Engaging Social Medias: Case Mobile Crowdsourcing

In this paper we present an attempt of engaging social media population for bringing crowdsourcing model into a mobile context. The proposed social media crowdsourcing platform leverages the existing social networking applications to rapidly allocate microtasks to a wide network of crowdworkers, and visualizes the geotagged result data in order to create a sort of visual information pool for public use. Activating participation is the critical success factor of social media engagement, and it is a significant challenge for researchers and practitioners to find ways to engage and direct the participants’ attention to useful purposes. In this paper, we review three approaches to incentivising engagement in social media, especially mobile social media: the game-based incentives, the social psychological incentives, and the economic incentives. Their use and measurement is examined in the context of a specific application, a mobile social search system. A prototype system and its user study are described. The results will contribute to the understanding of engagement and incentives in mobile social media.