Communications of the ACM
MIT Team Thinks Outside the Box to Snag Social Media Prize
A team affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won the U.S. State Department's social media contest, the TAG Challenge, which required participants to locate and photograph actors posing as thieves who roamed five cities for 12 hours.
None of the eight members of the team is a U.S. citizen, and no one was on the ground in Washington, New York City, London, Stockholm, or Bratislava--the cities where the jewel thieves were supposed to have lurked.
Team CrowdScanner's strategy combined traditional and social media, while the other participants relied solely on Twitter. CrowdScanner encouraged others online to assist its efforts by offering some of the $5,000 prize money if it won the contest. The team tracked down three of the thieves by the end of the day, something no other team was able to do. CrowdScanner emerged victorious on March 31.
"We knew that, should we win this, we would manage to raise the bar for rapid mobilization through social media a significant notch higher," says Masdar Institute of Science and Technology professor and CrowdScanner team leader Iyad Rahwan.
From NextGov.com
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