Crowdsourcing

What does crowdsourcing mean?

Crowdsourcing on social media refers to the practice of soliciting ideas and solutions from your audience to collectively solve a problem, gather information or improve a product. Effectively done, crowdsourcing can help entrepreneurs, marketers, content creators and influencers to fine-tune their offerings and optimize their customer service, product development and marketing. 

Crowdsourcing offers many benefits, such as: 

• Customer insights: Crowdsourcing is a powerful mechanism to gather unique customer perspectives that data analytics tools might miss. 
• Product improvement: Gathering and implementing real-time customer feedback enables alignment of your product/service with real pain points and needs. 
• Proactive customer service: Crowdsourcing yields insights into customers’ needs and pain points, allowing you to devise solutions proactively. 

“The crowd” in crowdsourcing typically comprises your followers, customers and stakeholders connected with you on various social media platforms. You incentivize them to share ideas by holding giveaways, polls and contests. 

Crowdsourcing examples to inspire you

Meaning Alignment Institute (MAI): MAI is a research institute dedicated to the cause of finding alignment between humans and AI. In 2023, it was contracted by leading generative AI brand, OpenAI, to test a new more democratic way of deciding which rules should guide AI systems. To validate its methods and findings, MAI crowdsourced over 500 online participants to talk to an AI chatbot, offering guidance on sensitive topics like abortion and parenting, which enabled MAI to plot AI’s answers on a “moral graph.” OpenAI used these moral graphs to train its GenAI models. Thanks to crowdsourcing, MAI completed the experiment within 3 months, attaining a speed and scale unfathomable through traditional methods. 

Starbucks: Starbucks is actively engaged with crowdsourcing ideas from customers and employees alike on platforms like Instagram and X. The heady cocktail of market research and social media experiments has made Starbucks into an iconic brand upholding customer-centricity.