You may have heard the term crowdsourcing being thrown around in the news lately but may not understand completely what it is- broadly speaking, it’s the process of connecting with large groups of people via the internet and tapping them for their knowledge or expertise. Companies are cropping up left and right using it as a tactic or as the foundation for their entire business model. Crowdsourcing concepts are exploding simply because the internet has now made it so easy to digitally connect people from all points of the world, and because the cost efficiencies make it highly attractive to companies dealing with cutbacks from our lagging global economy.

Crowdsourcing in its purest form, according to Jeff Howe who coined the term in 2006, does not limit who can be included in the crowdsourced community. There are no barriers to entry, and anyone with the desire can answer the specific need that an individual or organization is looking to have resolved. Surely, if you have 10,000 members in the community, by law of probability you’ll have a greater raw number of solutions offered. But do you want to invest in all that time to sift through all that noise to find a few solid nuggets?

Recently, crowdsourcing evolved when GeniusRocket invented “curated crowdsourcing,” which brings more value to the clients we serve. So what is it? Curated crowdsourcing improves upon the traditional model by ensuring that only the creative talent and caliber clients want and are most suited for their task are asked to participate. For GeniusRocket this means that only the best creative teams in the country are working on our client’s video campaign. So clients may not have access to thousands of potential ideas, but what they do have is access to a highly specialized, small niche of creative professionals. And because it’s still crowdsourcing, the costs remain at a fraction of the costs clients would normally pay.

Essentially, curated crowdsourcing substantially improves operational efficiency, both internally for the team at GeniusRocket and for the client. Processing time is reduced significantly, so the duration from pitch to launch is slashed to record times. Cost efficiencies resultant of reduced time investments and the lack of overhead costs allow these costs savings to be shifted down to the client – to the point that a traditional agency would be hard-challenged to be able to compete with. With the total cost being so low for the client and such creative quality being guaranteed, curated crowdsourcing is most definitely offering new value to business clients that did not exist before.