Crowdsourcing: capitalising on the conversation
- Luke Telford
- 11 November 2009
Photo credit: just4you, sxc.hu
One of the major realisations in the move to use social media as an advertising tool has been the reinforcement that good marketing is based on conversations.
Web 2.0 consists of vast and complex matrices of conversations. There are over 200 million people using Facebook, and 18 million using Twitter worldwide. The way users engage with these sites is deeply personal and extremely engaging; of course they have marketers fascinated!
It's not as simple as signing in and spruiking your brand, however. Nett has profiled numerous failed attempts at capitalising on Web 2.0 dialogues. Although the benefits are exponential to the effort of a measured and informed social media marketing campaign, the pitfalls and potential brand damage are extensive and often unforeseeable.
Which brings many back to the conversation aspect: if talking loudly isn't working for you, why not try listening?
The most promising and fascinating outcome of the largest ongoing dialogue in history is the ideas it is capable of producing. With certain social barriers removed, and anonymous and opinionated input encouraged, it's no surprise that discussions develop into such profound trends and demands so quickly. A brief visit to reddit.com will confirm this (actually, it will probably be slightly baffling unless you spend a while on there... which is worthwhile doing).
So: marketers are listening. More and more agencies are taking the jump from conversation marketing to crowdsourcing.
Norwegian agency Vizeum recently started an ‘Open Inspiration'
blog as part of an initiative to pitch a social media platform to furniture monolith IKEA. The purpose of the blog is to implore uniformly passionate IKEA fans to state what they
would want from such a platform. Categories available for input included Functionality/Apps, Success Criteria and Content.
Other agencies are much less cautious about relying on crowdsourcing. Victors & Spoils launched in late October 2009, dubbing themselves the ‘world's first creative agency built on crowdsourcing principles'. ‘Radical transparency' is cited as one of the main reasons
for creating a company based on such a progressive principle. It's no longer a mystery what people are thinking or saying about a niche market, so it's much more cost-effective to listen to what they are literally saying and act on it.
A local example of active crowdsourcing is Klick Communications hiring Scotty Iseri on the strength of his video blog series ‘Scotty Got an Office Job'. Identifying a personality that they felt their client could identify with, Klick
employed Iseri to deploy a social media campaign for Sydney-Melbourne Touring.
‘You find the right audience, you find the people they're listening to and enjoying online. And you can go via that channel,' said Klick McKay to the Mumbo report.
'He (Iseri) is, in a way, a new media.'
How do you start listening?
Here are three ideas:
Hashtags: If someone wants to comment on a particular issue over Twitter, they include the topic name preceded by a #. This is known as a hashtag, and is used to track topics of conversation within Twitter. If you're curious what people
are saying about something, go to hashtags.org, and search
it.
Youtube: keep an eye on the 'most popular' category. If this doesn't yield enough to sate your curiosity, you could always try the search function, and then sort according to popularity.
Reddit: This is one of the more palatable 'social news'
forums online. It is densely populated with highly web 2.0 literate users. Posts are brief and usually allude to a piece of news or culture that the user wants to draw attention to. Other users then can vote the topic (and the responses to it) up or
down on the homepage. What you are initially greeted with is the most popular topic at that second. Due to the size of the community, Reddit moves very quickly, so it's worth refreshing three or four times per visit. Trends can also be sorted by
category. #
