/5-crowdsourced-news-platforms/>.

Gershen-Siegel, J 2019, Perpetrators of Crowdfunding Fraud Can't Hide From The Law Forever, viewed 6 June, 2019, <https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/329995>.

Shoemaker, N 2015, 5 Examples of How Crowdfunding Can Go Wrong, viewed 2 June, 2019, <https://www.cheatsheet.com/technology/5-kickstarter-and-indiegogo-crowdfunding-pitfalls.html/>.

Thieringer, J 2019, How smart brands push innovation, viewed 2 June, 2019, <https://www.ispo.com/en/markets/id_79709436/crowdsourcing-pros-and-cons-and-how-you-can-profit-from-it.html>.

Thorpe, D 2018, What Is Crowdfunding?, viewed 2 June, 2019, <https://www.forbes.com/sites/devinthorpe/2018/06/25/what-is-crowdfunding/#731967765c5d>.

What is Crowdsourcing? | Crowdsourcing Week, viewed 2 June, 2019, <https://crowdsourcingweek.com/what-is-crowdsourcing/>.