Archive for the ‘Virtual Business’ Category

Crowdsourcing for small business can be a powerful virtual addition to your team.  Part One of my series introduced the concept and highlighted a few ways to take advantage of this relatively new trend.  Part two is intended to stretch your imagination.  My hope is that this post will help you discover the productivity possible when you combine new technologies with your own clever mind.

So Much Information, So Little Time

Every day, most of us tap the endless font of the web for some useful piece of information to keep us moving forward.  An email address, a market size statistic, someone’s bio, a competitor’s prices, a prospect’s address, etc. So much immediately available information of any kind makes us wonder how we did it in the old days.   The only constraint on the amount of information we can mine is the clock on the wall.

Imagine cloning yourself 1,000 times so that you could perform the same lookup for 1,000 of anything you needed all at the same time.  That’s what’s now possible.

Crowdsourcing for Real Life Business Needs

As the co-founder of a technology company focused on communications, I was spending a lot of time cataloguing journalists, bloggers and smart people who care about productivity.  Who are the influencers and how can I reach them? What do they care about?  What types of stories are they writing? What types of information interests them?  There are two parts to this type of work.  The first part is the slow, arduous process of compiling names and contact information – the part that should be outsourced.  The second part is developing a relationship with the journalists and/or bloggers that matter, figuring out what they like to write about and brainstorming creative, clever ways to tell our story in a smart and interesting way.

Somewhere along the way, I noticed that journalists that must publish frequently about local content were particularly apt to troll the Twitter airwaves for ideas.  And since Twitter makes it impossible to ‘ramble on’, it’s a great way to take that first step in building a long-term relationship if you can provide some value.

But now I had to go back to step one.  Compiling a list to start from and finding out if any of the people I noticed were Twitter users.  And then I realized this was a perfect scenario for Smartsourcing.

For this example I’ll focus on the small business reporters at the daily papers in the 50 major metros. I supplied a list of the 50 biggest cities to the virtual workforce, and in turns, they gave me back:

• The names of the daily papers in those cities
• The names of the business reporters at those specific papers
• A link to their most recent article
• And, finally, for those I deemed a fit, the email and Twitter aliases

To clarify, NONE of this information was harvested from a list or a relationship someone had with a journalist.  It was all out there, on newspaper web sites, bio pages and personal blogs.  The virtual workers just found it for me.  On my end, it was as easy as creating the columns of information I wanted (like adding titles to columns in a spreadsheet) and then writing a description of what I wanted filled into each by the virtual workforce.  Then I went about my day doing other things.  Occasionally, I would check in on my sheet to view the progress.  It’s an understatement to call my feeling ‘awe’ seeing the information automatically appear as workers completed their tasks.

After 14 hours and $68 dollars, I had my list.  Now, I’ve looked for consolidated lists of small business reporters and Twitter aliases.  They just don’t exist – until now.  Here’s the list:  Major Metro Small Business/Technology Reporter List. I made it editable so we can start adding to it, updating errors and making it a useful and valuable tool in an ongoing way.

DISCLAIMER: If you are going to use this list to spam the writers with press releases, please go away.   Use it to build relationships, to start following and reading and thinking before you engage.

Making the Subjective Relevant Through Sheer Numbers

For any business person, the possibilities with crowdsourcing are only bounded by your creativity with questions and data.   Here’s a more complicated, but also real example.  Recently, our founder asked me which of our target bloggers had a savvy audience of readers.  He was trying to find out which bloggers typically received thoughtful commentary on most blog posts vs. peanut gallery smack talk.  I found loads of rankings for different blogs and online publications, but literally nothing to characterize readers based on the insightfulness of their comments on any one blog.  I told him it was impossible.

But it wasn’t.  Something I considered to be way too subjective was actually feasible to pinpoint using the power of the crowds.  How did he do it?  He started with the top 25 ranked tech bloggers as ranked by TechCrunch.  He asked the crowd to fill in the most recent 10 articles posted by each journalist, and for each article, he asked 20 people to read the comments and rank the readers by their posts – so 200 opinions per blogger.  Half the people ranked whether they thought the posters were productive at work, and the other half ranked the quality and substance of the comments themselves.

