Social Media, Organizational Identity and Public Relations

6 Crowdfunding – collective organizing and virtual identities

The term ‘crowdsourcing’ refers to an emergent form of social media organizing which includes a wide variety of outcomes and practices. The term itself was coined by Jeff Howe as a contraction of the words “crowd” and “outsourcing” in the June 2006 edition of Wired (Howe, 2006a). The earliest forms of this phenomenon appear to have their origins in the late 1990s where the term emerged to describe a type of outsourcing initiated by corporations looking to reduce costs (Thurlow & Yue, 2013). For the most part this outsourcing was related to data gathering, market research focus groups and the desire to de-centralize call-center type functions so that stakeholders would have a channel ...