A Link-Tastic Article on Crowdsourcing for Business

I was inspired by this article in the New York Times about crowdsourcing. They mention Wikipedia and Linux, two semi-non-profit type organizations. I was curious how businesses owners can and have made it work for them.

First, to define: "Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. Problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions." Wikipedia

Seth Godin talks about a "tribe" or a group of people who are excited about your product and want to connect (not sure how to create a tribe? Start a blog, get on twitter, engage in person). Why not use that group of people already listening to you and see what they'd like to see.

Here are a few popular examples of for-profit businesses using the concept of crowdsourcing:

• Apple - Oh the iPhone. Any shmo can make an app. It's juried for quality, and apple uses the pure VOLUME of applications created as an incredible marketing campaign to basically say to the consumer "Our phone can do anything". Thank goodness these guys have a huge fantanic customer base because they are pimping those apps out without so much as a credit.
  
• Threadless - A retail T-shirt company that allows you to vote on T-shirts submitted by users just like you. At the end, the company has new product, and the user feels connected to the product. The trick here is that it's regulated by the company to reduce the overall "crap factor".
  
• iStockPhoto - A retail stock photo company, started by a collection of graphic designers desperate for affordable stock photography, users submit their photos to a Gallery that can be purchased by other users. There is a juried process to ensure quality, so once again the "crap factor" is reduced tremendously.
• YouTube - Free online videos...the content created by the users to be watched by the users. This unfortunately has little to no regulation which basically increases their overall volume of content but does nothing to assure quality outside of companies patrolling for copyright infringement or the occasional decency remove. High "crap factor".

So, what can we learn from these crowdsourcing examples?

1. You can make money crowdsourcing (also interesting).
   
2. You need to regulate the masses. There's a reason the government doesn't let us vote.
3. Some of your users are super-duper smart.
   
4. When you're marketing, or creating products, talk the people who are really going to buying your product. They know what they want.