Posts Tagged ‘Crowdsourcing’

Crowdsourcing Ideas and Job Descriptions @BestBuy

July 8, 2009

Today I received a tweet from Barry Judge Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy regarding Best Buy’s experience in their attempts to establish a new position called Sr. Manager, Emerging Media Marketing.

After the job was initially posted, Best Buy received community feedback about applicants’ educational and experience required for qualification.

Best Buy has since decided to crowdsource the job’s description and qualifications to the social media community via their BestBuy IdeaX site.

How the Best Buy Idea X site works:

How IdeaX Exchange Works

How IdeaX Exchange Works

For those interested in participating in the process, Judge has posted directions and guidelines for participating in the crowdsourcing of the Emerging Media Marketing manager job on his blog.

Senior Manager Emerging Media Marketing Besty Buy

Senior Manager Emerging Media Marketing Besty Buy

Judge also provides four reasons why Best Buy decided to take the route they have with this particular job opening:

Why on earth would we do this?

1. No, not because we’re lazy, we just recognize that a large group of people will come up with more ideas than a small group. We’d like help thinking through the important and relevant stuff for this job.

2. This role is a new one for us as it likely is for other companies. We have a lot of smart and social media savvy people here and amongst our partners and friends.  However, there are a larger number of smart and social media savvy people “out there”. So instead of thinking we know it all, we’d like to increase our chances of getting it right by surveying the wisdom of the industry.

3. One of our recruiters Joshua Kahn announced this role via Twitter a couple weeks ago. Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang, Jason Falls, and others it spawned dozens of re-tweets and at least a couple of blog posts. Pretty incredible buzz considering it’s a job posting. Many people had alternative ideas for us; good ideas. We thought it would be an interesting experiment to be more deliberate about capturing and actually using those ideas.

4. Based on the buzz, we also thought, it would be a great way to spread the message that we’re hiring for this role.

Ultimately, Best Buy is looking for help with this project from the social media community in three areas: Description of responsibilities basic qualifications and required qualifications.

For more information about helping Best Buy decribe and recruit a Senior Manager, Emerging Media Marketing, visit Barry Judge’s blog.

Google Aggregating Ideas: Project 10 to the 100th

September 24, 2008

To help celebrate its 10th birthday, Google has announced their latest iteration for crowdsourcing ideas with their Project 10^100.

Google’s Project 10^100 ( “ten to the hundredth”) aims to solicit and bankroll fresh ideas Google believes could have broad and beneficial impact on people’s lives.

Google Inc. plans to award a prize of up to $10 million to help make winning ideas a reality.

People are encouraged to submit their ideas, in any of 25 languages, on Project 10 to the 100th through October 20. Entrants must briefly describe their idea and answer six questions, including, “If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how?”

CNN will be covering this Google project, including profiles of ideas and the people who submit them from around the world.

A Google spokeswoman was reluctant to set parameters for the submissions, although the project’s Web site suggests that successful ideas should address such issues as providing food and shelter, building communities, improving health, granting more access to education, sustaining the global ecosystem and promoting clean energy.

“We don’t want to limit it at all. We want a wide range of ideas,” said Bethany Poole, product marketing manager at Google, who announced the project live Wednesday morning on CNN along with Andy Berndt, managing director of Google’s Creative Lab. “We think great ideas come from anywhere.”

“These ideas can be big or small, technology-driven or brilliantly simple — but they need to have impact,” said Google in a press release. “We know there are countless brilliant ideas that need funding and support to come to fruition.”

Learn more about Project 10 to the 100th @ YouTube: