Crowdsourcing entails placing an open call to the widest possible audience to help brainstorm new product offerings, contribute personal knowledge or participate in a community-based campaign. Companies tend to learn early on that the most successful crowdsourcing campaigns will focus their outreach to a target pool of respondents based on set criteria. One recent example of this was inspired by Middle Sister Wines' crowdsourcing campaign, which targeted women with an interest in low to moderately priced wine.
According to ClickZ, Middle Sister Wines used online conversations to help develop new product offerings and maintained social engagement through its innovative use of fictional personas. Users would post messages to Facebook and inspire customers to participate in forums and various contests. This campaign focused on "women who enjoy drinking affordable wine." They determined that this demographic made up 60 to 80 percent of the market. This was in contrast to "men who purchase fine vintages," who currently received the bulk of the attention in wine marketing. Due in part to this targeted approach, Middle Sister Wines was able to garner 74,000 Facebook fans and continue a trend that has Middle Sister Wines doubling sales each year since 2006.
Targeted crowdsourcing is likely to receive more attention if the success rates continue. Marketers need to ensure that they're able to get sufficient exposure to the right audience on social networking sites and are displaying ads during the times that qualified users are most likely to see them.
Semcasting's facebook microTargeting fulfills both of these needs through the use of comprehensive demographic and psychographic profiles. Using over 750 data variables and predictive modeling, facebook microTargeting is able to identify the Facebook users who are most qualified to respond favorably to crowdsourcing calls to action when they are ready to respond.
