Sourcing the Crowd
Today's audience isn't listening at all - it's participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.
-William Gibson, Award-winning Author(excerpt from Wired Magazine, July 2005)We live in a world where a wealth of high-quality amateur content is being produced and developed right alongside the industrial model. There is a shift in the traditional power structure whereby anyone with access to the Internet and an affinity for technology can produce and distribute a product or service that directly competes with you and your business. On-demand printing sites such as CafePress and Spreadshirt allow users to upload designs and open their own T-shirt and accessory stores completely free of cost. As Gibson noted, the audience is no longer content to stay in the role of receiver—today's audiences want, and in more and more cases expect, to directly contribute and participate.
Decreasing technology costs and the increasing ubiquity of inexpensive and specialized software have put previously inaccessible tools of professional creation directly into the hands of the consumer. Whereas once a musician needed to pay extraordinarily high fees for equipment and studio time, near professional-quality production tools such as Apple's GarageBand now come standard on new computers. The same goes for video and graphics editing software. That means more and more people are able to experiment with these once unavailable tools, and that in turn means more and more people are discovering innate talents that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Where crowdsourcing encourages participation and harnesses peer-production within a large dedicated community, it simply doesn't work if the crowd is too small. A group of 50 nonprofessional T-shirt designers is unlikely to come up with hit designs on a regular basis. If Threadless had started out expecting to select and print ten designs every week, it would have failed from the get-go. It had to start small and build not only its credibility, but also the crowd from which it sourced its designs.
What that means is, for mom-and-pop companies at least, crowdsourcing is unlikely to be a viable option. Without a vast community to use in soliciting responses, sustainable talent is a rarity. Even a novice will occasionally hit a hole-in-one on the golf course; just don't ask her to do it twice in a row. Realistically, crowdsourcing is best used in one of two ways: (1) as a one-off or (2) by larger companies, or companies with dedicated and/or talented communities.
Excerpt from: Juliette Powell
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