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The simplicity of Twitter makes it hard to understand its success. At a glance the site simply lets you tell people what you’re up to at any given moment — via cellphone, instant messenger, or the Web. Which sounds clever, but not earth shattering right?  Even founder Biz Stone once admitted that on the surface the idea seems like the “simplest and stupidest idea in the world” to most people.

Before anything else, Twitter was a messaging service, originally described as microblogging. You can share a 140 character message with your followers and they can share messages with you. If you catch yourself reviewing and commenting on items in your friend feed / status update stream on Facebook, then you’re a good way to understanding the social networking appeal of Twitter.

Early on, Twitter’s twist was their SMS syndication, which started as a fun way to SMS all your friends at once, but has since grown to open up lots of uses. Like sports cancellations – you can create an account for your cricket team and get everyone to follow you. If it rains on match day you can let everyone know instantly, using a single SMS.

Then more and more celebrities started using Twitter to share messages and connect with fans. High profile bloggers were the first, but entertainers, comedians, sports stars and musicians have since jumped on the band wagon, introducing Twitter to large non techie mainstream audiences.

As the popularity of the platform has spread, and messages are public and searchable, Twitter has become a source of breaking news. News about political victories, protests, scandals, natural disasters and tragedies is available on Twitter long before mainstream media. In recognition of this Twitter has added trending topics and real time search capabilities to the platform. It’s become an alternative to Google and the destination to find real time information. Searches on Twitter reveal a snapshot of what the world is talking about at that very moment in time.

For businesses this has created a huge opportunity – a completely new channel for promotion, PR and market research.  A simple keyword search can instantly reveal the continuum of opinions and attitudes your customers hold in regard to your brand, products and services. You can find and talk to your customers faster and quicker than ever before – giving a personal voice to your company and helping you to understand what you’re doing well and where you can improve.

What’s more, Twitter expose a suite of data services over an API – a technical interface that allows externally developed applications to access the vast amount of conversations and status updates going on within the platform, in real-time. This has attracted a swarm of talented developers fighting to come up with the next leading communications tools, news breaking services, market research applications and more.

So Twitter now has a lot of uses. Its popularity can’t be explained by a single feature anymore, but requires an understanding of the new ways users are using the platform. And for each new use of the platform, Twitter’s growth curve gets steeper and steeper.

He describes the story of Claudia Menashe, a project director at the National Health Museum in Washington, DC. She was creating an exhibition devoted to pandemics like swine flu and wanted some photographs to accompany the displays. The museum was on a tight budget, so rather than commission a photographer to capture new, exclusive images, she wanted to use existing stock – images that photographers have already taken and are available for multiple clients to use.

She eventually found a freelance photographer specialising in the health industry. Leveraging the non-profit status of the museum, Claudia managed to negotiate down the price to $100 to $150 per photograph. About half of what a corporate client would pay.

After several weeks Claudia emailed the photographer to say that, regretfully, she had to pull out of the deal. “I discovered a stock photo web site called iStockPhoto,” she wrote, “which has images at very affordable prices.” Claudia makes a pretty modest understatement here, as she found over 50 suitable images for about $1 each.

iStockPhoto, which started as an image sharing service for photographers, undercut an independent photographer by at least 99%. How? By building a community of amateur photographers around a marketplace for their photos. With the price of digital cameras and SLRs tumbling, the ability to take great photos has become widespread. Combined with power of the web to instantly share and distribute digital content around the world, the photography industry was ripe for crowdsourcing led reform. Professional photographers have since lost a lot of business to iStockPhoto and a host of similar online stock photography collections.

Alongside iStockPhoto there are several successful and interesting creative industry examples – Sellaband and Threadless are worth visiting. Wikipedia is the classic and arguably most successful implementation – read my post on Wikipedia here. Apple’s App Store and Facebook’s similar app development platform are other recently well published examples.

What next then? At Careerworms we’re among the first to apply crowdsourcing to recruitment – the next industry to be transformed by the benefits of crowdsourcing?

