I am interested to know if anyone has used crowdsourcing for anything, and if you were pleased with results.

If not do you think you would? My last boss was big on the concept for a new logo design, but all my research pointed to the fact that a good designer would cost as much as a traditional designer. That swayed him.

To be fair,  I have heard of successful  tech-related and idea competitions, and of course open source code is a variation in a sense.

@devanianjali I understand the value is in the competiton, which is theoretically how quality is managed. One issue in logo design that seemed to crop up was lack of originality.

Other than that I really don’t know, which is why I am wary.

I will say that I have a former associate who crowdsourced here business logo and was very happy.

@ptwylie Thanks. Is their a specific type of task you have found that lends itself particularly well to this method?

@joanmuschampfagnani

I haven’t crowdsourced logos, but a friend did and she got a bunch of great looking logos from 99 designs.

I crowdsourced a name for my new service for personal training for web marketing by emailing my list and got over 1,000 responses! (Oddly, I went w/a variation of my original idea, but that’s another story.

Crowdsourcing has it’s place, but it really depends on the situation and where you are in your business cycle.

I’d choose 99 designs if I were just starting out, but now I have a creative director who does a great job (IMHO) with our brand…I’m not crowdsourcing that.

Personally, I LOVE crowdsourcing! I think it’s such a great way to connect with people and get into the spirit of social media and online communities!

Our logo for the Social Media Crisis Academy was crowdsourced on 99designs.com We received just under 100 design submissions, and ran a contest to see which one our audience responded to most, and liked most. It was a great experience!

@devanianjali In response to what you said about not having control, the project is always yours, so you give your brief, can make comments and request changes and alterations while the contest is running, and then, of course, when you choose a winning product, you can have the designer tweak and change it as requested… Just to say that you wouldn’t have to worry about loosing control if you wanted to crowdsource something!

@deairby Crowdsourcing, to my knowledge is where you use an online community in a sort of competition to create something for you. Typcially you have a creative brief which you post, along with how much you wish to pay. Interested participants submit entries, which you comment on and they tweak . @melissaagnes also noted that you can even have the winning entrant make more adjustments.

I have seen it done for product design, software, and graphic art projects, but I am sure that only scratches the surface.

@deairby I honestly don’t know. Perhaps @ptwylie or @rich-brooks might know. My knowledge has been limited to more creative process driven things.

Well, that was fun to watch the leader in action! Thanks for sharing that link. I already used kickstarter and funded my cookbook (see: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/76008715/a-dollop-and-a-pinch-wants-to-get-cooking) What I need is to find a manufacturer for a product…I’ll check out Quirky. Thanks. @rich-brooks