Does A Name With Your Work Matter? (Photo courtesy of VividBreeze)
One of the important tenants of the Trada marketplace is that all optimizers (our paid search experts) must use their real names. We thought it was very important for our advertisers to know exactly who was working on their campaign. In addition, we felt if real names were out there it would encourage them to focus on being the best they can be (as their real name appears in leaderboards [screen shot] and such).
I had an interesting conversation with John Winsor (@jtwinsor) and Claudia Batten (@claudiabatten) at Victors and Spoils on this subject. V&S doesn’t require their creative crowd to use their real names as far as submitting their work goes. They do require their creatives to sign up using their real name and V&S takes a lot of care to vet the person is who they say they are. They do this because they feel:
1) The verification of “reality” by V&S is good enough for their clients (they are the vouch-for)
2) A client doesn’t want to sift through everyone’s profile anyway (even if they could see it)
3) Some excellent creatives simply can’t let the world know they are moonlighting in V&S as they work for existing agencies which may be the AOR of the client or may be a competitor to the AOR of the client
4) V&S doesn’t want to preclude the best of the best from being in their system due to issues of having to be public about participation and the conflicts it might bring
Interestingly, some of these anonymous creatives are having great success in V&S they will inevitably want their real name to be associated with their work. For example, V&S just produced a large TV campaign spot for a big brand advertiser using their crowd and the winning creative team will be behind a massive public campaign. I can only imagine they will want to get the credit for their amazing work. So how do you handle this dichotomy?
My original stance was that most paid search agencies wouldn’t mind if their PPC experts moonlighted in a system like Trada. In talking today about this with our VP of Product Management and Marketing, Bill Quinn (@billquinn), he asked a very simple question: would you want to know if one of our engineers was doing contract work on the side. My instant answer was yes (simply because we pay our staff as full-time employees). Now that I think about it, would I care if our engineers were working in TopCoder? Maybe the answer would be “no”, I love it when people continue to refine their professional skills and these competitions are one way of doing it. So I’m split on this.
So what is the right answer to the anonymity question? All crowdsourcing companies have to grapple with this issue. Some are completely anonymous, some are completely public. In discussion Claudia said something very important to this:
“Shouldn’t a system of ratings and rankings matter more than a real name?”
In Trada, if you’re an advertiser evaluating who is (or might be) working on your campaign what’s more important: knowing their real name or seeing that they are one of the top 10 optimizers in our marketplace? Clearly most people would pick the latter.
We’re embarking on a series of extensions to our profile system in Trada. This includes the first pass at important stats and rankings in the system (both positive stats like conversions earned as well as negative stats like rejected keywords). It will be interesting to see if over time our requirement for being public about who you are becomes less important as the merits of what you’ve done become more. In the end, it’s not your name that will get you on a campaign, it’s your results.
For now, we’re sticking with our policy knowing that some wonderful PPC experts simply won’t be able to participate due to conflicts with their full-time jobs. I promise to keep an open mind about this subject and regardless of a change, ensure that everyone in the system can live and die by statistics as the most important measure of their expertise.
(Cross-posted @ Trada Blog: Paid Search Marketing, Online Advertising and Small Biz)
