Online Marketing Blog

Creating original and compelling content is paramount to your success as a marketer. Getting your customers involved in this process is great for engagement, product improvement, product development and your overall reputation as a brand. It can also add tremendous value to your content.

You may be thinking that crowdsourcing is too complex to consider as part of your content curation, but once you understand the different shapes and sizes crowdsourcing can take, even the most risk-averse marketer will understand the benefits of crowdsourcing.

Just as the definition of content marketing and curation seems to vary, so too does the definition of crowdsourcing. According to DailyCrowdSource.com, “Crowdsourcing is the process of getting work or funding, usually online, from a crowd of people. The word is a combination of the words ‘crowd’ and ‘outsourcing’. The idea is to take work and outsource it to a crowd of workers.”

Content is an essential vehicle for corporate storytelling, attracting and engaging customers to buy. Organizations are beginning to get that, but struggle with content sourcing and how to scale. Besides hiring an editorial staff complete with corporate journalists, one of the most valuable sources of content for online marketing comes from your brand’s community.

Tapping in to what customers care about related to your products /services and what your brand stands for can be a gold mine of meaningful content.

I wrote about this recently on ClickZ, “Crowdsourcing and User Generated Content“, offering pros and cons plus a few tips. Here are 5 of those tips with some additional commentary based on discussions with audience members at the recent SES San Francisco conference:

I haven’t had the chance to write about any “dark side” social media stuff in a loooooong time. But today I caught wind of “Subvert and Profit” (blog) and they make no bones about their intentions. The opening paragraph sets the tone:

“Content-pushers and social bookmarkers rejoice! The democracy of web 2.0 is about to get a major dose of capitalism as the crowdsourcing revolution begins. This revolution will bring you money, should you choose to embrace it. Subvert and Profit, our brand new site, is leading the charge.”

Apparently they’re starting with Digg and plan to move on to other social news and bookmark services. Advertisers pay $1 per Digg and diggers get paid $.50 per Digg. Oh my, this is pure capitalism alright, of the super spam sort.