What is Crowd Sourcing?

• Businesses of today spend billions of dollars to maintain their turf or domain, maintain their name or stronghold in the public eye.
• Companies are spending bulk of the money on recruitment, marketing, advertisements and promotions.
• Companies or businesses find themselves sandwiched between providing quality of products or service.
• Employing cost effective measures to not only create brand awareness but to learn the new trends in the market.
• This led to the rise of outsourcing companies that allowed many of the businesses to concentrate on production or business development.
• Companies giving all responsibilities to a 3rd party to take care of the customer service, after-sales service, data mining and gathering.
• Times are changing and Businesses of today are looking for more cost effective measures to get their work done in the quickest possible time-frame. This has led to something new in the market – Crowd-sourcing.

Benefits of Crowd Sourcing

The internet is no more a tool of knowledge but an even more powerful tool of connecting like-minded people for a common cause.

For example, if a mobile phone company wants to know what new feature the public wants to have on their phones, the company will have to conduct a survey with a predefined amount of people which would require adequate amount of research and budgetary control.

However, if the company approached a survey company, a 3rd party to conduct the survey, this will prove cost effective. There are numerous survey sites in the internet that provides the option to individuals to complete day to day surveys and earn money out of it.

This proves beneficial as the company not only receives valuable ideas and feedback from the public but involves a sizable amount of people to help in the business development and remuneration the public for it.

This is the power of crowdsourcing and it has proved successful in avenues like data entry, surveys, call monitoring, research, product reviews etc.

Nowadays, with a lot of people looking for options to earn extra income, work from home jobs are on the rise but the question is that how many of them are trustworthy.

Crowdsourcing is definitely here to stay because

1. It is new source of income for millions of people around the world.
2. All it takes is a bit of research from us to find the most trusted and suitable one.

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon mechanical turk or mTurk is one of Amazon’s recent initiatives in the field of crowdsourcing.

It aims at allowing individuals or businesses to outsource their process or jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform the task virtually.

It functions with the believe that even with technology advancing at a fast pace, there are still some processes or work that require manpower and human intellect.

Things like content development and moderation, data reduplication and research requires a sizable amount of workforce which would be time consuming and costly in terms of recruitment for businesses.

Therefore, mTurk through its simplified website and application allows businesses to list their job or process along with the desired requirements

This application forms as a mediator bringing in the required number of people with the desired skills to work on the process.

This proves beneficial as :-

• It guarantees efficiency as the work is evenly distributed among a sizable population resulting in a quick turnaround time along with quality of work.
• For the individuals performing the task, it guarantees flexibility as they can work on the task anytime of the day or night.
• Every individual gets paid out for sure because Amazon is a trusted source.
• For businesses, it is cost effective measures as they do not have to spend a lot on up-scaling and recruitment.