Once we had this, we averaged the data in a couple of ways to show us which writers have the most productive readership.  Thus the ‘Reader Quality Score’ was born.  Plus, the data accompanying the scoring was extremely fascinating.  Many of the virtual workers spent extra time explaining impressions that led to their rankings. You can see the full story here.
From Disbelief to Everyday Tool

Ten years ago, people didn’t believe that it would be possible to index so much of the world’s information and make it available online to anyone anytime in a useful way (e.g. search engines).  Expect the same for human driven information assembly.  The sooner you accept that the world is your database, and that humans can be the processors, the sooner you can get to supercharging the productivity of your business.

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Guest post by Maria Colacurcio, co-founder of Smartsheet.com. She’s now advising the company’s strategic communications on an average of 2 hours a day as she raises her 2 year old daughter and 9 month old twins. Prior to Smartsheet, Maria worked in B2B marketing for 10 years at companies including Microsoft and Onyx Software. She can be reached at www.twitter.com/mcolacurcio

Big Changes

Marketing and sales is going through another sea change. In the past, messages were pushed through, broadcast to as many eyes as possible. But now, things are starting to get more personal. Customers are beginning to expect and value the relationship again. More and more people are recognizing the negative effects of buying from the faceless giants, rather than the family business.

This is good news for the small business, but it also presents a challenge. People are more and more connected, thanks to online tools like social media. Customers want the personal experience, want to know the people they are buying from. In some cases, that means they will walk into your local store. But they are just as likely to get to know small business owners and staff online, and build a loyalty and trust through that medium. Appealing to high tech customers that want more interaction is your next big marketing challenge.

Building Friendships Through Conversation

Used to be you could walk into any local shop and strike up a conversation with the owner. He knew you and you knew him. You had “history” together. These were the good old days. Well, here’s a shocker. They’re back!

Just the other day, I had a question about a product I use. It was a simple question, and I could have probably figured out the answer myself. But I know the owner of the company, so I just walked in and asked him. Well, actually, I used Skype, and free online chat tool. And I know the owner because of Twitter, where we often connect. Not exactly the same as walking into the shop for some small talk. Well, actually, it is exactly the same, except for their is no walking and often no actual talking involved. Just surfing the web and typing.

This is not a anomaly. More and more businesses are opening up because of the web, even some pretty big ones. By opening up, I mean becoming available for conversation. On any given day, I can have conversations with some pretty interesting business owners. It is kind of like strolling down main street and just stopping in to say hi. And as far as customer service is concerned, many of these small online business owners take the same exact approach as the downtown merchant with the barber shop or deli.

Does Conversation Scale?

Of course, this is an approach that cannot scale, right? Wrong! With new tools, business owners can hold a lot more conversations, even simultaneous ones. The web makes is possible to have both live conversations and time delayed ones. It is those time delayed conversations that make it possible for small business owners to connect with a whole lot more people. A customer might send an email or a tweet, and the business owner can read it and respond in kind, on her own schedule. Of course, the sooner the better.

People are People

This rediscovery of the conversation means that businesses can no longer just push out marketing. Customers want to be engaged, want to feel a connection and be recognized. And all a business owner really has to do to comply is to remember that he or she is still a person at heart.

It is okay to share personal stories, laughs, and even tears with customers. Who ever said it wasn’t? The bond between customer and vendor should go deeper than the transaction of money. Every interaction in life should be treated as a possible doorway to friendship, even customer interactions.

Join in the Conversation

So what is a small business to do in light of these changes? First off, adopt a policy of friendship and conversation. Commit to engage more with each customer. Remember, the key to good communication is to listen.

On top of that, learn the new tools of conversation on the web. This includes instant messaging services such as Skype and social media like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It can also include email, and the good old telephone. Technology is a means to making conversation more scalable. Surprisingly, it can be personal too.

This is a good change. If we can reconnect with each other on a more personal level, not only will we have better businesses, we will have a better world.

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Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow Bradford on Twitter @bradfordshimp.

photo credit: dana.ocker

Crowdsourcing Background

We’ve been hearing the buzz for some time now. Crowdsourcing is the new way to get things done on the cheap, its the outsourcing model for the small business and technology is making it more and more accessible. The somewhat squishy promise of using crowdsourcing is finally peeking its head out of the early adopter haven. Since Jeff Howe coined the term in his 2006 Wired Magazine article, it has largely been a concept only available for specialty purposes by companies with technicians and budgets focused at using it.

So what is it, and how can this newly adolescent buzz-word benefit you? I’m going to summarize in my own words here: Crowdsourcing is the act of getting a whole lot of people who you don’t know personally to do massive amounts of work for you. This work would typically be impractical or too expensive for internal employees or traditional contractors.

