Using Twitter to crowd-source the world
What started as a small experiment 24 hours ago to use the lists function on Twitter to create county lists in Ireland has now snowballed into projects covering the UK and Ireland.
Simply Zesty, an online PR and social media agency based in Dublin, are using crowdsourcing to create county lists of Twitter users. The company have set a limit of 72 hours per country, to gather as many users as possible. The idea is to create lists by area that anyone can use and also to produce a map showing which areas are the most active on Twitter. The experiment started in Ireland on Tuesday morning and in under than 24 hours they had spread it to the UK and America, due to the high demand.
The project itself shows the power of social media and is an example of just how quickly news can spread. The UK and US experiments were featured on Techcrunch, which has contributed to the snowball effect.
The project works through crowd-sourcing as people have to send a tweet to be included. Word of mouth is key to the success. To take part is simple and for each country users just have to tweet the following (replacing the place name with their county/state) :
Ireland “I want to get listed #TwitterCork add yourself here http://bit.ly/2C70pP”
England “I want to get listed #TwitterEssex add yourself here http://bit.ly/44DRZ5″
America “I want to get listed #TwitterCalifornia add yourself here http://bit.ly/40ZL4M”
Lauren Fisher, cofounder of Simply Zesty says “This is a really exciting experiment and we just can’t believe how quickly it’s growing. We never thought that just 24 hours ago we would be doing this in the UK and America. It’s certainly putting the new Lists function in Twitter through the paces. We started off doing the Ireland list manually but have now got people working on scripts to help us out a bit! When Twitter lists first launched there was a mixed reaction and some people weren’t too sure if they were useful. We hope we’ve found a great use for them and I can’t wait to see which areas are the most active on Twitter.”
Niall Harbison, cofounder of Simply Zesty says “We wanted to create something inherently useful that people all over the world would use. Imagine moving to Devon from abroad and being able to add 500 local people instantly to your network. The possibilities for this are endless”
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