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

A collaborated post with Max Luster over Google Wave

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(haha just kidding.)

To Early Stage Consumer Service Entrepreneurs:

You’ve just gone through the hardship of building early infrastructure and a quality team to lead the way to your future growth and profitabillity. In the process, you built a service you know your prospective customers would love. The only problem: they don’t know about it!

The cost of starting your company was likely significantly higher than what you initially expected (Who knew that licensing and permits would cost over $5000?). The advertising budget for your grand opening just went from a lavish full color ad in popular newspapers and magazines to a limited campaign on Google Adwords.

Entrepreneurs like yourself are in need of costless forms of promotion that are still effective at attracting your target audiences. Social media is seemingly the key to providing effective communication for little to no money.

The first two social media networks that pop into mind would be Facebook and Twitter. Since the websites draw in around 124 million and 23 million respectively - the amount of outreach for any successful marketing campaign would be monumental.

So keeping potential clients and friends updated to your company’s news comes differently with each of the social networks. Danah Boyd, on her blog, writes about the differences between Facebook status updates and Twitter updates.

Here are 3 reasons to use Facebook statuses and Twitter Updates to better promote your company:

Facebook:

1. Establish Personal Connections

• 2 way connection accept/deny: Facebook is about having a connection with a “friend”, not a “follower”. Boyd writes that Facebook “is about people at a similar level of status interacting”. When @replying a person, you are featured both on your own wall and their wall. You have gone through a selection process of whether or not you want to be their friend.

In this situation, my Status update was on both Max Luster’s and my wall.

This allows for you to mention a person on your Facebook Page. Thank them for writing a good review about your product, for coming to your event, for writing a blog post about your company etc. The mention will be broadcasted to both the people that are Fans on your Facebook Page and also on the user’s wall.

2. Make Your Fans Feel Exclusive

Offering fans exclusive information about your products/services gives them an incentive to stay. Pizza Hut’s Facebook Page isthe perfect example of exclusivity.

Their “Order App” Tab on their Facebook Page allow for Facebook users to order pizza off of Facebook. Offering your customers/fans the ability to do something solely on Facebook also establishes loyalty for your company.

3. Develop Community Around Your Product/Service

The option of keeping comments out in the open allows for open dialogue between not only yourself, but also your fans. Likeminded people are able to connect with each other, and at the same time, you have feedback that you are able to gain from your product/service.

Motorola builds community by allowing their Facebook fans to comment on each other’s wall posts. Getting organic comment from fans is a good way to develop community. Posts should not only be coming from you.

Twitter:

1. Join In On Existing Conversations

• By using twitter tracking services like Tweet Beep your organization will be able to conveniently monitor what people are saying about your product, and your competitors products. By monitoring what general audiences are saying, you’ll be able to write status updates that smartly respond to consumer sentiment. This can create excellent opportunities to offer insight, and establish credibility as a thought leader in your space.

2. Drive Traffic

• One of the simplest, but arguably the most important function of twitter is to promote content that you’ve created and hosted on your website. Letting your customers know that you just added a of content to your page will be  a great way to drive traffic to that content.

3. Crisis Management

• Since updates are limited to 140 characters on twitter, information spreads fast. What happens if your traffic spikes and your server crashes? Without twitter, getting message out as to why issues have occured would travel a lot slower. In crisis situations like that, often times consumers are simply looking for a reason why the content they requested is unavailable - but without that simple status update on Twitter, they may never find out - or find out too late.