Simo Kymalainen is an Online Producer at YLE in Finland. He was a delegate at CIRCOM Regional’s Social Media Workshop at ROOS Dagen 2014 where he delivered a presentation on this topic.

We asked a simple question: Tell us - Where a car almost hit you? We used an article with an attached Google map on which a person was able to point to a particular site and add comments.

After the map was published, we shared it on social media. YLE’s own Social Media Producer has a lot of followers on Twitter, which helped a lot. He was positively surprised, because people began to retweet his message so many times.

We thought for sure that we would get some answers, but the answers immediately began flooding in. We finally got more than 10,000 entries on the map and ore than 100,000 people visited it.

Pretty soon we published the first of the follow-up stories. They are the best way of making people aware of the original story. At the same time we told Twitter, how the crowdsourcing was going using #killerintersection.

Soon, the television news grabbed the topic and also did a couple news stories. We interviewed the minister of transport and so on. We worked on both TV and radio content. News stories were made in national and regional broadcasts.

A week after we had two more studio discussion on morning television broadcasts. Regional deliveries made dozens of follow-up stories on the web and on the radio.

Police praised the map, saying that it will be useful for them in improving safety.

In addition, we chose a dangerous intersection, which we asked students to make a new safety plan for.

Why was this project, kill crossroads, a success?

- A simple question - simple to answer
- The question aroused feelings - anger, fear
-We promised to find solutions to the problem = we'll listen to you

Click to see the project.