FLIRTing with the Crowds

What’s in it for me? That’s a question everybody makes – implicitly or explicitly – when faced with a proposal to co-operate and co-create. Quite naturally, monetary incentives are widely used in crowdsourcing efforts (a few cents per HIT at amazon’s mturk; $2000 in cash and benefits for each design taken into production at threadless; up to $1,000,000 for a winning solution at innocentive) and are usually required, if only for justifying the intellectual property transfers that take place between the company and the customer. However, there is a plethora of other, often implicit incentives that many times have even more influence on the participation rates and intensity of community members. It is important ot note that people, at least in the developed world, do not participate in crowdsourcing efforts to support their living, but instead for e.g. fun, recreation and intellectual or creative challenge.

Both intrinsic and extrinsic incentives are usually at play in crowdsourcing regardless of business area. The intrinsic incentives are immaterial by nature and concentrate on the benefits a participant creates for oneself through participating the collaborative offering: they don’t count in any of the external effects generated by belonging to a community or helping out a company.

Intrinsic motivations include:

• Challenging oneself
• Learning by doing
• Satisfying curiosity
• Outlet for creativity
• Developing a better product or service for one’s own use
• Enjoyment & fun

However, people are not solely driven by intrinsic motivation; customers sometimes put considerable effort into the projects and in turn expect to gain from it also through other means than simply enjoying the process. In the age social media, a strong social driver is at play that must be thoroughly considered when designing incentives for the crowdsourcing effort. I call these sources of value to the customer extrinsic subjective incentives, for their value is immeasurable in direct monetary terms.

Extrinsic subjective incentives

• Sense of belonging to a community
  • Togetherness and common cause, depending on the context and nature of offering.
• Learning through reciprocity
  • Possibility of sparring own ideas with the community
• Fame through exposure in the crowdsourcing community
  • Value consists of relevance of the audience to the member, size of the audience, and activity level of the audience
• Peer recognition
  • Closely connected with the fame, but peer recognition is more explicit than fame, that can in one sense be based on solely viewing stats, etc.
  • Written comments or other means (e.g. video responses on YouTube, etc)
• Company recognition
  • According to research among lead users, company recognition is especially important in challenges requiring significant technical expertise. In this setting, people want to be recognized by experts, rather than amateurs.
• Authority and readership
  • Especially important to Critics and Connectors
• Access to exclusive resources
  • E.g. getting a professional film crew to shoot an advertisement that you have scripted (Chevy); gaining access to a top-notch R&D department to execute your ideas (Lego)
• Access to exclusive channels
  • Even at a time when everybody can publish their videos for global audience on YouTube, getting your hobby project aired during a Superbowl commercial break still holds unparalleled prestige
• Gaining social capital through contacts made in the community during collaboration

A key issue to think about with extrinsic subjective incentives is: what can be offered to the customer that is easy and cost-effective for the company to deliver but still has significant value to the individual.

Finally, there are the extrinsic objective incentives, named so because they have also measurable inherent monetary value. Despite their name, also these incentives are naturally partly subjective as well, as there is no such thing as pure objective value for the individual.

Extrinsic objective incentives:

• Company products and services
• Products & services of relevant 3rd parties
• Credits for selected own/3rd party benefits
• Cash rewards

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Feeding intrinsic motivation is extremely important and should be though of first when aiming to engage customer communities and spurring quality input from the customers, because without intrinsic motivation, no amount of extrinsic incentives will ensure quality input. Humans being social animals, the community and fame effect usually correlates directly with the scale and intensity of participation. For this reason, be sure to maximize also the effect of extrinsic subjective incentives. Relevant extrinsic objective motivation is also required for reaching bes results, wide participation as well as simply justifying utilizing the contribution of the crowds to commercial ends. As already stated, even within this category, relying on cash alone might not be a good idea, and in e.g. open source communities it has been noted that significant cash incentives can even hamper creativity within the community. Think about something that would have even more value to the customer than money (customized , super-exclusive products and services, etc.).