Social media has changed the way business engages with consumers. Today, fans and followers don’t want to be “told”, they want to “discover”. Therefore, big and small brands are using the technique of Crowd Sourcing through Social Media Marketing. It is defined as the act of outsourcing tasks traditionally performed by an employee to Public through an open call. Globally big companies like Pepsi, Heinz, Starbucks, General Motors and Harley Davidson are using crowd sourcing as a part of their marketing mix.
By getting customers involved and engaged, crowd sourcing turns them to brand advocates. It includes asking customer’s feed back by means of open-ended questions on social media sites, which creates a program that converts the act of collecting and reacting to feedback to a marketing campaign of activation and engagement. This allows products to be developed faster, and more importantly, cheaply than previous. There will also be an increase in the value of PR as good content stories can be brought onto social channels and huge amount of press coverage can be achieved. Starbucks executed this idea of using consumer feedback with “My Starbucks Idea” where the fans of Starbucks can share, vote, discuss and sell ideas on My Starbucks idea. At the end of the day, the brand is getting a steady stream of feedback and business ideas while deepening the bond with its customers.
People love winning, and when they win prizes or discounts, they will share the news with their peers. This is the second strategy that can be adopted by offering exciting gifts to fans who identify the correct answer first. Thus a contest application can give everything needed to implement and manage a campaign. Here, the companies must focus to capture contact information for participants that help to plan for a post-event promotion. Thus for crowd sourcing, it is extremely important for the companies to know that platform to be chosen