Crowdtap – Offer Advice to Your Favorite Brands

Crowdtap is a tool that offers as many benefits to individual users as it does the large businesses that take advantage of its data. With Crowdtap, everyday users get to tell their favorite brands what they do and don’t like about the products and services they offer. In exchange, they can earn various rewards, badges, and gift cards. Companies, meanwhile, get unobstructed access into the minds of their most devoted customers for far less than they’d spend putting together research panels and advisory boards.

If you’re a consumer with opinions to share, then sign up for Crowdtap through your Facebook account and start filling out polls right away. These initial surveys are designed to let Crowdtap know about your likes, dislikes, and general interests, and they help the web-app understand which brand surveys you’d be most interested in taking. As you fill out more brand surveys and complete more actions—like taking polls, participating in virtual discussions, and sharing content with friends on your social networks—you’ll gain status on the Crowdtap site. That status can then be converted into free gift cards, new products, and charity donations that Crowdtap will give to the causes you select. You can gain even more status and earn special badges by taking things up a notch and hosting brand-sponsored parties or creating videos about the brands you’re reviewing on the Crowdtap site.

For marketers, Crowdtap’s benefits are clear. For very little money, companies can tap into the minds of their most influential customers and dedicated fans. Crowdtap makes it possible for businesses to learn what their customers like and also facilitates peer-to-peer marketing in a way that could be difficult for a company to handle on its own.

Practical Uses:

• Find out what customers think of your latest product releases
• Tell your favorite shoe company what you’d like to see in their upcoming lines
• Earn free gift cards by sharing your opinion with national corporations
• Throw brand-sponsored parties and get free swag for your friends

Insider Tips:

• Poll results can be broken down using demographic information
• Users can earn status by creating online videos about their favorite brands
• Companies can create online panels or hold online discussions where consumers can share their opinions
• At least 5% of every user’s points go to the charity of his or her choice

What we liked:

• Crowdtap is a fun way for young people to earn rewards for speaking their minds
• The consumers who use Crowdtap are among the most active and influential on the web, which is helpful for businesses looking for insight
• Companies can get access to uncensored opinions
• The marketing data collected with Crowdtap can be parsed in hundreds of ways

What we didn’t like:

• Nothing

Alternatives:

• BzzAgent – http://www.bzzagent.com
• Influenster – http://www.influenster.com
• quietBUZZ – http://quietbuzz.com

Company Info:

• Launched: March 2011
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: New York, New York
• Founded by: Brandon Evans
• Web site: http://crowdtap.com

Costs:

• Free for consumers
• Flexible pricing for businesses