Today I was reading how this company needed people to test out products in a role that is usually rock bottom in terms of pay and hierarchy in a corporate environment. Instead of hiring a bunch of people though they instead this time simply got fans of their products to do the work for them and sure enough many people embraced the idea. You’d be surprised at how many companies in different industries do this. And this isn’t simply for say a sampling campaign of sort.
The most common example I see are people that need a large audience for popular TV shows where in many cases they usually hire people to be the fillers. However, in a lot of cases they simply advertise to people that you can be on TV and a ton of people are willing to do it. In many ways I guess you can say why not if people are willing to do it for free which saves you the labour cost. I suppose the one major benefit is that at leas you know these people are excited in dong it. Whether or not it gives the professional reliability is another question.