A Few Examples:

• Netflix – offered $1M to anyone that could improve their DVD rating system 10% or more by analyzing their customer data.
• Amazon – uses crowdsourcing to check for explicit lyrics in CDs
• FaceStat (by Dolores Labs) – the crowd will judge your traits based on your photo

These are great tools for the companies utilizing them, but without access to their internal systems, these don’t help us as small businesses that much.

Putting Crowdsourcing to Use for the Small Business Owner

Now the stuff we’ve all been waiting for – a way for any of our businesses to get the mundane, time consuming, simple, but previously uneconomical work done. Imagine any repetitive task you can explain to a smart intern with a set of simple steps, and now get it done for pennies. A few examples:

• Get the web traffic volumes for all the websites of your 100,000 potential customers
• Get the email addresses of the top 50 small business bloggers
• Tag 50 jpeg images with two or three tags
• Survey your top 10 target blogs for positive mentions of 5 competitors

Spend a few minutes surveying your average day. How much time do you and your key folks spend either doing time consuming ‘busy work’ or wishing you could justify doing it for the the benefits you could get from the outcome? You’ll probably find many instances where you are spending hours researching something on Google, which could be better outsourced to a team of virtual assistants for as low as $0.05 per answer.

The arrival of more accessible tools is making crowdsourcing directly available to business people without needing those developer-esque folks to do it for them.

The Smartsourcing feature within Smartsheet is a good example. Smartsheet’s customers are business people who need a tool to manage a wide variety of work, whether it takes the form of complex projects or simple to-do lists with associated documents attached. Now, from right within the very same worklist that is their project, they can quickly ask a virtual worker to complete a variety of tasks as specific as the ones I’ve listed above.

Case Study – Rajala Lumber Company

John Rajala owns a lumber company in the Midwest. He needed a quick and cheap way to get a list of the retail lumber yards in the upper Midwest states. He was planning a test campaign to sell to these retail yards directly, but first needed to get his arms around the demographic; how big are the retail yards, what do they sell, where are they located and how many are there?

Most importantly, John needed to know whether the volume of high-end wood floors being installed in any one particular area was enough to justify the transportation costs.

Traditional data sourcing from list brokers was not an option since brokers rarely specialize in niche industries and segments like retail lumber yards to the level of detail that John needed. If he did this himself via web research, it would take him days using Google. So, John took advantage of crowdsourcing.

Smartsheet used Smartsourcing to harness the power of the crowd for John. 12 hours and $100 later he had a list of 924 lumber yards meeting his qualifications. Here is an example of what that looked like.

Tools to Harness the Crowd

New tools are popping up for any small business to crowdsource bits and pieces of work. They are generally oriented around carving off a piece of work, opening it up for bids and then enabling some level of collaboration to ensure the results you want. These services are provided via companies like:

• oDesk – global marketplace for remote work
• eLance – freelancers
• Guru – freelancers
• Ki Work – sourcing online work
• More examples can be found on MadebyMany’s wiki or Smartsheet’s Crowdsource List

In summary, there are more and more opportunities for small businesses to take advantage of crowdsourcing. This article gives you a good introduction on what crowdsourcing is and how it can help you get more done. As a small business owner, your time is precious and every second counts.

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Guest post by Maria Colacurcio, co-founder of Smartsheet.com. She’s now advising the company’s strategic communications on an average of 2 hours a day as she raises her 2 year old daughter and 9 month old twins. Prior to Smartsheet, Maria worked in B2B marketing for 10 years at companies including Microsoft and Onyx Software. She can be reached at www.twitter.com/mcolacurcio

Many small businesses do not understand how to work with a virtual administrative assistant (VA). While many different variables can occur with each process this article is outlining the basic process in what to expect when looking for, hiring, and using a VA.

Before Work Begins

Before work can even begin, a virtual assistant should offer a consultation. This consultation should be about learning about the potential client as well as giving the potential client the ability to learn about the VA. Information should include:

• Information about the VA’s background such as business, experience, history, client satisfaction, etc

• How to work with a virtual assistant

• What to expect from the VA such as communications, project updates, etc

• The VA’s personality type and compatibility

• Getting the biggest bang for your buck

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Virtual Assistance is a growing trend. More and more people are seeing the benefits of hiring a virtual assistant but for those who have never used one, figuring out and understanding the benefits could be elusive.

You already know that virtual assistants are cost-effective because they pay their own taxes, you are not required to pay insurance on them because they are not employees and there is no additional equipment to purchase. There are also other benefits to hiring a virtual assistant.

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