Customers are part of your culture. By inviting them to participate in your campaigns and community, you can speed progress, gain candid market insight, and have some fun. This conversation will share tips about wrangling your passionate users to help with specific tasks for mutual benefit. The tips and tactics will include: understanding motivations, providing rewards, setting boundaries, understanding types of volunteers, organizing disappearing task forces, avoiding "cat herding,” and thwarting confusion and conflicts.

Practical examples will include: crowd-sourcing a multi-language software translation project; organizing citizen reporting at an Olympic Games; creating participatory contests to produce content and assets; identifying perpetrators and looters in a riot; raising relief money under difficult circumstances; and, rapidly helping victims in disaster zones.

From the examples, we’ll discuss methods for channeling the passion of audiences into tangible results in much the same manner as Tom Sawyer recruited his fishing pals to help whitewash his fence.