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Let the Internet Do the Work

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Mar 29 2010

MIT did.  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently won a contest presented by The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  The contest was developed to test the powers of social networking.  The challenge was to find the coordinates of 10 balloons randomly placed throughout the United States.  Sounds massive?  Well it only took a team from MIT less than 9 hours to successfully complete this daunting task.  How did they do it?  They used the power of the internet.  They posted a link on their site informing people to sign up and help find these wonderful balloons.  To encourage participants they offered an incentive.  Money!  Since the prize from DARPA was a nice $40K for the winner, the MIT team was able to effectively tease internet users to work for them.  In the end MIT offered up the entire $40K to the participants; but if this were a business they could have walked away with a substantial ROI.

The question here is - how can I use the internet workforce to enhance my business?  Already companies are tapping into the virtual world of Cloud Computing.  A small company now has access to massive amounts of technological computing power without all of the overhead.  The same could be said for accessing a virtual workforce.  Netflix did it with their multi-year challenge of improving their current targeting model by a measured criterion and awarded a cash prize to the winner.  Creating this contest presented essentially no risk to Netflix; they only paid when they got what they wanted.  Of course once the winner was determined they paid the prize.  However, with proper forecasting of incremental revenue from the improved model, they will reap the benefits financially for years to come.   

Marketing departments need to ask themselves each day how they can develop their own marketing internet workforce.  Contests are a great start to promote products, registrations and site traffic, or even offer financially responsible referral incentives.  Let word of mouth marketing work for you and this time the words are - contests, money, and prizes.

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