Crowd sourcing in Advertising:

Idea generationAny company, be it large or small, goes through challenges at every stage. To beat these challenges, they need quick minds with an essence of innovation. Looking at the number of geniuses who do not get placed in well to do firms but have a zeal for that work, we believe they can contribute to this. The company can create a campaign around their challenge. For eg. Coke can start a campaign What is true happiness for you? and from the responses they get from people, the best ideas can be picked for their next marketing campaign. Similarly if an IT company faces a technical problem, it can create a campaign where all technology enthusiasts can give suggestions to solve the problem. This crowd sourced data can be applied by the company in solving the problem.By doing this, companies will be able get ideas from outside the four walls of their company and skilled people will be able to utilise their knowledge.Cases where brands are using idea generation via crowd sourcing to improve their businesses-1. Starbucks- My Starbucks IdeaThe company uses this as a hub where consumers can share their ideas related to the Starbucks brand, like- products, in-store experience and brand involvement.As an example, below is a screenshot of an entry made by a community member making a suggestion that Starbucks bring back old blends of coffee.

To sustain the level of engagement via the platform, Starbucks rewards community members for their ideas with points that are accumulated and listed on the leader board as below-

An interesting section on this site is Ideas in Action. The section provides a listing of ideas that community members submitted and their status in regards of being implemented by the coffee house chain.Below is the list of ideas given by community members. The ideas with a check mark against them are the ones liked by Starbucks which they have decided to launch in some of their stores.

2. LegoAs a part of collecting ideas for crowdsourcing, Lego has a dedicated site for fans and customers to contribute their ideas for product development.Other users vote for their favourite idea, explaining the reason for liking it and also state how much they will be willing to pay for it.If more than 10,000 people support the idea, then it goes to the official Lego review board who decide whether or not to put it into production.

3. DellDell has a unique and dedicated site called www.ideastorm.com where it invites ideas from its customers. Below is a snapshot of the site. Dell claims that there have been more than 20,000 ideas submitted to its IdeaStorm site, attracting more than 740,000 votes and 100,000 comments. Out of those, more than 550 of those ideas have been turned into reality.

Below is a glimpse of the ideas submitted by customers and the ones implemented.

Besides this, Dell also has a column for storm sessions where people can interact and discuss ideas. Discussions are focussed on a dedicated topic and are open for a limited time. Below is a snapshot of the storm session page.

4. Pepsi Co LaysWhen Lays wanted to come up with a new flavour of potato chips, it launched a Do us a flavour campaign asking its Facebook page followers for ideas. The person with the best idea, as chosen by Lays received a $1 million as a prize. Users were asked to name the flavour, pick the ingredients and tell their inspiration.

Crowd sourcing in Journalism:

Crowdsourcing can be described narrowly as efforts by journalists toaskthe public to provide information or actual content. Create platforms wherein you engage the people with news. Rather than just publishing events media can interact with people online via twitter and Facebook, only then people would be willing to help with news. People can share news with the media via a common platform; the channel can check for its authenticity and can use it for publishing. However, credits should be given to the people. For this, it is important to create a community and engage people regularly so that they share news regularly .Channels like Twitter and Facebook can be of utmost importance for this purpose as nowadays everyone is interested in live news and it is the future of journalism. How it is done?Exhibit below shows the impact crowdsourcing is having at every stage of the news process.

Crowdsourcing is transforming journalism in ways that news is produced, distributed and used. The ongoing struggle of news organizations to adapt to the online world is forcing them to turn to utilize crowdsourcing (and crowd funding to some extent) in their production process. Exhibit above shows the impact crowdsourcing is having at every stage of the news process.Crowdsourcing is transforming journalism in ways that news is produced, distributed and used. The ongoing struggle of news organizations to adapt to the online world is forcing them to turn to utilize crowdsourcing (and crowd funding to some extent) in their production process. Examples:a. In 2011 the Pulitzer Foundation modified its rules, specifically in the breaking news category, to emphasize the importance of real-time reporting (in other words, its not enough to save the news for the next days paper). Following these changes, the staffs of Denver Post was awarded the Pulitzer last year for its coverage of the Aurora, Colo., shootings coverage in which a crowd sourcing tool called Storify played a role. (Exhibit 2) Storify is building the story layer on top of the social networks, to create a new media format that is interactive, dynamic and social. Journalists can turn to Storify to curate the relevant social content from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram etc. for any topic of their choice.

b. Local citizens, armed with a mobile phone, can assist reporters working on breaking news with real time images of the event. One company in particular, Scoop shot is leading the charge on that front. Its an app that helps phone photographers easily sell their images to news organizations. The company is encouraging citizen journalism and is enabling local citizens play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing, and disseminating news and information. For example, reporters turned to Scoopshot to capture the real time images from the anti-government protests in Ukraine last month (Exhibit 3). The task received 84 submissions for the request within hours of the request.

The networked journalism of the digital age is not a threat to the independence and quality of professional journalism. There will always remain the need for sense-makingfor a professional processing and understanding of information. Crowdsourcing has the potential to elevate the profession of journalism to new levels of quality and autonomy.Crowd Sourcing in Healthcare:

We can collect the data about the doctors residing in each area from various social networking sites and then can make groups of doctor for each area so that during the emergency situation at odd timings those doctors can be contacted for immediate first aid and instant treatment. We can also ask other doctors to join the groups whom information is not available to us through networking sites to help the people. This will act as a private service by the doctors to the patients for which doctors can charge their fees individually if they are not using hospital services for the same.Users: For the aged people or people having sickness of long duration who cannot stay always in hospital or near to a hospital can use this app.How to do it ?For collecting the data from social networking sites, we can use the social communities that exist on these sites to make doctors and professionals aware about the motive and can ask them to become member of our service by providing a little bit of their personal data. For Example: DoctorsHangout.com is a facebook community.

Similarly we can gather the information about the doctors from the LinkedIn social networking sites. For example:

The concept of crowdsourcing is difficult to apply when it comes to today's patient care standards. Protected health information must be handled with care. It can't be blasted publicly on the Internet for the entire world to read and share. However, if patient information could be shared and discussed in a protected online environmentwith a group of medical professionals, then perhaps the concept of crowdsourcing in healthcare for the purpose of treatment could be realized.Crowdsourcingisn't the same as visiting different physicians to get a second or third opinion. The patient would be getting multiple opinions by crowdsourcing. The participating physicians and medical professionals would either agree or disagree with the opinions voiced by other healthcare providers. These virtual votes would feed the algorithm that would make diagnostic and treatment decisions for each patient.Other platforms likeCrowdMed make the process of unraveling a medical mystery similar to a team sport where each clinician is looking for clues and asking questions to assign the correct diagnosis. The collective brainpower of thousands of trained medical professionals could shorten the time it takes to accurately assign a medical diagnosis, especially for patients with rare diseases and conditions. Most people would not know if they have a rare or unusual disease unless they have already spent considerable time seeking multiple medical opinions and traveling around the country to see different specialists.Reimbursement?Physicians expect to get reimbursed for the time they spend diagnosing and treating patients. Whether they review a patient's chart, examine radiology test results, or otherwise examine a patient, physicians expect some form of reimbursement. The simplest method would be to provide direct payment in the form of cash for physicians to contribute their opinion to a crowdsourcing platform, but the problem with this idea is that most patients fall back on their insurance plan to cover the bulk of their medical expenses. Although some interesting reimbursement models are available for patients who are able to pay cash, this only targets a small percentage of the population.