Inside Word: What Crowdsourcers Can Learn From ‘American Idol’

Kenneth Yeung

The Inside Word is a weekly feature that looks at compelling industry debates and discussions unfolding on the blogs of employees at digital-media companies.

Poster: Kenneth Yeung

Blog name: The Letter Two

Position: Yeung is a freelance interactive producer, who also blogs for domain name registration firm Network Solutions.

Backstory: There’s been debate recently about how businesses can effectively use crowdsourcing — generally defined as outsourcing a task usually associated with one person to a group. LinkedIn, for instance, faced a backlash last month when it asked members if they would be interested in translating some of the site’s content into other languages. Many said no. In a blog post, Yeung presents American Idol as a model for effective crowdsourcing. American Idol lets viewers choose which contestants they want to stay on the show — but only after the choices have been filtered down — and the judges have given their own points of view. More than 100 million votes were cast during this year’s season finale.

Blog post: “You must build up trust and a relationship with the people you want help from,” Yeung writes. “American Idol has done really well because they have the judges telling the contestants and viewers what they think and they

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