Week 2 Learning Accomplishments & Reflection

• Started discussion with my team on group homework and developed a plan of attack for the next few weeks.
• Read required reading
• Read additional articles:
• http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/19/why-twitch-is-worth-1
  b-to-google/?obref=obinsite 
• Crowdsourcing Evolution from YouTube 5 minutes by "the blogtv".
• Why You Should Tweet Your Way Into A Career-Changing Mentor's Heart | Fast Company | Business + Innovation http://m.fastcompany.com/3012703/dialed/why-you-should-tweet-your-way-into-a-career-changing-mentors-heart?utm_source=twitter 
• The social marketing playbook "Chapter 3. Making the transition to the social web"

 
Reflection  

This week's readings offer an insight into the emerging market place of crowdsourcing! This is such a fascinating concept: how do you engage the power of the crowd to contribute and develop products? Companies such as Kickstarter offer an opportunity for business owners to get funding and product feedback.  Products now emerge that would not have had the opportunity previously due to lack of venture capital or our funding sources. This provides more opportunities for entrepreneurs to succeed and greater diversity of products. 

Amazon's Mechanical Turk is another example of how to utilize the power of the crowd. This is a similar example to the one provided in the reading where NASA had a screensaver program available to the public that helped speed up very long & complex computations by using excess computer capacity.  In the case of Amazon, people get paid a few pennies to do small tasks like clicking a button or taking a short survey that provides input to businesses. The critical lesson here is how can businesses divide up tasks into small bits that are easy to execute to save time and money by using such programs. Theoretically, this could reduce the time to market of product and revolutionize some types of product development. This hinges on the idea that complex problems or tasks are broken down to very simple easy to do tasks and can be divided amongst many people to execute.

Another interesting article that I read this week was about using Twitter to find mentors. Twitter can be an effective tool to get your message across to many people and a way to build a brand, however I do not see how you can use Twitter to build a meaningful relationship with a mentor.  There are thought leaders that you can follow on Twitter and learn from their advice, but a mentor - protege relationship needs to be a two way dialogue and discussion. The relationship should develop over time and be mutually beneficial. Twitter can provide a forum for communication and a way to get advice from a large group.  LinkedIn also has forums and group discussions where people seek and provide advice.  These types of communication methods do not faciliate the type of relationship and engagement that I consider an important element of a mentor - protege relationship.