Weak Ties Contribution to Crowdsourcing - Case Study Example

WEAK TIES CONTRIBUTION TO CROWDSOURCING Student’s name Course & code Professor’s name University City Date Contents 1.0 Introduction 3 i.Voting Theory 3 ii.Compensation Scheme theory 4 iii.Trust Building Systems: Escrow and Buyer-Worker Rating theory 4 2.0 Case study 5 2.1 Coca-Cola Company 5 3.0 Impact of CrowdSourcuing in the Global Business World 6 3.1 Intermediary Model 6 3.2 Citizen Media Production Model 6 3.3 Digital goods sale model 6 3.4 Consumer Report Model 7 4.0 Pros and Cones of Crowdsourcing 9 4.1 Advantages of Crowdsourcing 9 4.1.1 Cost Effectiveness 9 4.1.2 Service Responsiveness 10 4.1.3 Quality and Market Reach 10 4.2 Disadvantages 10 5.0 Conclusion 11 6.0 Reference List 11 Weak Ties Contribution to Crowdsourcing 1.0 Introduction Taking advantage of the growing approach of social media technologies, companies and businesses have continually created innovative sourcing approach. Crowdsourcing, where businesses use the web to harness the efforts of the virtual crowds, has emerged as an effective business tool. Simply put, crowdsourcing has taken advantage of divergent technologies that have characterized social media technologies. Whereas crowdsourcing uses technology that enables online interaction of communities with similar interest, it is pointed out that closely connected individuals are important for a specific network. In fact, they offer less value to the network, since the individuals within the network probably know similar things and interest, however, wider networks –characterized by weak ties – create access to new networks and information. Essentially, if marketers want to extract wisdom from crowds, diversity is an imperative aspect and that this can be obtained from a wide network of weak ties. Daren Brabham has authored a range of important case studies as well as conceptual pieces that are non-profitable and government programs regarding crowdsourcing (Daren, 2011). His perception towards crowdsourcing is similar to his counterpart Alex Bruns (Daren, 2011).He focuses mainly on the innovation and problem-solving approach created through crowd sourcing. Understanding the effectiveness of crowd sourcing can be viewed under multiple theories; i. Voting Theory With the ever increasing organizations and corporations providing different services and goods has rendered the introduction of crowd voting. This can also be referred to as promotional election where it encompasses the reviews of products by the crowd as they express their feelings towards a certain product or services. For instance, Samuel Adams in 2012 employed the social networking, dubbed Samuel Adams Crowd Craft Project, to have the consumers vote to determine each aspect of beer was to be released in the market for the Southwest festival (Rutledge, 2012). Promotional elections are a sense of advertising products as well as enhancing a positive relationship between the consumer and the retailer. At the same time the consumer feels appreciated as it makes them feel that their views are valued (Castano, Ferrara, Genta and Montanelli, 2016). ii. Compensation Scheme theory Any incentive scheme in an organization or institution is an important element in a managerial control system. Financial and various rewards is vital motivator of a person inclusivity in the crowdsourcing transactions. A variety of rewards includes paper checks, royalty points, virtual money and gift cards. For instance, OhmyNews motivates reporters with a virtual “tip jar” filled in correspondence to the number of comments receives from the readers (Castano, Ferrara, Genta, and Montanelli, 2016.) iii. Trust Building Systems: Escrow and Buyer-Worker Rating theory Online business is full of untrustworthiness and risks because a workers prowess cannot be verified until the already given task is offered to the buyers. The workers are also in uncertainties since they don’t know whether they will be paid for the complete work. One way of minimizing these uncertainties could be market-driven buyer/ worker rating systems. These systems not only create a trust but also render premium prices in absentia of the buyer/seller. Escrows have also been commonly in use to help maximize secure financial transactions (Castano, Ferrara, Genta, and Montanelli, 2016). 2.0 Case study Businesses adopt this concept of crowdsourcing to increase their supporters and to drive businesses to the rest of the world. 2.1 Coca-Cola Company Coca-Cola faced a challenge of promoting their brands in a market that are valuing healthier drinks. It developed the ‘open happiness campaign’ as an approach to maintain relevance in the market. Coca-cola interacted with their audience through calling upon their customers’ hearts by uploading an inspiring Tippy Tap video and story. They also developed a mechanism where they would reach the customers interests by putting popular names on its bottles and cans. In 2013, the company based its campaigns on the slogan, ‘Open Happiness’, an open phrase that gave room for multiple initiatives (Schultz, 2016). The company used this tagline to involve their customers. It later launched three initiatives so as to add up the size of their market and global relevance for the next ten years. Such initiatives were ‘The Coke Zero Dance’, ‘The Super Bowl Polar Bears’ and ‘The Share a Coke’. To maintain and grow its global relevance the company used crowd sourcing into their market strategy. Although Coke is one of the most popular brands in the world, they understand that it is not all about the size of the audience but having the right audience. Using the effective market research, Coca-Cola was able to reach out to its audience and also through crowdsourcing; it created a real impact on this corporation. Coca-Cola is, however, closing down the campaign, to anticipate its subsequent replacement with a new global campaign dubbed “taste the Feeling.” Essentially, the strategy aims at putting the campaign at the center stage of consumers in seeking to win over other beverages. In major strategic change, it will incorporate a “one brand approach” that will consolidate multiple varieties such as Coke Zero and Diet Coke; as opposed to running multiple campaigns (Schultz 2016). 3.0 Impact of CrowdSourcuing in the Global Business World 3.1 Intermediary Model In this model, web users act as a virtual work force that trails the process of find, finish and earns through the web. They do this by searching the lists of Human Intelligence Tasks cited by the job seekers. They chose and completed the tasks and earned money. In this model, the problem-solving action is subcontracted to the online crowd, and the users finish the tasks by acting the role of innovative problem solvers like the engineers, doctors, scientists and the researchers (De Vreede, Nguyen, De Vreede, Boughzala, and Reiter-Palmon, 2013). 