Crowdsourcing Hits the Mainstream: How Online Communities Are Changing The Way Work Is Done

Anyone can build a loosely affiliated, unstructured crowd - a mob. However, the key to building a successful crowdsourcing business is to advance beyond that to create an engaged, interactive community of highly skilled professionals. In this session, you will learn the secrets to building a successful online community and how that feeds into the crowdsourcing model, including reputation and compensation systems, community recruitment and engagement strategies, the role of social media, as well as both the challenges and benefits of crowdsourcing models.

With more than a decade of marketing experience at companies ranging from web startups to publicly-traded corporations, Matt Johnston leads uTest's marketing and community efforts. He is responsible for leading the strategy and execution for uTest’s brand-building, community engagement, and telling the uTest story to the world through integrated marketing and PR efforts.

Before joining uTest, Matt served as VP of Marketing at OnForce. Before that, he was the Director of Marketing at Mimeo.com and worked at Herman Miller as a web marketing manager and commercialization strategist. Matt earned a Bachelor of Arts in Marketing from Calvin College, as well as an MBA in Marketing from New York University's Stern School of Business.

uTest is the world's largest marketplace for software testing services. The company provides real-world testing services through its community of 21,000+ professional testers from 160 countries around the world. More than 1,000 companies - from web startups to global software leaders - have signed up for the uTest marketplace to get their web, desktop and mobile applications tested.  More information can be found at http://www.utest.com or the software testing blog at http://blog.utest.com.