Friday, March 06, 2009
Google Tip Jar: A Community to Save Money & Share Insight
Tough economic times inspired the creation of Google Tip Jar, a forum for money-saving tips and tactics.
We realized there were a lot of tips that could help people save money scattered across the web. Why not use Google Moderator to collect and rank them all according to community feedback? And so Tip Jar was born
The Tip Jar community is divided into eight categories:
- At Home
- At work
- Finance
- Kids and Family
- Shopping
- Food
- Cars and Transit
- Travel
Each user has the ability to submit a tip and vote on other tips, which Google Moderator collects and ranks. Tips with the highest vote total are placed in the section: Popular Tips. As of noon today, Tip Jar's community consisted of 23,000 members, including a two sites that raised my eyebrows.
- dough
roller.net - iwillteachyoutober
ich.com
As with any message board or online community, there's always the chance for spammers to creep in and ruin a great site. Fortunately, you can report a comment as inappropriate, but I'm not sure what Moderator deems as, "appropriate."
Some of tips were so basic I don't know why the user spent the time to post "bring your lunch to work." I also saw a few that made me wonder where these people get some of their ideas, such as mixing vodka with shampoo. I'm not even kidding.
I decided to register and offered these two tips. 
I was surprised that I was allowed to include a link in the post, but it wasn't active.
Tip Jar Pros:
- Another community to create new connections.
- A great method to build trust and expand your network.
- Voting to rank comments.
Cons:
- You can't comment on a specific tip.
- Potential to become a spam magnet.
Posted By Matt O'Hern at 12:32 PM
Permanent Link: Google Tip Jar: A Community to Save Money & Share Insight
| Comments (1)
Subscribe to The MarketingShift Feed