experiencefreak.com

A letter from the internet:

To my dearest technology geeks, marketing entreprenuers, info-strategists, and designers.

I love you dearly. I just want you to know that. I mean, without you I wouldn’t be here. I owe you everything, but… I’m afraid I have to break up with you. Instead of working with you direct, I’m going to do things myself, or surf the thousands of people that can do your job cheaper and better.

Really though, it’s not you. It’s me. That’s the way I’m built to think after all. Sometimes I wish you didn’t watch The Matrix, Terminator, or Star Trek Borg episodes so often.

Take care, and maybe I’ll interact with you soon. I’ll have my spiders contact your experience metatags and rfp responses posts and we’ll do lunch.

xxxooo,

The Internet

Hmmmm.. Sound far fetched to you? Your waaaay to personable, talented, well-liked, and educated right? Well think again my friends cause Amazon is into the long-tail of people sourcing, creating a project-based automation system to dole out tasks of your job to independant consultants, freelancers, moonlighters, retirees, and simply anyone people who might have the time on there hands. Enter Mechanical Turk.

The concept is amazing, though clearly not set up to make any of us alot of money. As Bezos says,while most companies and salaried folk dread the commoditization of their business, Amazon thrives within it and wants to monetize project sourcing Wal-Mart style. It’s been around for a few years, but looks as if it could be ready to get mroe traction as similiar platforms seem to be popping up all around over the past 12 months.  Though it’s hard to know how much elasticity this process has for extended marketing services, there’s a growing community of free-agents and companies that use these types of services online.

Things to consider before we get ahead of ourselves.  Quality control of output? Feedback mechanisms for strategy development? Good old fashioned relationship building and peer-two-peer collaboration to make the product better? Like the backlash of customer service outsourcing, lack of interpersonal interaction or communication skills could lead to stumbling blocks. Regardless, this direct-to-task master approach could surely make certain marketing service functions a heck of a lot easier to commoditize.

Random Tangent: ..if you take this to the extreme case, it makes you wonder if an “idea economy” matters with systems like mechanical turk in place. Does it break down the advantages of highly educated/technically trained workers in a traditional salaried job? A task-oriented “idea” economy? I’ll let Grant or Logan mull that one over, but in the mean time I’m drooling over the genius of these new Amazon platforms. I also presume that theres a similiar strategy independents could take to make this work for them.

In case your thinking Amazon is the only one with skin in the task automation game, here’s a bunch more examples.  And to my earlier point, they seem to be cropping up at an expanding pace thanks to the mainstreaming of social technology:

Source/Bid/Outsource

TechDirt

FreelanceChina

Elance

Collaboration and Sourcing:

Kluster

Automated Marketing Intel and Consulting Sources

TriggerBox

Speed To Market Planning Tools/Complexity Reduction:

Jumpchart

….also talked about in detail by Tim Ferris and similarly (but less task-oriented/actionable): Behance, The Purple List, etc

Can anyone help me with more?

Fun stuff to wrap your head around. And by the way, don’t lose too much sleep my free-agent friends. Our hourlies might go down but after we:

1) outsource someone to disseminate our profile’s throughout the multitude of these properties that are going to spring-up,

2) spider the web for our specialties key words,

3) and do a little SEO on our credentials,

we’ll be mechanical turks making the long-tail bucks amazon style too ;)

Note: Thanks to Noah for the inspiration.

Categories: online inspiration · social media · techTags: , cloud staffing, crowd-sourcing, elance, marketing outsourcing, micro-automation, online task automation, people cloud computing, web automation