What Is Crowdsourcing?

As defined by Wired Magazine, “Crowdsourcing is the act of sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to an undefined large group of people or community through an open call.”

A very simple example is to ask friends and followers on a social networking site to help you create a logo. You’ll have people working together to offer suggestions and solutions immediately.

Also, if you’ve participated on social networking sites you’ve probably had people ask you to like their Facebook page and to share it with others. Or you’ve had people ask you to retweet a link or post. This is an example of crowdsourcing. You’re asking the masses to help you grow your business.

So How Do You Grow Your Business with Crowdsourcing?

First, think about the various ways you can grow your business. These include:

* Marketing
* Content
* Fundraising
* Product development
* Website traffic
* Branding

Second, you’ll want to think about your crowdsourcing resources. As you can see from the earlier examples, social networking is often the key to success. That’s where you can reach large groups of people. It’s also the best place for any effort to pick up momentum quickly. Word can spread on Facebook across the country in a matter of minutes.

Do you have a large network of friends and followers? Are you currently active on social networking sites? It doesn’t have to be Facebook. Social sites like YouTube are very powerful too.

Third, consider your goals. What do you want to accomplish first? For example, do you need a lot of content for your website? Ask for submissions or guest blog posts from your friends and followers. Make it a contest and ask readers to vote on the best blog posts.

If you want to use the power of the crowd to develop a product, ask for input. Publish surveys, questionnaires or ask for beta testers.

The power of the crowd is immense. You can use it to grow your business in a number of ways. Instead of paying a product development team or hiring a focus group, you can now go directly to the source and ask your prospects to contribute. And it doesn’t cost a thing. Consider your goals and your resources, then take action.

#1 Make sure you offer exceptional customer service

Good customer service is the first step to gaining repeat customers. People respond to quality customer service. They recognize when a business appreciates them and treats them with respect.

Make sure you’re doing everything you can to treat your customers to the best customer service possible. This may mean outsourcing or automating your customer service. It may also mean making sure your customer service policies and procedures are easy to find on your website and clearly explained.

#2 Go above and beyond

Don’t you love it when you get more than you expect from a company? Your customers do too. They love unexpected surprises like downloadable reports, discounts and coupons or free shipping. Take a look at the various ways you can go above and beyond for your customers. How can you be a delightful surprise?

#3 Make sure your prices are justified

Many people leave a business simply because the price is too high. Now that doesn’t mean you have to lower your price. What it does mean is that you need to be able to justify your price. If your customers feel like they’re getting value, they’ll continue paying your price.

You can often solve this price problem by offering a few more options. For example, if you sell information products you might group some products together and offer a discount while also allowing people to purchase items a la carte.

#4 Connect personally

When your customers feel as if they’re part of your community, they’re more likely to stick around. They’re more likely to be repeat customers. Take steps to connect with your customers on a personal level. Your email messages should have a personal touch to them. You can do that by sharing a story or a personal experience.

You can also connect with your customers via social networking or blog and allow commenting. Take a look at your business and how you can create a community. What features or function can you add to your website to encourage interaction?

#5 Establish credibility

When customers trust that you’re the best, they will come to you for your solutions. You can establish this credibility and trust by sharing and providing valuable industry information and solutions. Consistently offer value and you’ll build a reputation as the “go to” person in your industry.

Repeat customers can help you take your business to the next level. Repeat customers buy more often. They also refer new customers. And for every new customer you have to find, you’re spending money, time and energy you may not have. Keep your customers! Use these strategies to help create the best business possible.

According to current Alexa rankings, YouTube is the number three most visited website on all of the Internet, surpassed only by Google and Yahoo. Millions and millions of users flock to YouTube every day to indulge in viewing and commenting on videos, spending what, for some, can often turn into hours staring at the monitor.

In this article we’ll look at 5 key points that can help lead to success, should you decide to give YouTube a run as your next big marketing medium.

1) Know your target demographics.

That goes without saying when we talk about marketing, but let’s just explain why it applies here. YouTube users, while varied and diverse, can generally be narrowed down enough to speak about generally. While everyone from four year olds to Grandma spend time on YouTube, the people who live and breath YouTube are going to be your 18-35 males.

While females in the same age group do also use YouTube quite a lot, and there are many users older and younger, the 18-35 male demographic are the people that are going to spend hours a day surfing YouTube and sending videos back and forth between their friends (this is important!)

