With great power comes the frequent question of how best to use it. Crowdsourcing your work done is not immune to this quandary.
Several influential bloggers have expressed interest in utilizing this emerging capability, but haven’t had the time to divine an example worthy of a demonstration. So, we came up with a simple one.
Question: How much does word choice in a blog post’s title affect readership?
We picked 25 ranked marketing blogs and had the on-demand workers get us either their past 25 articles, or all the articles within the last 90 days, whichever number was larger (1,141 total). We weren’t really sure what we were going to find, so we Smartsourced up a variety of bits of information about each article (# of comments, category of content, web traffic, publication date, day of the week, etc.).
There were many state variables competing to call into question the conclusions we drew, but one conclusion in particular stood out clearly:
Conclusion: When certain terms are included in a blog’s title, there is more interaction from the readership (based on comment volume).
- · The word Facebook
- · The word Twitter
- · The phrase “Top # … of things” (e.g. Top 5 Things to Avoid …)
- · The phrase “How to …”
Average # of Comments per Article
There results were produced by 154 separate workers contributing to the effort. A rough quality assessment of the data provided by the workers yielded about an 85% accuracy rating (but some of the categorical work is very subjective anyway). Here is a subset of the data collected on the articles.
We could analyze other elements of blog posts, for example, does a longer post inspire longer comments or does it get fewer comments? What about a more complicated post vs. a shorter, pithy post? The scale, and extremely low cost of these kinds of research provide power enough that the answer to the opening question is: “use it to do things you didn’t think practical before”.
- Brent
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