Crowdsourcing is a technique where users are enabled to pose questions or ask for assistance in an expertise, eliciting responses/help from a wide pool of users. Not too long ago Amazon released their Mechanical Turk to allow users to crowdsource small tasks to other users for a micropayment. I thought it was interesting and that we would be seeing a lot more companies utilizing a similar model to elicit feedback, and that’s exactly what happened.

Take My Starbucks Idea or Dell’s IdeaStorm for example. They’ve been utilizing their user pool to make their products better and nip issues in the bud as they occur. There have been other analytics used as well to actually go where the conversations are happening rather than creating a gathering place. Having representatives of the company interject appropriately when necessary to help demystify or aid users with confusion point.

This post is more of a scrawling than anything else but it was prompted by the most recent crowdsource example I’ve seen by Herman Miller: ThoughtPile. They are posing questions periodically and eliciting responses from users. I like the visualization and playfulness of the experience.

If you’re looking for an easy extension to your brand that can give a great feedback loop consider some of the crowdsourcing examples.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 1:27 pm and is filed under scrawlings, social software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.