Mechanical Turk allows businesses to leverage an on-demand global workforce to perform tasks requiring human intelligence like data entry, content moderation, and search query classification. Requesters can create and publish tasks through the Mechanical Turk web interface or API and workers are paid micro-payments for completing work. Common uses include search marketing, content creation and management, and data verification. Case studies show it can quickly scale workforces and is cost effective.

1. Leveraging the Crowd for SEOSMX Advanced June 8, 2011Natala MenezesSr Product ManagerAmazon Mechanical Turk

2. What is Crowdsourcing? Distributed problem solving Mechanical Turk makes crowdsourcing easy.

3. 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 quicklyAccuracy: Get high quality, efficient and cost effective results.Price: Pay only when you are satisfied with the results.Speed: Start receiving results in minutes

4. How it worksMicro payments through Amazon Flexible PaymentsHuge workforce: Over 500,000 Workers, 190 countriesPlatform can handle millions of tasks, via Web or API

5. Business Use CasesCategorizationClassificationTaggingSentiment AnalysisData ManagementData VerificationData Entry & CollectionData De-duplicationAlgorithm TrainingContent & MediaModerate Photos & ContentContent Creation & EditingTranscriptionBusiness ServicesSearch Relevancy Product Usability Testing Research

6. Search Experts <3 Big DataSearch Marketing: Keyword expansionAdding attribute tagsPulling lists from publicly available toolsDe-duplication / data cleanup and organization Search query research “How would you search for X?” Web ResearchCompetitive research – What is the tagline for this company? What is the SEOMoz Score for this website? Search Results Analysis Of the two results shown – which is the best result?

7. Content CreationArticle writing & editing Write a caption for a photoSummarize the benefits of a product Write a story about a specific topicEdit 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.

8. Content ManagementContent 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? Is this tweet positive or negative?

9. Use Case: Lead CollectionThe Problem:Needed to create a list of local business contacts that met certain criteria:Review rating above 3 starsVertical focus – family friendly restaurants onlyWithin a certain distance of downtown The SolutionPosted tasks to Mechanical Turk to gather information about potential contacts. Used this data to prioritize their list, then took the smaller subset for additional data augmentation

10. 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 workforce10 x more cost efficient than an in-house solution

11. Things you can’t do:Disrupting or degrading the operation of any website or internet serviceEx. Generate "referred" site visits or click through trafficGo to this website and click on the most valuable adEx. Ask Workers to take action to manipulate a website’s behavior or resultsGo to X search engine and search for “Danny Sullivan is Awesome” Violate the terms and conditions of an activity or website (for instance asking Workers to vote for something) or that directly or indirectly promote a site, service, or opinion or ask Workers to solicit third partiesEx. Ask a Worker to perform a marketing activity on your behalf – for instance voting for something “Tweet This” or “Like” Ex. Ask a Worker to write a review on a 3rd party site Go to Yelp and write a review for this restaurant Capturing PII Ex. requiring disclosure of the Worker's identity or e-mail address, either directly or indirectlyEx. requiring registration at another website or grouphttps://requester.mturk.com/help/faq#restrictions_use_mturk

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

13. Thank you.Natala Menezesnatala@amazon.com@amazonmturkFacebook.com/amazonmturkmechanicalturk.typepad.com

14. FrameworkWhat is crowdsourcing What is mturkWhat can you do w/ MTurk: big data tasks Keyword expansionCompetitive research / web researchContent Creation How to accessDirect or partners A note on policy

15. 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:

16. Search Enhancement / RelevanceSearch discovery requires categorization and expansion or classification of 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:

17. How it works:. “Validate, Pay & Go” “Design & Publish”