Ways to start crowdsourcing
- Luke Telford
- 24 February 2010
Photo credit: thadz, sxc.hu
Admitting you don't know it all, and expressing a willingness to open the floor to the wisdom of others is a wise move for anyone running a business. The question is, how to achieve this? Crowdsourcing helps.
Social media is the crowdsourcing marketer's best friend. If you aren't ready to take the financial and technical plunge and start a dedicated crowd-sourcing effort, then just try listening.
Previously on nett.com.au, we've suggested trying Twitter for some
inspiration. Whatever the subject or target of your campaign might be, try typing a relevant term into the Twitter search engine and see what turns up. Using the correlative search function on Facebook yields some interesting results too, as
Adspace Pioneers
pointed out recently. Whilst this isn't necessarily actual crowd-sourcing, it does provide you insights into how people perceive and converse online about whatever you may be trying to advertise. This approach is also a
wise way to research competitors, identify any mistakes they might be making (from disapproving tweets), and learn from them.
When you need a bit more activity on the crowd end of a crowdsourcing effort, there are a number of services that come in handy.
The best place to start is Google Moderator. This
is an app that members of Google staff created in their famous ‘20% creative time'. It allows a moderator to create a subject for discussion. Appointed authors are then invited to post ideas, suggestions and critical questions to the discussion. The
discussion's posts can then be voted up or down by anyone who views the page; the goal being that the most pertinent suggestions/issues are addressed more quickly.
The only catch to Moderator is that you need a sufficient online community paying attention to your topic. The app is therefore particularly useful in a larger company-you can send out a memo with the details of the discussion. Otherwise, it's up
to you to promote it online. Once again, the best way to do this is with social media: Posting the URL Facebook pages that are relevant to your topic, searching Twitter for relevant comments and replying to tweets; you could even try posting your
topic to Reddit, a message board that has a similar voting system of
its own.
If finding an audience for your crowdsourcing initiative is proving tricky, there are a number of paid services.
On InnoCentive, businesses looking for crowd-based
inspiration can register as ‘seekers' and post ‘challenges' to ‘innovators' on the Open Innovation
Marketplace. It's free to start an account, but it costs a nominal amount to post a challenge and in some cases the site takes a percentage of the ‘reward' as a
commission. The site isn't limited to marketing: topics include chemistry, computer science, food/agriculture and mathematics.
Mechanical Turk is Amazon's InnoCentive
equivalent (and a market dominator), and CrowdFlower is a
recently established company that is well-regarded online.
You can also find a number of excellent crowdsourced niche services. Here are a couple that impressed us:
- CastingWords: excellent for audio transcription
- TopCoder: a service for software programming
- uTest: an effective site for finding people to test your services
or programming #
