In 2010, networking and social media will remain the unchallenged rulers of the business and personal communication kingdoms, but what can we learn about ourselves and our communication capabilities from these activities?
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of their ARPANet platform – a precursor to today’s Internet – they hosted the DARPA Network Challenge to explore the roles of mobilization, collaboration, and trust in diverse social networking constructs, and to learn how these tools could fuel innovation across a wide spectrum of applications.
The Setup: In one day, DARPA distributed 10 red weather balloons across the U.S.
The Mission: DARPA asked people to find the exact coordinates of each of the 10 balloons. The team with the quickest correct response would win $40,000.
The Challenge: Since no one individual could plot the location of all 10 balloons given their various locations, participants had to work with others using Internet and social media tools to solve the puzzle.
So, how long did it take to find all 10 balloons floating above the vast U.S.? The five-member MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team found them within nine hours.
The Strategy: The team built a website designed to attract followers from across the country who might know the location of any given weather balloon or know someone who did. Group leader Riley Crane discussed the project in an interview with Lance Whitney on cnet News.
“I think the key factor as to why our team ended up able to pull this off… is that we really designed a system that allowed people to [see it] as sort of a recursive incentive.
One of the interesting things is that in trying to understand what we actually did, a lot of people might think of viral marketing. But again, this is the wrong point because it’s not that our approach was to get a message out. It was more that we wanted people to send information back to us. You could really see a fun way of engaging people that they can see how influential and how resourceful they could be at getting people to join this challenge and recruiting them for the greater good.”
The Marketing Connection: This is a shining example of how our connections can pay off. The success of the MIT Team was based upon the interest and feedback of their Internet followers, so keep this in mind as you’re adding content to your website and updating your social media profiles. The questions you ask, answers you provide and comments you make can spur the spread of information and boomerang business back to you.
Learn more about the DARPA Network Challenge and how the MIT Team used the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media and networking tools to win the prize at networkchallenge.darpa.mil.
