Crowdsource it!
When we have a problem, need recommendations, or are looking to learn more about something we turn to our community. We ask for advice, or to hear friends’ and family’s reviews on where to eat or what sight to see, or ask about a relatable scenario in order to see if others think the way we do — all this is the act of crowdsourcing information.
Today, more often then not, in order to gain knowledge through crowdsourcing we turn to Facebook. Social media platforms are even set up so you can post a poll; giving your friends and followers easy-to-click multiple choice answers. When you ask for a recommendation on Facebook, the platform will suggest adding a location in order to get more precise and more helpful recommendations. The social media giants saw this potential use case and built out features that support and make crowdsourcing information even more possible and successful than ever before.
And crowdsourcing information is so powerful: New moms asking for tips from the comfort of their own home, people traveling abroad for the first time needing to know the ins and outs of traveling in foreign countries, making a big-ticket item purchase and getting some reviews from people you trust before spending all that money… If you need important information (or even not so important information, like my one Facebook friend who asks Would-You-Rathers about celebrities on a regular basis) crowdsourcing is the way to go. Not only is it fast, saving you Googling time, but it gives you a wide breadth of personal insight that you may not have been able to achieve just by Googling or asking your friends at the next get together.
Crowdsourcing money is also a very powerful thing that social media has made so easy and successful for the everyday individual. Crowdfunding has saved families in desperate times, friends with potentially fatal illnesses, people who have to make the decision between putting a dear pet to sleep or keeping them alive, donating to worthy causes, and other impactful contributions.
“Community” is bigger and more powerful now than ever and when it comes to content marketing, there is a huge amount of untapped potential.
Not only has social media made it possible to request information from a large reach of people but it has also made it possible to request content. Marketers can spend days going through social media to find relevant content for their campaigns utilizing relevant hashtags. The reality of it is that more people are finding creative outlets and sharing spectacular content just by having access to smartphone cameras. The technology and effort that has gone into making smartphone cameras what they are today hve opened the flood gates for amateur photographers.
So if decent cameras and quality images are much more prevalent and social media has become a content goldmine, why is the content marketing industry still struggling?
The hashtag and tagging phenomenon is not perfect. We’ve taken a look at use cases showing how marketers go about utilizing hashtags for their marketing campaigns before, and this can yield great results, however unreliable. But when it comes to leveraging in-the-moment content, Experiential Marketers struggle.
When hosting a large scale event there is so much that goes into planning and organizing, least of which is the marketing of the event. Not just before the event date but during and after the event. Being able to ride momentum from an event is an important and time-sensitive marketing opportunity. And if they only put on one giant event each year it is that much more important because the UGC and collateral that comes from that event needs to last their marketing campaigns all year long. It can become so important to be able to squeeze every last ounce of marketing fodder.
One way to leverage an event and get marketing collateral is to hire professional teams of photographers and videographers. This leaves social media combing behind but can be an expensive endeavor, however. Expensive in terms of money and time. Waiting for videos to be cut and edited and photos to be cleaned up and ready for sharing can take weeks or months. That precious momentum is completely gone by the time the footage is ready. So this is a less-than-ideal solution but you do get great quality collateral out of it.
Finding an efficient way to crowdsource the content at an event would be the way to go since 50% of consumers capture and share between two and five photos, videos or social posts; and 14% share more than six posts at events. Being able to use this content as the people are taking the photos and capturing the videos would be clutch for this industry. Believe it or not, there is no complete solution out there today. Nothing takes you from point A to point Z; from organizing to the moment of capture to curating and editing and all the way to sharing.
This is how Mobs came to be. While at a concert, our founders discovered how much content was being taken but knew that it was going nowhere because there wasn’t a sufficient solution for taking advantage of it. Mobs allows for collaborative, real-time video content generation. Video stories built by attendees and customizable on the fly. People attending the event can make awesome videos with crowdsourced content from their friends, and marketers can crowdsource the content that meets their goals by asking their attendees to use Mobs. Sharing can happen in the moment for attendees and marketers alike, and the customizable features allow for content to be used again and again in meaningful ways that suit campaigns throughout the year and beyond.
