Though now considered ‘old school’ in some social media circles, e-mail marketing still has well-earned seat at the breakfast table of modern commerce. But while it looks cheap and easy, the problem for many small and medium-sized businesses is the effort required to create the campaigns. From gathering carefully customized lists to creating engaging copy, fluid layouts, and attractive graphics – the entire process can become quite time-consuming. Outsourcing the project to a marketing company, while offloading the labor headache, substantially increases the final cost due to list licensing markups and creative fees.
At SpoolSource, we recently did a small marketing campaign for an IT support firm that wanted to offer a cash bonus to commercial real estate brokers that referred new data networking clients. They had no list, they had no campaign, they had no money (does that sound the least bit familiar?...no need to raise your hand)
There are millions of public calendars and event databases available online. From the Google and iCal Calendars of civic and social organizations to large commercial directories, these searchable listings are extremely handy for letting people know when and where important stuff is happening. Calendars are just another one of those beautiful web tools that we can't imagine living without. Indeed, publishing a calendar of events can be yet another indispensable service that makes your website stickier and more useful.
The only downside of managing a calendar is that time inevitably marches on. What was au courant quickly becomes irrelevant. Hundreds (sometimes thousands) of events must be updated on a regular basis or the data becomes useless. For user-generated event calendars that may not be a big deal but for larger event calendars, constant feeding and care is required.
Ever wish you could press a button and have your Google Adwords campaign or your banner ad displays all instantly translated into, say, Polish? I do. In the not-so-new Global Economy, it seems like localization of media and advertising should be a simple dashboard feature, not an arduous linguistic odyssey. For Adwords users, Google offers a Translation toolkit which runs on their impressive super-collider translation engine. The problem is that machine translation, even with Googliest algorithms, ends up looking like a super-collision, spitting out a stilted version of the original--comprehensible perhaps, but awkward, like cousin Balki on "Perfect Strangers".
Here at Spoolcentral we have crowdsourced our fair share of video transcription, translation and subtitling and it's not as simple as it looks. Our JobSpooler platform automatically divides video and audio media into chunks for assignment distribution to our crowd of Spoolsmiths. So far, so good. However, we've been looking at ways of integrating all the tools needed for transcribing and subtitling all in one place (automated timestamping, line-length control, error correction, etc.).
When Businessweek starts doing multiple pieces on Crowdsourcing, I think we can say the tipping point may be upon us.
yes, kids...the crowdsourcing sector is now officially "Hot" in 2010.
Google acquired the Aardvark (vark.com) (social-crowdsourced, question-and-answer service) for somewhere around $50MM (it pays to be a former-google employee when you do a start-up :)
Too bad none of that money trickles down to the little elves who power the system... :(
Pixazza, a Google-backed company, is set on tagging every product photo on the Net so it can be linked to ads and e-commerce. How do they do all that tagging? Crowdsourcing, silly. Even though you'd never know that just by looking at their website. In this case, Crowdsourcing is just smarter outsourcing and since it serves only their internal eco-system, it isn't worth mentioning. The company is much more interested talking about turning photos into 'buy now' buttons.
