Viralsourcing explained

Today we're guilty of coining a new term, viralsourcing, in BusinessWeek. Adding jargon to the corporate oeuvre is a dark sin that annoys some, of course, but the dynamic is real and growing.

Viralsourcing is the simple combination of viral marketing and crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing has been around for a decade (think the thousands of people who write articles for Wikipedia, the reCAPTCHA program in which you type passwords to help scan real news articles, or the Netflix prize to improve personalization for video rentals). Jeff Howe first distilled that concept in a June 2006 Wired riff. But something was added in the past few years as social media gave crowds more control over the dissemination of ideas as well.

Engaging crowd egotism

Viral marketing has been the flip side, in which groups push out messages without playing in the creation. But now, as crowds engage in building something -- say, running a UK soccer team -- they also have an incentive to chat it up among their online friends. Our BusinessWeek discussion looks at CrowdSpring.com (a network of designers who bid on projects), Crowdbands (a startup that allows groups to decide where major musical acts play), and Tyson Foods (which has donated tens of thousands of meals under the direction of social media participants). In simplest terms, the role of product development in crowds has expanded to marketing. The masses can now be a free line item in your ad budget.

The best current example of viralsourcing is Twitter -- a business that has moved group creation into marketing, too. As Brian Morrissey noted, Twitter has outsourced its entire business model by allowing third-party developers to play with everything from advertising to financial transactions to search engines. When something works, like Summize.com, the viral masses inside Twitter propagate it.

The people who help build have an incentive to share. It's worth a look in your business, to see if there is a way to get the masses to play with your product and then brag about it.