The Pros And Cons Of Crowdsourcing

A well-implemented crowdsourcing strategy has the potential to be incredibly

rewarding for a brand, but that doesn’t mean that things can’t go wrong. As

with many marketing tactics, there are several well-defined pros and cons.

Some of the opportunities and challenges of crowdsourcing when it comes to

brands and agencies are:

PROS:

·         Handing over the ownership of your brand encourages consumer involvement.

·         Inter-disciplinary collaboration brings fresh input.

·         Individuals have opportunities and connections that did not exist before.

·         Problems can be explored at a low cost and often very quickly.

·         Often, a client pays for results, and only for what is used.

·         The organisation can tap a wider range of talent and brainpower which may not be present within its own resources.

·         Organisations can gain valuable insight into the desires of their customers.

CONS:

·         Many clients have no agency guidance or contribution towards a viable strategy and in some cases, have very little control over production value, especially if the end result of the project is completed or finished work.

·         When it comes to spec work, as opposed to merely an idea, the risk/ reward ratio is fairly high. Not only is this taking advantage of an individual’s efforts, but it can lead to work of a lesser quality.

·         Legal issues are often overlooked and the IP of an individual’s work is disregarded with no written contracts, nondisclosure agreements, employee agreements or agreeable terms with crowdsourced employees.

·         The crowd’s reliability can be somewhat altered by the Internet. As an example, many articles on Wikipedia may be of a high quality and edited by multiple people, thereby taking advantage of the crowd’s collective wisdom. Other articles can be maintained by a single editor with questionable ethics and opinions. As a result, articles, may be incorrectly assumed to be reliable.

·         Additional costs may be needed to bring a project to an acceptable conclusion.

·         A crowdsourced project may fail due to the lack of financial motivation or reward. As a consequence, a project may be subjected to fewer participants, lower quality of work, lack of personal interest, global language barriers or difficulty managing a large-scale crowdsourced project.

A crowdsourcer may have difficulties maintaining a working relationship with the community throughout the duration of a project. A danger is that some crowdsourced employees might feel a brand has taken advantage of their time or skills.