Home Smartsheet and Google Apps: Crowdsourcing Made Easy

Smartsheet and Google Apps: Crowdsourcing Made Easy

Let’s say you want a list of every Fortune 1,000 CEO in the United States, along with a picture and contact information.

You can look through Google. Top page results may help a bit. But to get the granularity you need, top page results can only go so far. What’s the best way to go about discovering and collecting information that is so often scattered and fragmented?

Crowdsourcing works but you need a process and a way to organize the information.

Smartsheet provides a way to use wikis and spreadsheets for crowdsourcing information from services like Mechanical Turk and Live Works.

Smartsheet recently integrated with Google Apps. Clients can work from Google Apps to crowdsource information through Smartsheet.

Let’s say you have a list of the startup companies from the top 10 metro areas in the United States. You have the names of the companies in Google Apps. But you are lacking the name of the CEO and any contact information. So, you add some columns and open the Smartsheet application directly from Google Apps.

You may now make your request to have the work done for you. Smartsheet opens a service such as Mechanical Turk. You describe the job, what you need and set your price. As the tasks are performed, the new information pops into the spreadsheet.

You can then import the spreadsheet back into Google Apps.

Smartsheet integrates with a wiki environment. For example, Smartsheet works with Brain Keeper. Structured information from Smartsheet may be imported into the wiki, providing the crowd-sourced data to anyone with access.

Crowdsourcing is a classic example of how the enterprise can get information almost immediately that could take hours to collect if done manually by one person.

The cost savings alone makes Smartsheet an application worth giving a try.

SmartSheet is a subscription service. Pricing starts at $9.95 per month on a per-user-basis.

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