3.2 Citizen Media Production Model This model generates revenue through, TV programs, commercials; user generated news and then divides the profit with the media reporters equally. In this model, crowdsourcing media website does not supply or resell the paper to the online users rather it is a collaborative media context production platform. The news audience, therefore, is not passive consumers of the news produced, but active consumers of the news produced that day. They therefore earn some benefits for the content they contributed (Gatautis and Vitkauskaite, 2014). 3.3 Digital goods sale model The website is a place where it gets digital pictures all over the globe. These pictures are uploaded by the online community and sell them through the company-provided web platform. They are afterwards rewarded regarding the number of downloads the digital picture has. Community users have to pass a quality-review process as well as concur with copyright policies so as to become a member. Some community members make contracts with crowdsourcing website to examine the quality of new members. Photo tagging, photo caption and quality control are subcontracted to the community users. Market demand information is provided by the company so as to address the intellectual property and copyright issues (Halder, 2014.) 3.4 Consumer Report Model The social web technology has created product-recommendation social websites such as thisNet.com,Crowdstorm.com and ReeVoo.com where the users share their recommendations, reviews about products. This model capitalizes the social web by sourcing consumer reviews or essays on the products. A good example is the Epinions.com, which incites the consumers to participate in the product reviews through share income program that gives the best reviews five to ten times of the mediocre reviews on the product. In this model, the review process is subcontracted to online consumers who act the role of consumer reporters. Figure 1: Models of Crowdsourcing 4.0 Pros and Cones of Crowdsourcing 4.1 Advantages of Crowdsourcing Some of the advantages created by crowd sourcing, as an innovative approach, helps in outperforming traditional forms of the doing business as a result of the following advantages; 4.1.1 Cost Effectiveness Organizations can access knowledge at low cost. Simply put, it reduces the costs and money than hiring people, and so it saves the costs. The only required materials in crowdsourcing are the internet and a computer or a gadget that accepts the internet. With this, one can market his or her products to the rest of the world. Crowdsourcing engages clients and assists them in establishing loyalty to your brand. Facebook Translations, a translation initiative created to translate the powering Facebook websites, oversaw the engagement of viewers exceeding 300, 000 which was translated into 70 different languages at little or no cost (Villarroel, 2011). 4.1.2 Service Responsiveness As a result of communication and computing capabilities, crowds can work in effective ways and efficiently correct any errors that may exist. 4.1.3 Quality and Market Reach Crowdsourcing creates an unprecedented global reach through its inherent scale factor advantage. The contemporary business environment is typified by an increasingly large social websites that offer a larger outreach to a large number of users. Additionally, the quality created through the large crowds is considered to be of good quality. 4.2 Disadvantages Interestingly in the business environment, the main disadvantage mirror the main disadvantage; evidently, cheap labor implies less credible information, hence questions the credible output, in comparison to expensive professionals. More often than not, the crowdsourcing initiator has to manage a large scale of workers; where the management of old and new crowd members is increasingly complicated. 5.0 Conclusion Evidently, the existence of weak ties is imperative given the need to need to consolidate divergent interests. Weaker ties imply that different interests can be collectively enhanced to achieve effectiveness in information gathering. Crowdsourcing model description has been based on the virtual production platform and new media-enabled little subcontracting. With the illustrations of the models, there has been a comprehensive classification of crowdsourcing models and a description of the impact on the global business world. Summarily, crowdsourcing dwells on the potential of a productive crowd in the cyberspace to achieve the business goals assuming that crowds’ collective intelligence prevails that of a limited group of professionals (Aitamurto, 2014). 6.0 Reference List Aitamurto, T., 2014, Crowdsourcing for democracy: A new era in policy-making. Committee for the Future, Parliament of Finland. Castano, S., Ferrara, A., Genta, L., and Montanelli, S., 2016, ‘Combining crowd consensus and user trustworthiness for managing collective tasks’, Future Generation Computer Systems, vol. 54, pp.378-388. Castano, S., Ferrara, A., Genta, L. and Montanelli, S., 2016, A framework for policy crowdsourcing. Chiu, C.M., Liang, T.P. and Turban, E., 2014, ‘What can crowdsourcing do for decision support?  Decision Support Systems, vol. 65, pp.40-49. De Vreede, T., Nguyen, C., De Vreede, G.J., Boughzala, I., Oh, O. and Reiter-Palmon, R., 2013, ‘A theoretical model of user engagement in crowdsourcing’, In Collaboration and Technology (pp. 94-109). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Daren, B. (2011). Crowdsourcing: A Model for Leveraging Online Communities, In The Routledge Handbook of Participatory Cultures Edited by Aaron Delwiche & Jennifer Henderson Gatautis, R., and Vitkauskaite, E., 2014, ‘Crowdsourcing application In marketing activities’, Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 110, pp.1243-1250. Halder, B., 2014, ‘Evolution of crowdsourcing: potential data protection, privacy and security concerns under the new media age,’  Revista Democracia Digital e Governo Eletrônico, vol. 10, pp.377-393. Schults, E. 2016, ‘Coke Replaces 'Open Happiness' With 'Taste the Feeling' in Major Strategic Shift’, Advertising Age . viewed 18th April 2016, < http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/coke-debuts-taste-feeling-campaign-strategic-shift/302184/>. Rutledge, K. 2012, ‘Samuel Adams Taps Social Networks To Create A New Brew’, viewed 18th April 2016, . Villarroel, Andrei J. (2011), ‘Strategic Crowdsourcing: The Emergence of Online Distributed Innovation’, Leading Open Innovation. MIT Press. Read More