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Innovation Insights
by Stephen Shapiro

Crowdsourcing Content

On July 19th, 2012, I will be keynoting at the inaugural Crowdopolis event being held July 19th in Los Angeles. You don’t want to miss this event!  I can assure you it will be incredible.  And at the bottom of this article there is a link which will give you a discount.

I asked Crowdopolis organizer and founder of Daily Crowdsource, David Bratvold, to write me a brief article on his perspective on crowdsourcing and in particular on how it can be used for content creation (I created a video about my perspective that I will be posting soon). Enjoy!

Curating Content with Crowdsourcing
by David Bratvold

Creating compelling and worthwhile content is an essential fact of life for companies looking to attract and engage consumers and incentivizing them to buy. But creating sufficient content to meet business objectives is an ongoing challenge. Besides hiring a large enough editorial staff to meet the content needs of your brand’s community, tapping into what your customers care most about related to your products and services can provide a treasure trove of meaningful content.

Crowdsourcing is a relatively new method of generating content for your brand’s product, and as it grows, organizations are now able to leverage this channel as means of connecting with their customers.  Below are three ways crowdsourcing is impacting the future of content marketing.

Crowdsourcing speeds up the content creation process 

You will never have enough time in the day to create the amount of content you want to create. Writer’s block, vacation, major deadlines, and other business emergencies can get in the way. With sites like CrowdSource.com, you can employ a scalable crowd of workers to create your content. No matter how many articles you write each week, more is better. With scalable labor, the only limitation to posting 5 articles per day is your budget. Keep in mind, however, that crowdsourcing projects do take a lot of moderation & feedback.

Crowdsourcing offers you diversity and creative choice

One of the main draws of using a site like Genius Rocket to crowdsource a commercial or viral video is the number of options to choose from along the way. Imagine what your video would look like if you or your internal team created it.  The scripting, filming, acting, and even editing would, over time, begin to take on a uniform appearance. Once you turn this over to crowdsourcing, you begin picking from 30 different scripts, written from 30 different individuals from several different countries, cultures, & backgrounds. The diverse perspectives these individuals bring to the table are invaluable.

Now apply this benefit of diversity to the earlier benefit of drawing input from your customers and potential customers. Your target audience will begin to show you all the different ways they want to be approached – They’ll essentially be giving you your ideal marketing strategy.

Crowdsourcing inherently atomizes your content marketing process

By its nature crowdsourcing does not atomize the process. It’s only after you get unsatisfactory results will you start to break processes down so small that you will arrive at your desired goal.  It’s tough to imagine that projects need to be broken down into steps that could take no more than seconds to accomplish. However, to effectively use crowdsourcing, every project must be atomized as small as possible.

Consider the task of moderating your forum. As an alternative to hiring a forum moderator, every single post could be fed through MTurk with a simple Yes or No question: “Is this post offensive?” Any Yes responses could be removed or reviewed. By atomizing this process, crowdsourcing can keep your forum (or any UGC Content) valuable and problem free.

Summary

As you sit and think about your content marketing strategy, engage your community and solicit their input. Each industry and community is different, offering quality analysis and creative ideas. Content marketers will be able to accomplish their objectives by using crowdsourcing as a means of better engaging and growing their social networks.

David Bratvold is the founder of Daily Crowdsource, an open-format website that aims to educate the public on the topic of crowdsourcing and a producer of Crowdopolis 2012, a major crowdsourcing conference teaching the future of crowdsourcing in advertising, technology, and content marketing scheduled this July 19.  You can follow David on Twitter at @TDCrowdsource.

P.S. If you use this link to register, you will save $100 and pay only $378 (until June 25th when the price goes up)