How To Exploit The Power Of CrowdsHow To Exploit The Power Of Crowds

10 Crowdsourcing Success Stories

Crowd Factory already has marquee customers like HBO, Microsoft, and Sony Music to point to in support of its social marketing platform. Now all CEO Sanjay Dholakia has to do is figure out how to explain how his company is different from every other vendor promising to unlock social media riches.

Previously the Chief Marketing Officer at Lithium Technologies, with a history as a consultant at Accenture and McKinsey & Co., Dholakia joined Crowd Factory a little more than a year ago, attracted by the potential of its technology to help marketers promote their companies more easily and track the results of promotions in social media.

Dholakia spoke about that potential following an event last month where Crowd Factory was featured as one of the first participants in the Jive Apps Market, Jive's attempt to position its enterprise social software as a launching pad for other applications. Jive customers can now sign up for and sign into the Crowd Factory Social Offer app without the need for a separate password. Social Offer is a tool for creating and tracking special deals for consumers related to social sharing, such as discounts that are unlocked for driving a minimum number of friends to a website. Crowd Factory also offers a Social Campaigns product, and a related analytics dashboard.

Some of Crowd Factory's apps for driving social behavior might be compared to North Social's Facebook apps or Wildfire's tools for creating promotions such as contests. However, what distinguishes Crowd Factory's approach is really its emphasis on analytics. "The apps in some sense are just Trojan horses for the analytics on the back end," he said.

Potential customers are often confused about the categories, Dholakia said, and he pointed me to a video blog he prepared explaining the different types of social media marketing companies. He came up with seven categories, which tend to be lumped in together even though they do pretty different things.

-- The public social networks themselves, Facebook and its competitors.

-- Listening tools, "putting the rabbit ears up" to hear what people are saying about your brand.

-- Social media management, including publishing tools like HootSuite.

-- Facebook applications that specifically exploit Facebook's development platform.

-- Social sign-on, making your identity portable across websites.

-- Community-building tools, offered by companies like Lithium (and the public-facing side of Jive).

-- Social campaign automation.

The way this list is structured, you can probably tell that "social campaign management" or "social campaign optimization," which Dholakia sees as a new category Crowd Factory is trying to create, is the one he thinks is ultimately most significant. Crowd Factory creates apps for social engagement, but inside the Trojan horse is a plan to create "an Omniture for social" that measures the response those apps attract with the goal of continuous improvement.

"You wouldn't think today of having a website with no Web analytics underneath it," he said. "We're not very far away now from where people would not conceive of doing social without having the direct causal analysis to go with it."

10 Crowdsourcing Success Stories

Dholakia argued it's time to "stop thinking about all those prior categories that presume social as a new channel and instead start thinking about social as a new medium that lays across all channels. That SEO channel of yours, that email channel of yours, that display advertising channel of yours, and, certainly, that Facebook channel of yours--you should lay on top of every one of those a social boost, a social amplification. If you're paying Google a dollar a click to bring Sanjay in, why wouldn't you give Sanjay an opportunity to go out and bring 'x' number of his friends back to the page. Say he brings four people to that page. That dollar, then, just turned into 25 cents per person that came back."

Regarding his math, I asked if the benefit would not be offset by the cost of the coupons and other promotions a business uses to encourage social sharing. "Sometimes, but not always," he said. As part of the launch of Windows 7, Microsoft created a campaign that drove people to a page where they were asked to vote on the best videos and, after casting their vote, to post a link to the contest to their social networks. "It was just, hey, that's terrific--now remind your friends to vote. That was it. No give, no get," he said, but people were still motivated to share because, having cast a vote, they had made an emotional investment in seeing their choice win.

Other campaigns take advantage of emotions like altruism. Textbook rental specialist Bookrenter built a campaign around giving away a scholarship, and every time someone shared a link to the site it would add $1 to the value of the scholarship. "There's no direct benefit to me to take that action, but I want whoever wins this scholarship to get the most money possible," Dholakia said.

For Practice Fusion, a maker of electronic medical records software, the social insight was simply that "doctors are our customers [and] they tend to hang out with other customers. If we can just get them to hang out [and] tell our story, that's got to be good for us," he said.

Awareness of the need for something like the Crowd Factory platform is growing because many companies are no longer relying on a team of 22-year-old Facebook enthusiasts to define their strategy, which is instead being elevated into the role for a senior digital marketing executive, Dholakia said. Marketers intuitively sense that there ought to be more concrete ways for them to exploit social media, but they are not sure how to go about it, he said.

Something similar happened a decade ago with the advent of search. Many people intuitively sensed that aligning their marketing with what consumers were searching for had to be a good thing, but at first they were unsure how to go about it, Dholakia said. They didn't know how to put it into their budgets or how to measure the results, he said.

"No disrespect to the engineers at Google, but the genius was not the algorithm. The genius was AdWords. That's what gave marketers a way to spend against search and see exactly what was coming back, because they controlled the dials," Dholakia said. "Moving forward another 10 years, we have another massive change in Web behavior called social." Again, marketers understand that if they are selling cars, and people on social networks are talking about cars, they ought to figure out how to connect with those people, he said. And they want to be able to track those efforts right through to the conversion of marketing to sales.

"But, they're saying, I don't know how to do that," Dholakia said. "And my punchline is always, until Crowd Factory came along."

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