On Digital

Irfan Kamal June 25th, 2008

Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) was not just adventurous, but pretty smart too. As many of us know, Tom convinced a few friends to take on the job of painting a fence by making it seem fun.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and we see the same basic idea being used creatively by Gwap, FoldIt , Brandtags and some similarly entertaining (and secretly useful) little games on the Internet.

FoldIt

You have fun solving a puzzle using actions like “Shake” and “Wiggle” and competing with others to see who can get the highest scores.  FoldIt gets solutions to complex protein folding problems that help with HIV/AIDS, cancer and Alzheimer’s research.

Gwap

A Carnegie Mellon project, Gwap lets you play games around media labeling and drawing. Gwap gets media tagged and improves computer vision.

Brandtags

You have fun free associating and seeing what others think.  Brand owners get zeitgeist for their brands.

The overall technique for having people help you out is usually referred to as crowdsourcing. I’d call this variant “funsourcing”, and when used in a marketing context it can be a very powerful way to achieve a range of marketing goals, from gaining word of mouth to researching positioning.

Tags: Cause Marketing, Innovation, Social Media

• Cause Marketing , Innovation , Social Media
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