Social Media, Crowdsourcing, and Marketing

Crowdsourcing

Management literature has broadly analyzed the outsourcing concept (Parmigiani, 2007). Focusing on the resource based view of the organization, companies attempt to be competitive by channelizing its resources towards the core activities and outsourcing the non-core activities to outside parties and reduce the cost substantially. Therefore, “companies should commit most of their resources to their core competence, while outsourcing the rest of their functions to specialized entities.” (Li and Petrick, 2008,p. 237). With internet, technology and globalization on the one edge of organizational environment, information travels at the speed of light. Additionally, companies also try to develop and nurture the mechanisms to attract experts to focus and provide solutions to the problems or work that suits them the most. This brings the attention of the companies to ensure that the experts must come under the ambit or in close proximity of the companies, so that the expertise can be accessed at ease and earliest. In other words, companies are shifting their attention to “folk capital”, or “community capital” or “global capital” or “masscapital”.