Crowdsourcing For Dummies

Give your business the edge with crowd-power! Crowdsourcing is an innovative way of outsourcing tasks, problems or requests to a group or community online. There are lots of ways business can use crowdsourcing to their advantage: be it crowdsourcing product ideas and development, design tasks, market research, testing, capturing or analyzing data, and even raising funds. It offers access to a wide pool of talent and ideas, and is an exciting way to engage the public with your business. Crowdsourcing For Dummies is your plain-English guide to making crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and open innovation work for you. It gives step-by-step advice on how to plan, start and manage a crowdsourcing project, where to crowdsource, how to find the perfect audience, how best to motivate your crowd, and tips for troubleshooting.

Give your business the edge with crowd-power!Crowdsourcing is an innovative way of outsourcing tasks, problems or requests to a group or community online. There are lots of ways business can use crowdsourcing to their advantage: be it crowdsourcing product ideas and development, design tasks, market research, testing, capturing or analyzing data, and even raising funds. It offers access to a wide pool of talent and ideas, and is an exciting way to engage the public with your business.Crowdsourcing For Dummies is your plain-English guide to making crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and open innovation work for you. It gives step-by-step advice on how to plan, start and manage a crowdsourcing project, where to crowdsource, how to find the perfect audience, how best to motivate your crowd, and tips for troubleshooting.

Introduction 1Part I: Understanding Crowdsourcing Basics 7Chapter 1: People Power: Getting a Feel for Crowdsourcing 9Chapter 2: Getting to Know the Forms of Crowdsourcing andCrowdmarkets 19Chapter 3: Infiltrating the Crowd 29Chapter 4: Joining the Crowdforce 43Part II: Looking at the Different Forms ofCrowdsourcing 61Chapter 5: Creating Crowdcontests 63Chapter 6: Raising Money with Crowdfunding 79Chapter 7: Making Use of Macrotasks 99Chapter 8: Managing with Microtasks 125Chapter 9: Combining the Intelligence of Self-Organised Crowds145Part III: Building Skill 161Chapter 10: Engaging the Crowd with Your Project 163Chapter 11: Instructing the Crowd 175Chapter 12: Crowdsourcing with Social Media 187Chapter 13: Picking Your Platform 203Chapter 14: Managing Your Crowd 221Chapter 15: Learning on the Job 241Part IV: Getting All You Can Get from the Crowd 257Chapter 16: Combining Microtasks and Preparing Workflow 259Chapter 17: Crowd Reporting: Using the Crowd to GatherInformation and News 273Chapter 18: Initiating Innovation 287Chapter 19: Preparing Your Organisation 309Part V: The Part of Tens 317Chapter 20: Following the Future of Crowdsourcing: Ten (Or So)Websites to Watch 319Chapter 21: Ten Best Practices to Adopt 329Chapter 22: Ten Success Stories 335Chapter 23: Ten Crowdsourcing Blunders to Avoid 343Index 353