Outsourcing Versus Crowdsourcing - What Is the Difference?

Many of us have performed some outsourcing work in one way or another. Then again, many of us may not have heard of the term called crowdsourcing. In this article, the author explains the two, and reveals the difference for business owners to be able to implement both concepts effectively to achieve profitability and great business performance.

In Outsourcing, what you do is you pay someone to do a job for you, very much like employing a part time employee. Most probably, this person or organization have a relationship with you for years already before you consult or outsource to them.

In Crowdsourcing, you leverage from the Internet from a huge group of people. Okay, example would be this. Assuming your organization or company is a small one, and you need a lot of information in a short time, let's say, in organizing an event. You then, logon to a website with a lot of event managers, which is a forum website, and then you post something there saying something like this "My company ABC Enterprise will be organizing a Green event, and would like to source for Event managers who have experience and ideas on how to run this event." Let's say the forum has about 1000 Event Management companies registered. Normally, Conventional Marketing Conversion Rate is 1%, meaning out of 1000, 10 will reply with a meaningful answer.

Using the 10 suggestion and contacts from the Event Managers, you can begin to tap their experience and minds to organize your Green Event before outsourcing to them. Of course, this exercise will only be effective with a large pool of targeted people (like Event Managers) and can only be done via the Internet and also Online Marketing (posting in the forum is the tactic).

The above tactic may sound like a simple one, but it is effective, if we only take time to do it. It saves you money and time and not to mention brain juice in doing a company or business project. This tactic or strategy is pretty simple yet cost effective which may save organizations and businesses tens of thousands of dollars if it is implemented correctly. With the advent of digital community platforms, crowdsourcing campaign implementation is very convenient indeed.

If you would have built a community online over a period of time, you would be able to perform crowdsourcing easily and thus saving market research fees.