crowdsourcing

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)

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.).

Okay, so you've caught some of the buzz and you're ready to do some real Crowdsourcing. Not the volunteer kind of 'vote-on-your-favorite-idea' polling or "invent-our-next-sneaker" contests that might be termed crowdsourcing-lite.

When Businessweek starts doing multiple pieces on Crowdsourcing, I think we can say the tipping point may be upon us.

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.