A recent conversation with Clive about the enormous task that lies ahead of the Digital Media team got us thinking. A round of beers later and we have “Spot The Virgin” (it’s funny how some of the best ideas come out of an evening down the pub).

One of the things that have been bugging us since we realised we were to create a new brand and consign the Virgin Radio we know to the history books, was just how we were going to sift through the thousands of images on the website. Clever apps (and clever people like Duncan and his team) can cut in half the job of finding text references to the old brand, but the variations and subtlties of branding in photographs is something that even advanced image analysis techniques would struggle with. When it comes down to it, the human eye works best for this sort of thing.

The likes of Google and NASA have enlisted web users to organise and identify the contents of images, so we’re in good company. One search on Google for “crowdsourcing” reveals loads of other fantastically useful ways of harnessing the combined power of the Internet community, some of them more subtle than others. Take reCAPTCHA for example. They produce those distorted text images that you see on websites when you are registering for something like an online forum. Not only are these guys preventing horrible spamming “bots”, but they are also helping to digitize old books. Every time you read one of those funny little images and type in what you think it says, you are one of 60 million people breathing new life into pages of classic literature. Brilliant!

So, how can this information help us? Well, we know our VIPs love the station, and we know that there is good portion of them that love to interact with the folks at One Golden Square, and with each other on the website. It’s also clear already that our VIPs will dictate, to some extent, the speed at which we reveal information about the new brand to our audience. These guys are already blogging about it on the website, asking questions, and even prepared to give up their spare time to join us for an evening of discussion about the brand at Albion’s offices in Shoreditch.

Our music quizzes and picture galleries have shown us that many of our users are also willing to spend a lot of time interacting with content on the website, particularly if it’s rewarding, and directly impacts on their status in the community, such as their Kudos level. This high-clicks-per-visit content also keeps our lovely Digital Media Sales team happy, as it usually means they have more ad inventory to sell.

In the spirit of One Golden Square we thought, let’s be open with our users. Let’s not only keep them informed about the important changes that are going on behind the scenes, but actually get them involved. If they feel a part of something from the beginning, they’ll be more likely to stick with us on the journey, and feel they can enjoy the end product all the more. Spot the Virgin is the first step towards that.

Simply put, we show the user a random image from our website, they tell us whether there is any branding present on the image by clicking a button, and this then flags the image up in our database. Then, it’s on to the next image… and so on. Once a branded image has been “spotted” a set number of times, this image will then be earmarked for removal. For the user, it’s a weirdly addictive click-and-go game that rewards VIPs with a nice badge in their profile. For the Digital Media team, it’s a nice big tick on our long list of things to do for the new brand. Everybody’s happy.

“Spot the Virgin” stats:

• 20,000 page impressions in the first two days
• 16,000 unique photos viewed so far
• 4,000 photos yet to be looked at
• 9 VIPs have been awarded a Profile Badge after viewing more than 1,000 each

Right, all we need now is to work out a way for our VIPs to help us with the tens of thousands of references to Virgin Radio on the website, and in our audio and video clips. A brainstorming session in the Old Coffee House, anyone?

Article-related links:
Crowdsourcing on Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing
Google Image Labeler – http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
NASA stardust@home – http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
ReCAPTCHA – http://recaptcha.net/

Anthony