TAKA DESIGNS

Traditional methods of gaining feedback about your brand or website online have typically relied on blogs, surveys or polls. With the emergence of social media sites and tools such as Twitter, Facebook and Google Alerts, you now have the ability to monitor and listen to your audience in an indirect way.

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What is crowdsourcing? Think of it as taking a task performed by an employer or contractor and outsourcing it to a large group of people or community. It’s been done on review sites like Yelp, articles on Wikipedia and even voting for contestants on American Idol.

Let’s take a look at Yelp. Review sites have been around forever. You’ll probably remember Citysearch as one of the more popular ones. So why has Yelp been so successful? In July 2009, it had an estimated 8.6 million unique visitors and 80% growth from a year ago.

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Let’s stop a second and think about how we search for information on the internet for things like events. Most of you will probably use Google, or maybe Bing if you’re a rebel? But the information you’re searching for has probably already happened sometime in the past and it’s eventually picked up by search engines. Even this blog post probably won’t be picked up by Google for a while.

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URL shorteners have been around for quite some time. One of the first to rise in popularity was TinyURL.com. URL shorteners work as follows:

Say you have a nice long link like this:

http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?t

ype=3&campid=5336224516&toolid=10001&customid=tiny-
hp&ext=unicycle&satitle=unicycle

Services such as TinyURL will turn that link into this:

http://tinyurl.com/unicycles

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