Sure, this demographic tends to be the most desirable one anyways in many cases, but if your target audience sit outside this range, there are likely much better ways to spend your time and money than YouTube.

2) Go viral or go home.

A video of me feeding my dog or taking my garbage out might be entertaining to me (“look how well I poured that cat food! Not a bit spilled”), but that’s probably the extent of it. If you’re going to try and use YouTube to get your message out, your ultimate goal should be for your video to grow virally.

That word, viral, is said so much these days that it’s going out of style, but there’s a reason, it’s important! You want your video to spread around, as quickly as possible, and to be seen by as many people in your demographic (and in general) as possible. Otherwise, why are you even using this medium in the first place? When you sit down to plan your campaign, always have this in mind.

Any ideas that come up that don’t reek of potential to spread quickly likely aren’t of any value. While you never know exactly what will go viral (I’m sure the parents that posted a video of their baby laughing didn’t expect almost 74 million views to date), you can generally tell whether something has the potential, as there are some aspects that essentially all the videos that really take off.

3) Make it funny, make it weird, make it shocking, or don’t make it.

Going viral happens because someone sees a video and deems it so awesome that they simply have to email it to their friends, their mom, their boss and their priest. As stated above, mundane videos won’t do this. If you want to ensure that your video has the potential to spread like wild-fire, you pretty much have to make sure that it’s funny, weird, shocking, or some other form of general awesomeness.

If you look at the top 25 most watched YouTube videos you’ll notice that while some may be cute, some may be cool, the aspect that you see most represented is comedy. Whether it be comedians or little kids being bitten by their brothers, things that make people keel over laughing tend to spread the fastest and widest. Whatever method you choose to go down to give your video the legs it needs to run across the net, there are certain warnings to heed!

4) Know your brand and know what it means to your customers.

There is a certain danger with viral video marketing, namely that many of the things that tend to go viral can also have a tendency to be on the edge of cleanliness, and certain brands may end up being hurt more than they stand to benefit.

Take the “Landlord” video, made famous by starring Will Ferrell and available on FunnyorDie.com. 61 million views for a video that isn’t on YouTube is a massive success. As viral as they come. However, the real star of this video isn’t Ferrell, it’s the landlord, who is a cursing, beer drinking…little girl. Funny? Sure. Viral? Sure. But does your brand want to be associated with swearing, boozing toddlers?

Maybe it does. Maybe your brand is edgy and your customers won’t look at such an association negatively. But maybe not. Always make sure that whatever your video is portraying isn’t going to conflict in someway with the core values of your brand.

5) Figure out what you want from the video and design it to deliver on that goal.

What do you want your video to do for you? Do you want it to build brand awareness? Do you want it to help sell something? Do you want it to drive traffic to your website? It’s very important that you recognize exactly what your goals for the campaign are, and that you realize a few truths about YouTube and it’s viewers.

Firstly, people aren’t on YouTube to watch commercials. If your video is plastered with your products, logo and marketing messages, it’s probably worthless to bother going any further. A good example of tasteful branding is Seth McFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy, sponsored by Burger King. People watch the videos to see the funny stuff, not to see the BK stuff, so Burger King does a very short intro, which is in itself comical, and then a little bit of branding at the end. That’s it.

The next thing to realize is that it’s very unlikely people will leave YouTube to go to your website, unless you somehow entice them to. People on YouTube may love your video, and they’re happy you made it, but they don’t care about you enough to go check out your website just out of the goodness of their hearts.

Offer them something at the end of the video or in the description at the side that they can only get through your website, or they’ll never get their, especially not with so many other hilarious related videos being suggested to them by YouTube at the end of yours!

Finally, if you’re trying to directly sell something, you’d better find a way of featuring your product and making people crack up or say “wow” at the same time. Blendtec is the perfect example of this. They use video to help sell blenders by posting clips of them blending up ridiculous items like golf clubs and bricks (and people love it). Whatever your goal, define it ahead of time and make sure YouTube is a viable medium to deliver on what you’re looking for.

Making videos doesn’t have to be expensive, but it can be. That being said, money is the easy part, a great idea with an almost certain chance of success  is the hard part. It takes planning and time. The key is to analyze beforehand whether YouTube is a good medium for your business to get it’s message across.

If it’s not, don’t bother wasting all that time and money on something that won’t work for you. If it is, follow these five rules and you’ll be far better off than if you just wing it and post something up on a hope and a prayer.