This webinar discussed using Mechanical Turk for various social media use cases. Mechanical Turk allows businesses to scale their workforce for tasks like content moderation, discovery, and analysis by distributing work to online workers. For example, one company used Turk to categorize 73,000 products in 4 days at a cost savings of 75% compared to in-house staff. The webinar provided examples of how requests can create HITs for tasks like analyzing sentiment of tweets, finding keywords in videos, and moderating user-generated content at scale.

1. Social MediaUse CasesWEBINAR February 24, 2011 Presented by: Natala MenezesSr. Product Manager John HoskinsSr. Business Development Manager

2. Welcome Logistics How to ask a question:. Ask a question with the questionpanel. We will moderate questions. Agenda Introductions Marketplace Review Social Media Use Cases Q & A

3. Introductions

4. What is Mechanical Turk?

5. Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work. Mechanical Turk gives businesses and developers access to an on-demand, scalable workforce. Flexibility: Scale your workforce up and down quickly Accuracy: Get high quality, efficient and cost effective results. Price: Pay only when you are satisfied with the results. Speed: Start receiving results in minutes

6. How it Works

7. Workforce 500,000 Workers 190+ Countries Who are the Workers? Workers are global Valuable source of feedback on how to improve your HITS Managing Your Workforce Can narrow to US based (i.e. when you need western culture competence) Leverage qualifications to find your best Workers

8. Popular Use Cases Categorization Classification Tagging Sentiment Analysis Data Management Data Verification Data Entry & Collection Data De-duplication Algorithm Training Business Services Search Relevancy Product Usability Testing Research Content & Media Moderate Photos & Content Content Creation & Editing Transcription

9. Social Media Solutions Content Moderation Is this photo appropriate given our guidelines? Is this a good question or article for our site? Content Discovery Do these photos have useful meta tags? What are the keywords used during this video? Content Analysis What is the sentiment of this tweet? Content Creation Launching a new site and need relevant stories?

10. Photo & Content Moderation Moderate UGC at scale (millions of items a day): Photos Comments Posts Reported violations Keep up with reports so that you can effectively remove inappropriate content before it negatively impacts your brand. How it works:

11. Content Discovery Search discovery requires attributes – keywords that users can use to find content that relates to them. Adding meta data – such as detailed descriptions, attribute tags and categories can improve discoverability. How it works:

12. Case Study: Magnum Photos “An image sent out through the new system will come back, having been keyworded by up to eight people, in less than a minute. After piloting small trials last summer, images are now being sent out in batches of 20,000.” "You can keyword an entire archive within weeks.“ -- Meagan Young, Magnum's Web Content ManagerQuickly removed their backlog through access to on-demand workforce 10 x more cost efficient than an in-house solution

13. Case Study – Channel Intelligence Problem: A backlog of 73,000 uncategorized products Solution: Categorize them through Mechanical Turk. Details: Project completed in 4 days, vs. 600 man hours done previously in-house. By integrating Mechanical Turk into their backend process, they were able to realize a back office savings of over 75% vs. the cost of in-house staff.

14. Experiment: Search Discovery Problem:Requester did not show up in search results for topics (in this case a musical artist) that they had content. Solution:Requester took 2000 pictures from their site and annotated them adding keywords, and captions Results:Improved relevance of the pages saw their presence in search results jump. Their pages were now in the top 5 – 10 results, translating into a higher volume of page views and user engagement on their site.

15. Content Analysis Understanding the value of content helps improve how content is displayed or responded to. Should an article be on the home page? How relevant is it to your business? Analyze content relevance Analyze content sentiment Is this tweet positive or negative?

16. Content Creation Article writing & editing Write a caption for a photo Summarize the benefits of a product Write a story about a specific topic Edit the grammar & style of an article Photo selection Find a creative commons photo for an article Transcription Transcribe video or audio content Tip: Always collect content in your HIT, never have Workers post directly to a 3rd party website.

17. Requester access:

18. Applications & Solution Providers Mechanical Turk supports a robust ecosystem of providers that have built or can build solutions to meet your needs.

19. How can I get more accurate results? Plurality Asking multiple Workers to do assignments (if their answers agree then the result is validated) Qualifying & Training Workers Bonus payments Known Data Sets

20. Q & A Your Questions. Answered.

21. Thank you. @amazonmturk Facebook.com/amazonmturk Mechanicalturk.typepad.com