Self-Building Lists

Think of the list that you’d like built. Describe the criteria by which a member of that list would qualify, and then jot down a couple of examples as seed rows. Now, sit back and watch it grow.

How is this possible? It’s another cool crowdsourcing possibility with our Smartsourcing feature. Let me give you a couple of examples.

Who Provides Crowdsourcing Technologies? I had a list of a half dozen crowdsourcing providers and wanted to fill it out to include all the known companies with online offerings.

I crafted a Sheet called “Vendors – Crowdsourcing”, set up the columns for the data I wanted and typed in some sample answers: Amazon Mechanical Turk, eLance, oDesk, LivePerson. Then, published the Sheet as Read Only as well as created a SmartForm link.

Then, I Smartsourced the following instructions (you can actually try it as the links are live – if you do, be courteous, all the world can see your work):

Find Additional Websites/Companies that serve up outsourced services (Crowdsourcing-type) Look at the sheet in this link, and find my current list of companies or websites that offer crowdsourced or outsourced business services.

                                   The Current Crowdsourcing List

I'm interested in other websites that also enable business people to get things done through virtual resources. I'm NOT looking for the traditional outsourcing companies; I'm looking for those companies that operate like eLance, Mechanical Turk, oDesk, etc.  If you aren't sure what I'm talking about, please do not do this work as I’ll reject your submissions.

I'll pay you 10 cents for every example you can find (up to 20 examples) that qualifies and is not already in the list. Simply use this link as many times as you like. Each time you use it, your answer will appear in the list above once you refresh it.

                                       The New Value Entry Form

Once you are done, insert your Worker ID (so that I can appropriately credit you) and total count of entries you made into the Amazon Mechanical Turk HIT and press Submit. Once I’ve checked your entries, I’ll approve the work and you’ll be paid.

Amazingly, the list began growing almost immediately. I authorized 3 workers to work on my list, and within 20 minutes, they’d added another 15 examples. I resubmitted for another 3 workers and 23 more rows were added. Clicking down through the results, I found a few that didn’t qualify and deleted them. All in, I authorized payment for 33 rows – so a total of $3.30.  (It's helpful if you occasionally sort the primary column alphabetically as it helps the workers check the current list).

It’s worked well with much larger lists as well.

• 300+ Project Management Vendors
• 140+ CRM Software Vendors •
• 50+ Online Document Management Vendors

And, for much, much larger lists, I simply pre-segment them into manageable categories like State.

Example: I want all the towns in America that host a celebration on the 4th of July, along with their website and the name of their City Manager. I run the same process as above, but do it by State. Most States have less than 300 towns or cities, so it works quite well.

Feel free to ask for help if you’d like to run your own list, or try your luck and see if I’ll build it for you.

Brent