RobQuig

HootSuite’s Dave Olsen reading from Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer.”

In all the years I’ve gone to Interactive, I’ve never seen someone read out of a 140-year-old classic novel.

Dave Olsen, the vice president for community at HootSuite, read from Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer.”

He read about the part in the novel where Tom Sawyer talked kids into whitewashing a fence for him.

“I started thinking about this,” Olsen said. “He had to convey excitement, a bit of mystery” to get people to help him with the work. “I also realized Tom was being a little manipulative.”

Olsen said thinking about that made him examine whether he was taking advantage of people when working on a crowdsourcing project.

One of his big projects was the True North Media House, a crowdsourcing media project that took place during the Olympics in Vancouver.

To make a crowdsourcing project work, he said you need to:

* Make it fun for people

* Give them an incentive

* Allow people to self-identify themselves. In the Olympics project, he had people print out their own badges and then cover content.

* Give them a chance to be a part of something bigger

* Make it easy to spread information so people will “beat the drum for you.”

He said the media caught onto their project. “All the official stuff paled in comparison to what we did,” he said. “We took over the Internet.”

He also talked about Phones for Fearless, which donated camera phones to people in a poor area of Vancouver and then trained the people who received them on shooting videos photos and posting them online to tell their stories.

“By the end of the day we were jammed packed. We had piles of phones,” he said. “The project has a legacy.” He said people are still donating phones.

He said what made it work:

* They went out into the community to thank people

* It was an important project, which draws people

* Convenience - it was a convenient service for people who had old phones

* Altruism

Another project he worked on is the Hootsuite Translation Project. He said it started when they realized HootSuite was popular in Japan. When they asked people in Japan what they wanted, they told them they wanted the tool to be translated into Japanese, which he said was hard because there are odd terms, such as “retweet.”

He said HootSuite reached out to the community to see who could help them out with this. He says they now have 14 languages, and “it was done all with stickers and T-shirts.”

“People get extremely passionate” about their languages, he said. They go out of their way to help HootSuite translate their tools because of “love and pride in their language.”

He said anyone can sign up, but they pick a language coordinator to be the arbitrer of what the proper definitions are, etc. They use Pootle as a tool to translate using the crowd.

“We let them paint our fence.”