Not too long ago Ad Age's Brian Sheehan took Unilever to task for their crowdsourcing efforts for Peperami. He railed that it's not actually crowdsourcing, at least not as it was intended in James Surowiecki's book "The Wisdom of Crowds." Of course that would imply that a crowd was actually wise. In fact, that crowd might even be wiser than its smartest member. He contends that mass collaboration is a key element of crowdsourcing. However that's not how crowdsourcing is being used in many cases these days.
I'm bringing up a semantic difference here, but to be fair to the term, what companies like Unilever, Brammo, Crowdspring, et al. are doing is actually crowdsourcing. In the simplest sense of the phrase, they're using a large group of people as a means to generate a large number of ideas, through which they can sift, curate and adjudicate to find the perfect solution to their business problems. They're sourcing from a crowd rather than the traditional approach of going to an organization specialized in solving those types of problems.
Sure, there's nothing idealistic in that and Brian Sheehan gave 'em hell for it. The ideal that comes from 'the phenomenon of collective intelligence iteratively brought to bear on a problem facilitated by the free communication of the internet' is a powerful one. But to be honest, crowdsourcing isn't really all that apt a term for it. I'd rather call it 'crowdcrafting'. It's got the ring of honest effort and valuable outcome to it. It's more apt for the wisdom of age and diversity converging to create something that might not otherwise exist.
I've also got a name for the bastardized process. The one that tries to get people to work for free, or better yet, because 'they want to feel like they're part of the brand'. That's more like 'herdsourcing'. It's a cattle call. It's an amateur talent show. It's not an iterative process and it'll only provide solutions that are as good as it's smartest member. In the end it's mostly a quantitative thing.
I can't help but think that herdsourcing comes from the same place committees do. Not that committees are inherently bad, but they're definitely safe and they produce similar results. A committee at its best is a collective of smart, experienced and diverse minds who come together to collaborate and shepherd a project. But they often lead to compromise and things tend to come out the other end of the process a little (often a lot) duller and tamer than they went in. But there's protection in a committee. Nobody takes the blame, and everyone can generally cover their own ass if shit goes south.
I think that's where herdsourcing comes from. If you don't trust yourself, trust your vision, then it's very difficult to make decisions. So you gather people around you to help you make those decisions. You hire an agency. But if you don't trust yourself it's hard to trust anyone else, so you don't trust your agency. "This idea is good...but is it good enough? Can't you guys show me another ten or twenty concepts? And incidentally, why is this costing so much?" So you do what Unilever did and you throw it out to the world in the hopes that you'll get ten thousand ideas that you can sift through like a gold prospector panning in the Yukon, hoping that somewhere in that big muddy stream of shit you can find a gleaming nugget that will save your brand. Or the diamond in the rough. Or the 'perfect' solution to your problem.
Special thanks to @noloveforbruce for helping to clarify the concept.
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