If you weren’t already aware Social Media Week coincides with London Fashion Week and fashion bible Grazia has aptly embraced both with a social media crowdsourcing campaign to engage their readers.
For the first time in its seven year history Grazia has opened up its editorial process to invite readers to have their say and make decisions about the title’s London Fashion Week issue using Grazia’s YouTube, Twitter and Facebook profiles.
Defined by Jeff Howe in a 2006 issue of Wired magazine, crowdsourcing describes distributing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community (crowd) through an open call by issuing a general invitation to all.
Social media crowdsourcing is growing in popularity particularly because as small business expert Scott Steinberg says, you can gauge demand for and create bankable products from day one and our US pharma counterparts are starting to take note.
Sanofi US recently crowdsourced the question “What matters most?” about diabetes to consumers and healthcare professionals. As the Huffington Post’s Rosina Samadini noted, the fact that Sanofi were encouraging external developers to devise ideas to address a problem shows a marked shift in approach.
With pharma facing increasing financial pressures to reduce money spent on R&D it will be interesting to see if the industry begins to look to more innovative ways such as crowdsourcing to develop new ideas.
@VirgoHEALTH @VirgoConsumer @KamiquaPearce
Tags: Crowdsourcing, health, social media, Virgo, Virgo HEALTH