Red Balloons, Social Media, and Causes

The folks at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) ran a fascinating research project recently, and the results are interesting for those of us who are involved with using social media for cause marketing.
The researchers placed 10 moored red twelve-foot weather balloons in 10 locations around the continental United States and offered a $40,000 to the first person (or team) to send in the exact correct location for all 10. There were a total of 4,372 teams who entered, and the winning team (from MIT) took the prize by reporting the exact locations of all 10 balloons in just over 9 hours.
How did they do it? First of all, they used social media to recruit team members and mobilize them across the country. By creating Twitter and Facebook accounts and a Twitter hash tag, the MIT team was able to “crowd source” the project, getting real-time reports on sightings all over the country. They also encouraged people to recruit their friends onto the project, and provided a financial incentive – $2,000 for the first person to provide coordinates of a balloon found, $500 to the person who recruited them, $250 to the person who recruited that person, and so on.
There was also a cause marketing angle: the MIT team promised to give a percentage of the $40,000 prize to charity, adding additional incentive for individuals all over the nation to jump onto Twitter and Facebook to help the MIT team.
It was a pretty interesting study which provides insights into how real-time social media can be used to quickly mobilize volunteers to a cause.
Want to know more? You can read a Forbes Magazine article on the research study, and listen to an NPR report.