It seemed a good starting point then, to define what the term crowdsourcing encompasses. In doing this I pulled down a definition from Wikipedia. I was immediately struck by the irony, as Wikipedia is probably one of the best known examples that demonstrate the benefits and transformational power of crowdsourcing. Here it is:

Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. Problems are broadcast to group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users — also known as the crowd — typically form into online communities, and the crowd submits solutions. The crowd can also sort through solutions to find the best ones. These best solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place — the crowdsourcer — and the winning individuals in the crowd are sometimes rewarded. In some cases, this labour is well compensated, either monetarily, with prizes, or with recognition. In other cases, the only rewards may be kudos or intellectual satisfaction. Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from experts or small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization

I would expand this further to describe the role of the crowdsourcer: a facilitator and architect that designs a structure that enables and provides incentives for user participation.

I have included this definition here verbatim. It’s a succinct description that has been drafted, reviewed, enhanced and maintained by the Wikipedia editorial community. Crowdsourcing is a fairly new concept with few experts in the world – the fact Wikipedia can keep up to date with rapidly evolving ideas in a field like crowdsourcing is an incredible achievement.

So how does Wikipedia use crowdsourcing? Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, has designed an open yet controlled hierarchical collaborative system that allows anyone to contribute to a topic. Several mechanisms are in place to ensure quality, with editors able to monitor pages manually and programmatically to ensure the content is in line with current expert opinion.

The incentives at work here are similar to those found in the scientific community: a desire to publish true facts about the world, to share knowledge and fundamentally: to receive recognition or credit among peers in the contributor’s community. While Wikipedia doesn’t credit authorship, authors often claim to know each other and frequently discuss and contribute to topics they are well known for within their community of expertise. For every professor and scholar denouncing the inaccuracy of a particular topic on Wikipedia, there are ten actively editing the wiki to improve the quality.

It clearly works. A crowd of 85,000 contributors, 14,000,000 articles and 65,000,000 monthly visitors are evidence of that. The currency, accessibility and breadth of content on Wikipedia has left predecessors Britannica and Microsoft Encarta in the dust. The architecture of openness, collaboration and contribution incentives is a perfectly executed example of using a crowdsourcing model to create an immeasurably valuable resource.

So what lessons can we draw from the success of Wikipedia? If we consider what characteristics make crowdsourcing such an effective model for encyclopaedic web publishing, can we identify other industries ripe for introducing a crowdsourcing solution?

It’s a fantastic way to hire people, as through your connection you have someone you trust that can vouch for their competencies (and sanity!). And it’s cheap.

Lots of companies use social recruiting in its most simple form – approaching well connected contacts within their network and asking if they know anyone suitable. Candidates sourced in this way are typically high quality and a good match for the vacancy, as the employer / recruiter has en existing professional relationship with the referrer.

For small companies with well connected management this approach is effective. But for bigger companies and recruitment agents, the size of any individual network isn’t big enough to shake out enough suitable candidates. At this point many companies start advertising their vacancies on job boards and in newspapers: a more expensive option that can attract an influx of low quality candidates.

So you could conclude that social recruiting doesn’t scale well.

However, at Careerworms we created a social recruiting solution that works for small, medium and large organisations. We apply a crowdsourcing model to find candidates. In our case the crowd is the hiring company’s (or recruitment agent’s) employees, alumni, clients, investors and previous candidates etc. When an employer is looking for staff, SocialReecruit sends a notification to the relevant people in the employers ‘crowd’ and encourages them to seek out suitable candidates within their own networks. A finders fee incentive ensures a good response to the request for talent.

Sharing tools embedded into the platform and in email notifications increase the exposure for each vacancy, through integration with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and the major online social networking sites.

For companies looking for talented staff, without spending lots of time and money searching, it’s a very effective tool.

A month later the site was dead. The only visitors were an army of search engine bots and crawlers and no amount of marketing revived any interest in the site.

While in hindsight the venture was pretty naïve, it inspired me to start a web company. Since then I have launched several ventures and learned a tremendous amount about the web, running startup companies and turning ideas into products. In particular I have developed an interest in crowdsourcing and the social web – the two topics I plan to write about in this blog.

Social media has transformed the web and enabled crowdsourcing to transform entire industries.  In my role as a director of Careerworms I am an active participant in this transformation. In this blog I plan to write about the insights, trends, products and companies I come across in my day to day involvement with Careerworms.

So if you share an interest in startups, crowdsourcing and social media then you’ll enjoy Crowd Around. Go ahead and subscribe so I know you’re listening!

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