Learning Through Crowdsourcing
In a conversation with my friend and crowdsourcing industry leader, John Winsor (@jtwinsor), we were talking about some of the non-obvious intrinsic benefits of participating in crowdsourcing. John runs a revolutionary agency called Victors and Spoils, which is a ground up brand-focused agency using crowdsourcing techniques to produce innovative solutions for their brand clients. They specialize in setting up crowdsourcing activities, curating the crowd they work with, and managing the results produced to the benefit of their clients.
One of the things that came up in conversation was the deep involvement and exposure that their crowds get to a formal brand-based agency process. What does that kind of a customer want? What is the expectation? How does the work process go progress from scoping to review to finalization? As he discussed this, it dawned on me that some of the members of their crowd would never have the chance to work with such clients and experience the innards of that kind of process. Only if you were an intern at a big 5 agency would you even come close to participating in that process and probably only in the sense that you got the memos of how activities were going.
As I think about Trada, I see the same thing emerge. We have all types of paid search experts in our marketplace. Some that have been doing paid search since its inception, some that have been making a living doing arbitrage off of affiliate networks, and some that have less experience with paid search having learned the art through classes or personal experience on campaigns. For newer paid search experts this provides an incredible opportunity to learn not only to the process that many different types of campaigns go through to find success, but also the communication that happens with the advertisers during the process. Whether they want to only work in Trada for the rest of their paid search career, forge out on their own to build a PPC agency, or go to work for a more formal agency, they will have had considerable experience working with clients along the way. Paid search, like any performance based marketing, is deeply coupled with learning, setting, and delivering on customers’ expectations. These expectations vary dramatically from customer to customer as the dynamics of their business vary widely. Again, this is only experience that you’d get as an intern in an agency or through an entry-level paid search job.
Crowdsourcing is the new internship.
Through crowdsourcing, whole new generations of stock photographers, graphic designers, testers and paid search experts starting out in their careers can get access to working on and with clients that they could never dream of. So while many people focus on the extrinsic benefits of crowdsourcing (making money), there are a whole raft of intrinsic benefits as well.
