- Zebo.com
- ThisNext.com
- VirtualTourist.com
- ChaCha.com
- Current TV
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
ThisNext.com
As with Zebo, ThisNext relies on members to create its content—namely, lists of their favorite products. Also, like Zebo, ThisNext provides links to stores.
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What You Can Do
- Get emotional. What makes Zebo.com and so many other community-driven sites successful is its basic premise: Young people are passionate about possessions, those they own and those they want. That's an important message for anyone thinking about using crowdsourcing as a manufacturing process. The crowd will not come to you unless you touch them where they live. No one wants to devote time and dollars to a site about your new brand of aspirin; a site dedicated to exchanging news and views about pain control is more likely to succeed.
- Get the crowd involved. As the Zebo site suggests, the more ways you can provide visitors with a chance to express themselves, the more likely they will hang around and identify with your operation. Forums, targeted question-and-answer pages, ratings systems—they're all calculated to keep members busy and involved and eager to keep delivering up more content. It's a virtuous circle.
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When you enter the name of an item in the search bar, you end up on pages with a variety of nominations and links to the nominators. We typed in "surfboard," for example, and discovered 22 options, from miniature surfboard towel hooks ("They brighten up a kid's bathroom," wrote Jody) to a Rusty shortboard ("Thin as a chip, turny but definitely not a flip flopper," according to Allyson). In each case, we were informed how many members recommended an item and what tags were applicable to the choice ("waves," "Venice"). We were also told where the item could be purchased.
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ThisNext, once again like Zebo, is known as a social shopping site. It enables its members to create their own pages with a photo, a profile, and answers to a long series of questions, such as "What is the next big step you'd like to make?" It also allows them to go to other members' blogs to find more examples of their product tastes or simply to establish contact. And although the member lists on ThisNext are weighted toward products, they can range far and wide, from activities (cooking and climbing, for example) to entertainment (movie reviews), to lifestyles (living green).
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In theory, everyone posting products is a private citizen, but it's easy for a company's employees to sign up as individuals and promote the company's product. Some consultants actually advise clients to do so as a means of "building buzz" around a product. Still, such recommendations are in the minority. As a member told the New York Times, "I like the concept of peers, people like me, referring each other to interesting things. It's more trustworthy."
What You Can Do
- Shrug. When you open yourself to the crowd, you will inevitably find some people eager to exploit your site for their own ends. In the case of ThisNext, for example, company employees posing as private citizens are most likely promoting legitimate products. If so, you'll have a hard time distinguishing them from the other recommendations. Try to weed out phony or dangerous products and improper presentations. By and large, though, your best bet is to recognize ahead of time that there will be some difficult people, and when they show up, shrug.
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