Crowdsourcing Your Marketing!

Welcome to this week's book review. As many of you know, I’m passionate about marketing, online or offline. One of the ways that I keep up is constant learning. So, instead of being really clever and witty or even funny in my blog, I would like to share with you things I have picked up along the way that have inspired me and given me a moment of inspiration.

Flying home this weekend from my podcast training program in Chico, California (yes a fun and inspiring place to go to learn), I read the book “WE Are Smarter Than ME - How To Unleash The Power of Crowds In Your Business" by Barry Libert and Jon Spector and Thousands of Contributors www.wearsmarter.org. The book is fun and a very quick read. It reviews social marketing. The numbers are impressive…

 MySpace is growing at 2 million new registrants per week with over 200 million members, is well on its way to half a billion,
 There is a new blog created every second of every day (we are one);
 Over a million avatars (an image used to represent somebody in cyberspace) live in a virtual community called Second Life.

As a small business owner why might you care about social networks? Collaboration of a crowd is now creating a multimedia bandwidth and a medium of communication never thought possible before. Word of mouth and viral marketing has never been more powerful. The new potent “we” is far smarter than any singular “me”. Business people are just beginning to comprehend the consequences.

The new business model of using social networks has been coined as open sourcing or crowdsourcing. You might perceive that open sourcing of information belongs to large corporations like IBM or P&G, but I remind you of a recent experience where I was trying diligently to purchase silicon ties to truss a turkey on line. I was all over the Internet going from site to site to find a Canadian retailer. I actually ended up at a Home Shopping Internet site and found the precious cooking tool. As I was about to press the BUY button, I noticed the consumer evaluations. I quickly scanned them and found the silicon ties had performed poorly for many of the previous buyers. In a nano second, I decided not to buy. There you go, the power of crowdsourcing. Important to note these were not even people I knew and trusted.

I remind you that you must keep this example in mind, it can happen to you as any size of business owner. The power of telling ten friends has now multiplied virally. Women in particular are very good at this viral Internet crowdsourcing tool. Look at the emails we send each other for charities – Breast Cancer Think Pink and or for good luck. I know on any given day I have at least a couple in my email box.

Check out the book. It is a good read. I will follow up with more findings in the next issue.

To great marketing ideas and in friendship,

Tricia
The Marketing Chefs