Airbnb Company Crowdsourcing Effort

Crowdsourcing Effort in Airbnb Company

Crowdsourcing is a social media sourcing model where organizations or individuals get goods and services. This term was initially coined by a writer named Jeff Howe in 2006. He described it as a way of businesses tapping into the power of the crowd instead of carrying out the tasks. It includes micro-tasks, voting, ideas, and finances from a large group of participants, which is open and rapidly evolving. As of 2021, it means the use internet to attract and divide work among participants to attain the cumulative outcome. Advantages associated with this effort include speed, flexibility, diversity, and improved costs. Many crowdsourcing methods like virtual labor markets, open online collaboration, and competitions. It helps organizations to learn beyond what is provided by employees.

There are several examples of outsourcing efforts that have been successful. Such an example is Airbnb, a company based in the United States; it does its operations as an online marketplace that helps people rent lodging places that are affordable to them. The range of dwellings is hotel rooms, hostel beds, and holiday cottages. In 2013, the company faced a challenge due to a lawsuit of a trademark infringement from the company's competitor. This was the need for having the outsourcing effort (Kohler 70). The company, therefore, came up with a marketing strategy of carrying out campaigns to embed the concept for the creation of excitement relating to the brand.

The concept made use of the generated content by the user. Airbnb company launched the crowdsourcing campaign's first video on Vine (Zimmermann). The videos were combined through a series of submitted users, and a short film was created, referred to as ''Hollywood and Vines.'' The primary premise of this film was making adventures and traveling around the world. Approximately one hundred videos among the six-second clips were chosen to make the four-and-a-half-minute video. The campaign's development was alongside the company's sponsorship in Sundance Film Festival.

The other campaign happened in 2014, and it took a different approach by utilizing Instagram. Those who responded to the outsourcing effort were the hosts who rented their accommodations and had a passion for their homes. They gave their contributions by sending fifteen minutes videos. The videos contained a summary of why travelers wanted to visit the city. The campaign named ''Airbnb shorts'' was meant to showcase (Zimmermann). The company used this strategy to have it known in the lesser-known places and give a local vibe. These hosts shared the passion of their hometowns with the rest of the world. This made travelers aware of the places and the hosts who promised them personalized experiences.

These campaigns resulted in personalized videos made by the company's hosts with a worldwide network; they benefited the company (Palacios et al.). The hosts were required to submit their fifteen-minute videos on Instagram having the city's name alongside the Airbnb hosts hashtag, and the accounts had to be made public. The winner was promised a flight to London with a $500 voucher every night in the listing of Airbnb plus a ticket to the Shorts workshop that had been put across by Sundance Institute.

There was the mention of intellectual property where it involved innovation of the employees in the company in being creative about the crowdsourcing. They did that by creating accounts in social media like Facebook and Instagram, where a group of hosts was asked to tag their videos. The videos were a form of artistic content meant to attract more viewers. It showed that the content in social media was not only limited to photographs (Zimmermann). These intellectual properties were only limited to its use against its competitors. That is why exclusive hosts were taking up the role of posting the fifteen-minute video alongside the hashtags. These hashtags also reveal that this was protected and used for the company's benefit alone.

The company filtered the ideas and suggestions by analyzing the marketing strategy that would help the company since its focus was on imagery with high quality and vivid (Palacios et al.). Therefore, there was a need to give insights to consumers into different accommodations and travel destinations. However, the company needed its services to reach over 34,000 different locations worldwide, hence the need to collect images from various places. At this point, the company adopted crowdsourcing to reach out to more people. The different ideas were filtered out, and crowdsourcing became the only viable idea.

The results were that the campaigns had a good impact because, through the contests open for two weeks, nearly nine hundred and fifty videos had their tags in the Airbnb hashtag (Palacios et al.). The use of Instagram for the campaign meant that the brand could receive a windfall of the video and bonanza from social media due to the high penetration of the hashtag. Scott Allen Perry was announced the winner of this contest who therefore got a flight to London that was complementary. The winner had many followers on all the social media accounts. He resided there for a week and received a ticket to the Sundance Film Festival.