Mechanical Turks

I love being a Mechanical Turk! And I like the idea and ethos behind it, especially as a Web PR person whose clients generally have limited budgets. Also, the number of times a software app has failed to work successfully because it is only artifical intelligence and lacks 'people power' does seem to have been marginally solved with this approach. But what is a Mechanical Turk and what do we do?



MTurk is an Amazon company. It is basically a system which gets people to do the jobs that computers are unable to do. This can be something as simple as writing a review of a product, finding links for items that fit certain criteria, adding tags to Amazon books, or, my favourite, transcribing podcasts and interviews. There is a whole other side to it which involves web services, APIs, coders, etc but that doesn't really fit in a Web PR blog!

The pay is pitiful, but that works well for those looking to get jobs done. However, as a Turk, the money in your account mounts up fairly quickly if you get bonuses, and you get to spend it on Amazon.com. (This isn't great for a UK Turk as it means no DVDs or electrical stuff, only books but hey...it's money).

However, for a company with a limited budget looking to achieve some results with online marketing but without necessarily the in-house resources (time, people etc) to carry out these tasks, Mechanical Turks are your solution.

Imagine you need to find blogs which are for your target audience eg interested in your products, services, industry sector etc. Don't spend several hours on Google looking for them, pay a MechTurk to find them for you, and review them. Do they have regular postings? How many subscribers? Do they accept comments? Would the blog owner be open for a product review of your product, a prize for a competition, and advert? The list is endless and the cost for a job like that would probably come in the 10-25cents region.

Interviewed a knowledgeable member of staff, a well-known guru in your industry - get a full transcript of it for a couple of dollars. None of the commercial services can do it this cheap, and there are over 20,000 Mechanical Turks up for that particular task.

Want content for your website? Set down some criteria and get it written for you for a few pennies. Want someone to review what your competitors are up to, all the keywords on their websites, what their rankings are in the search engines, etc etc etc? Hire a Turk!

It really is a cheap and efficient way to get jobs done, and the turnover of jobs (or HITs - Human Intelligence Tasks) on MTurk seems to imply that there are a considerable number of us whiling away our free time doing the HITs offered.