Crowd-sourced DAILY.

Crowdsourcing can broadly be defined as the action of outsourcing a task to the undefined public. Crowdsourcing can often be a great tool to garner information, opinions, feedback and even identify issues, gaps and problems! The main principle behind crowdsourcing, is leveraging on mass intelligence to accomplish a task - these tasks can be ranging from simple, small tasks to a scale that even saves organizations (just ask Modell's Sporting Goods!). As one of the many in the "undefined" public, I have often been solicited for my opinions (which as a professional keyboard warrior, I am happy to oblige) and here are two of the ways:

#1 Instagram Polls: Instagram polls are often a quick and dirty way to crowdsource for the information you need. It might not always be accurate, but is certainly is FAST (well...depending on how many active friends you have). Recently, I had a cousin who recently became a mother of TWINS, and she put up an Instagram poll asking what she should name her new babies - garnering more than a 800 responses in 4 hours! Imagine how such efficiency could work for major organizations! Pro tip: Never never NEVER crowdsource for baby names. Firstly, you are always gonna hate every name that is suggested to you and also, it hurts the person when you don't adopt the names they suggested :( To me, they will still always be Denise (girl) and Denephew (boy).

#2 Beta Testing: Crowdsourcing is huge in the gaming industry, and is often used by companies to obtain usability feedback, identifying bugs in the game and most importantly, receiving real-time market opinion of the product. I have been a beta-tester for the upcoming Runescape Mobile (that will be coming out on 17 June, so pre-register if you havent already done so!) and among others, the feeling of being able to participate and be engaged in the creation of a product that you enjoy playing is satisfying to say the least. On deeper thought.... Crowdsourcing allowed Jagex to obtain huge amounts of labor (at least from me), opinions and thoughts for the mere price of...satisfaction. Pretty good deal for them in my opinion.

I can understand the appeal of crowdsourcing. For organizations, they are able to obtain what they need quick and cheap (although its reliability is a doubt) while for individuals being crowdsourced, it affords the opportunity to be part of a (i use this term loosely) community and contribute to something that you enjoy or believe in. What are the ways YOU have been crowdsourced?