The Power of Crowdsourcing

Chapter 9 of Real-time Marketing and PR is about the ability to “tap the crowd for quick action.”  David Meerman Scott uses the National Football League’s Super Bowl as an example of this.  Each year hundreds of millions of viewers tune in to watch the leagues top two teams compete for the winning title.  But this isn’t the only thing the audience pays attention to.  If you’re like me, you watch the Super Bowl for one reason and one reason only: the commercials.

Companies pay millions of dollars to have their commercials shown during the Super Bowl because they know they will be seen by millions.  They spend months creating memorable ads as a way to brand the name.  As said in the book, “the event is so high profile and the budgets are so enormous that each ad is intensely measured and discussed” (Scott, 100).

Scott describes the Super Bowl as an “advertising championship,” because each company presented does as much as it can to get its brand noticed.  After every Super Bowl, we see newspaper articles where panels of “experts” rank the ads based on their popularity.  This often takes hours or even days to be published and only gives us the opinions of those few people.  We want to hear the opinions of the millions of the real viewers watching, and we want to hear it in real-time.

Social media gives us this advantage.  In 2010, an ad agency named Mullen partnered with social-media monitoring and engagement provider Radian6 to create BrandBowl 10, a competition that gauged reaction to ads on the 2010 Super Bowl in real-time.  Web-based crowdsourcing techniques allowed them to monitor and measure people’s opinions to rank the ads during the game.

“Crowdsourcing involves taking a task usually performed by one or few people and distributing among a crowd of people-outsourcing it to a crowd-via online social networks” (101).  This allows companies to engage with public opinion as quick as possible, which is most efficient in the competitive world we live in today.

The best example of a crowdsourced product is Wikipedia.  As you probably know, Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone.  “Everyday, people around the world collectively make tens of thousands of real-time edits and create thousands of new articles.  Thus, the volume and knowledge of Wikipedia expands each day, all thanks to one of the most successful crowd sourcing projects on the planet” (102).

Television shows like "American Idol," "America’s Got Talent" and "Dancing with the Stars" also use crowdsourcing.  They ask audiences to evaluate and vote on their favorite performers by voting during live broadcasts.  The use of crowdsourcing attracts viewers because it allows them to be more attentive and actively involved.  It gives them the feeling a percentage of the power is in their own hands.

So now you are probably wondering who actually won the 2010 Brandbowl, right?  Brandbowl collected 98,656 tweets during the game to determine an overall ranking of the ads.  They scored these tweets based on:

•       Volume (the number of people who tweeted about each add)
•       Sentiment (as calculated by Radian6)
•       Net sentiment scores ((positive tweets – negative tweets)/total tweets)

Doritos won the Brandbowl 2010 title by dominating in sheer volume of tweets. Google, which actually had a higher percentage of positive tweets, came in a close second place.  McDonald’s and Dr. Pepper also put up a noble fight in the brand competition.

As you can see from the popular results of Brandbowl 2010 and Wikipedia, crowdsourcing is a magnificent tool in social media for brands.  With this function, companies can receive knowledge and insight by connecting with people all over the internet in real-time, which is what this book is all about: connecting with customers while speeding up the pace of your business.