3 Benefits of Crowdsourcing for Small Businesses

Crowdsourcing is the when a task/question is outsourced to a group of people. Individuals from all around the world use crowdsourcing to develop a new business idea, complete a design task, or just answer a question.

Crowdsourcing has been one of the hot-button topics in the social media world. The Wall Street Journal featured an article in August about technology’s impact on innovation. Technology is giving us all the ability to access information that previously we would never have been able to because it was either too difficult or too expensive.

For small businesses, crowdsourcing can be used a lot more effectively and inexpensively if used correctly. Crowdsourcing is not a matter of looking for individuals to help accomplish a task, it is about finding the community where multiple individuals are willing to help. I was able to interview Edward Boches, Chief Social Media Officer and Chief Creative Officer of Mullen via Twitter about how he felt about crowdsourcing for smaller brands.

I asked: Do you think that crowdsourcing requires an influential brand to become successful?
He replied: Not if there’s a reason to participate, or value for the crowd. Crowdsourcing has to be as good for the crowd as the brand.

So to all small businesses, crowdsourcing is your tool. If used effectively and if the audience is right, crowdsourcing is an extremely effective tool to get customers paying attention to your business.

Here are three ways crowdsourcing can benefit your business.

1. Design Work

Looking for logos, business cards, any sort of stationary that will start the branding of your company can be an expensive task. Looking for a designer on Craigslist, Facebook, or newspapers can be extremely expensive. They may quote you thousands of dollars. However, we shall leverage crowdsourcing. A great resource is CrowdSpring.

Submitting a request and offering a reward of however much money you choose, designers from all over will attempt to design something for you for the cash. This is a great resource to see designs from different designers. You are the one who is reaching out to a community to help accomplish a task - on top of that, you can determine how much you want to pay. LG used CrowdSpring to design their new phone. They offered a 20k+ reward for the first prize.

There are other crowdsourcing design websites as well: Denook, BootB, and Kluster are there just to name a few.

2. Get some new insight

As a small business, there are only so many creative minds in your company. When staff meetings have gone to a standstill, or if the company is just you and there is no one else to share another opinion, there are plenty of resources that will come to your aid. Yahoo Answers , Wikipedia, even Twitter is an excellent resource of information.

3. Create some awareness

Netflix in this situation, created a campaign to improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to enjoy a movie based on their movie preferences. They offered a $1 Million grand prize to whoever submitted an algorithm for it.

Of course small businesses are unable to dish out $1 million for contents, but take from Netflix the idea that people are willing to listen to you if you get their attention. There are many things you can do to grab the attention of a community.

Here is a resource for crowdsourcing examples, it is divided up in 4 broad themes. (Very cool that it is in a wiki, which is another resource of crowdsourcing)

1. Individual businesses that channel the power of online crowds

2. Brand - sponsored initiative or forums that depend on crowdsourcing.

3. Brand initiatives that allow users to customise their products

4. Brand sponsored competitions/challenges focused on crowdsourcing.

So according to your small businesses budget, these themes will either be of influence, guidance, or reference to your marketing.

It is always difficult to get awareness, and work towards a company that will become well connected in the community. Crowdsourcing is a wonderful aid, but always remember that

Helpful Links:

Crowdsourcing: 5 Reasons It’s Not Just For Startups Any More by Dion Hinchcliffe

5 Tools a Small Business Can’t Live Without by Bradford Shimp