Crowdsourcing: What's My Motivation?
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Editor's Note: Apologies for the long absence. I've been moving! There's still plenty of work to be done on the new apartment; at least we're starting to settle in a bit now, and I have internet again (hard to believe how much I missed it). So, back to work...
Motivating collective creativity among a group of loosely connected individuals with a shared interest requires more than just an offer of prize money. Brands can harness social and personal desires to inspire crowds to come together for collaborative endeavors.
Daren C. Brabham is a PhD candidate who does research on crowdsourcing. A few weeks ago I came across this paper (PDF) he wrote about why Threadless members participate. (I'm embarassed to admit I can't remember where I found this. Please pipe up in the comments if you were the person who passed me this link.)
Daren interviewed 17 members who participate on Threadless in different ways and for different reasons. He found that across this spectrum, there were a few main themes for why members participated: to make money, to possibly get freelance design work, to get better at designing, because they liked the community, and eventually because they get addicted to participating.
These themes have strong implications for the many brands who aspire to get their fans to collaborate with the brand on some kind of collective creative endeavor.
First off, brands need to acknowledge that their fans need motivation in general. They're not waiting around for an opportunity to be creative. They don't need you for that. If you're going to go ahead anyway, then be sure to design the experience to deliver as many of the potential motivations as you possibly can.
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Motivating collective creativity among a group of loosely connected individuals with a shared interest requires more than just an offer of prize money. Brands can harness social and personal desires to inspire crowds to come together for collaborative endeavors.
Daren C. Brabham is a PhD candidate who does research on crowdsourcing. A few weeks ago I came across this paper (PDF) he wrote about why Threadless members participate. (I'm embarassed to admit I can't remember where I found this. Please pipe up in the comments if you were the person who passed me this link.)
Daren interviewed 17 members who participate on Threadless in different ways and for different reasons. He found that across this spectrum, there were a few main themes for why members participated: to make money, to possibly get freelance design work, to get better at designing, because they liked the community, and eventually because they get addicted to participating.
These themes have strong implications for the many brands who aspire to get their fans to collaborate with the brand on some kind of collective creative endeavor.
First off, brands need to acknowledge that their fans need motivation in general. They're not waiting around for an opportunity to be creative. They don't need you for that. If you're going to go ahead anyway, then be sure to design the experience to deliver as many of the potential motivations as you possibly can.
1 Comments:
Great post, Mike (and welcome back!).
We've done a lot of this analysis in our attempt to build a vibrant crowdsourcing creative platform at Poptent.net. It's good to see our notions backed up by research. Thanks for sharing!
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