Real-Time Marketing and PR: Chapter 9

Scott spends this Chapter 9 talking about crowdsourcing or outsourcing a task to a group of people.

Everyday examples of this crowdsourcing is audience voting, by text messaging or calling in,  that competition television shows like American Idol or Dancing with the Stars does to find out which contestants are going home. A BIG example is the BrandBowl 2010, an idea was stared by Mullen, an ad agency, and Radian 6, an engagement provider. Together, they used Web-based crowdsourcing techniques, monitoring and measuring opinions, and ranked ads as the game was played.

Brandbowl 2010 collected a little less than 100,000 tweets during the Super Bowl to determine the overall rank of all the ads and the rank was based on a composite score. The score was dependent on volume and sentiment. The opinions of tweets were used to get a net sentiment score to measure if the fans' reactions were positive or negative. To differentiate between positive and negative tweets  Radian6 built a reference library of examples that assigned values to language used in tweets to sort distinctions and colloquial usage. In the end of all the processing Doritos and Google had the top ads after the game rather than giving the results the next day in the paper.  Although this all sounds great, Edward Boches, chief creative officer at Mullen, co-creator of BrandBowl 2010, described crowdsourcing as both a challenge and problem because seeing all the wisdom of your crowd can come back with the results you wanted more quickly or in a way you weren't expecting.

Personally, I think it's a good idea to use crowdsourcing because of some of the things Scott mentioned. One of the things that it allows is brainstorming, but it allows companies or people to ask the public to participate. An example of this was Mark Levy's use of it for coming up with a title for his book, Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content. Levy said, "For me, crowdsourcing was interesting in unexpected ways... crowdsourcing backed up something I had suspected, and it gave people a forum to help me construct (a subtitle), I wouldn't have gotten without their input."