I decided to hike farther up the canyon to a place I’d never been before. There was no trail and it was rather difficult to hike. I came to the base of a cliff of lichen covered rocks and as I glanced farther up the canyon I saw a deer feeding on some grass. I froze in my tracks. Fortunately I was downwind otherwise, I would never have seen them. I then saw another deer, a four-point buck. And then yet another doe feeding nearby. I turned on my camera to take a picture and they twitched at the minor sound it made, but did not run. (The picture below is not one I took-explanation as to why, shortly to come).

Photo of Deer (not my picture though)

I crouched down and crossed the little canyon then climbed the ridge on the other side. I slowly raised my head above the top of the ridge looking down on the deer as I was now above them. I turned on my camera again hoping to get a better shot. I didn’t care this time if I spooked them because it would be fun to get them running on video. As I stepped up over the top of the ridge and kept looking at the deer through my camera, I tripped, dropped the camera, sprained my thumb and spooked the deer!

Seven of them bolted from their feeding area and ran up the hill in the opposite direction of me. I had only seen three, now there were seven! I fumbled around with my camera trying to turn it back on and get a beautiful shot, but only managed to get them when they were quite a distance away.

I had lost a really great opportunity. But if I had been a hunter I would’ve come home with a dandy four-point buck to mount on my wall. (Don’t worry, I have not even tried to hunt a deer in more than 30 years).

Apparently these deer (and their ancestors) had come down this canyon for hundreds of years to reach the year-round natural springs in the valley below for water and food. Native Americans had created places to hunt them and the petroglyphs were created during the long waiting periods of boredom waiting for their kill. If they didn’t hunt, they didn’t eat. All sorts of animals used the springs as a food source and it became a natural hunting ground. Antelope, deer, rabbits, coyote, chukar, quail, etc. were all hunted here and that’s the reason for the petroglyphs.

When I came home I uploaded all the video files and camera shots to my computer and deleted them off the SD cards. A few hours later I returned to my computer expecting to edit and upload the videos but my computer died. This was the third time in seven months that I’ve had a hard drive failure on this computer and am now requesting a replacement from Apple.

I have an automatic backup system but it was not connected that day so all I have to show for this experience is a swollen, sprained thumb!

Internet marketing is very similar to this experience, except with one very major difference. Most of us don’t have to hunt today to provide food for families or pay the bills. We either own and operate a business that produces a product or service, or work for someone that does. The labor that we have to do is to create a product and service to solve another persons problem. Marketing is the means by which other people find out about who you are and what you do and how you can help them.

Traditional forms of advertising have utilized a “broadcast” mentality that throws up messages everywhere we go to entice us to call them or visit their store to make a purchase. While some demographics have been utilized to make proper decisions regarding which television show to advertise on (for example) the results have still somewhat been crude and unrefined. For the most part, all traditional forms of advertising use some method to jolt you out of your trance and make you think about them for a moment.

Internet marketing is completely different. So is Social Media marketing. For the first time in all of history we have a medium where people go to search for a solution to their problems and we can track their results. They type in all kinds of things to help them feel better, look better, get rid of aphids on their roses, choosing the best paint, do research on which car to lease, try to decide on the best new camera to buy…the list is endless. They actually go online and type in keywords and phrases that they understand and the results that pop up are what the search engines have decided are the closest resembling answers for their search query.

In other words, they are hunting for an answer. It’s like hunting in reverse. Instead of a business going out and trying to target specific individuals, Internet marketing allows individuals to hunt for specific solutions provided by businesses. I don’t think anyone in our day would like to be called or referred to as “the hunted,” but that is in essence what’s going on. And I doubt the ones being found are objecting.

Your business, product and service are being hunted and searched for every single day by someone, somewhere on the Internet.

And that trend is continuing to grow in dramatic fashion. It is safe to say that the majority of people finding and choosing a business have gone through some sort of search engine to find them. The next big wave of search traffic will come from the mobile marketing platform and it promises to be the most dramatic shift in advertising to date.

But let’s focus on helping your business to be found on the Internet. Findability, is the most important aspect of any Internet marketing campaign. If they type in a search phrase, and your business does not show up, they will go to the person or business that does. You have to be “findable.”

Sadly, most businesses of today still do not understand this dramatic difference between Internet marketing and traditional forms of advertising. It is still so new to so many people. And one of the biggest reasons for that is that there just too many options available for business today. Internet marketing all by itself, is an enormous subject. It is far more than PPC were SEO (if you know what those terms mean). Which one should they do and how do they start?

Another problem I see is that many people try to use traditional forms of advertising (i.e: broadcasting to the world) on the Internet, and while it works to a degree its usually very expensive and only reserved for the largest of companies to obtain success in this manner (although this is not entirely true). And just as I tripped and fell and lost a good photo-op, every business I know is also missing out on successful sales because they aren’t using the Internet correctly (or at all) and customers are going to those who do.

If you’re having a hard time getting your business found on the Internet, please call me today at 775-722-4949 to schedule a time to analyze your online status and offer you a proposal about how to fix it. I have a Masters Degree in Internet Marketing and I know how to help you. But my company only has the ability to service so many customers, so it’s important that you act quickly because once we’ve reached the limit, we will have to send you somewhere else. I don’t want to do that, but there’s only so much any business can do. So call me today or fill out the form to the right and I will get back with you as soon as I can.

We can make it possible for your business to be found online by those who are hunting for your products and services to solve their problem. Call today at 775-722-4949!

I asked to see his website and when I went there I learned all kinds of things about this company. First of all I discovered that they are getting a large amount of traffic (over 282,000 views per month or around 10,000 per day) and a great deal of that is from PPC. In other words they are paying for people to visit their site. Some months they pay over $16,000 per day for these visitors.

But the real killer here is that they don’t have their website properly formatted for SEO and therefore not able to take advantage of free traffic. By just applying some basic principles they could have a tremendous amount of free, regular and steady traffic to their site. I am not sure who persuaded them to just do PPC and forget about basic SEO, but they must have some motive to do so.

I recently heard of a company that did about $10 Million per year and spent about $1 Million with Google PPC per year to accomplish this. But something happened (no one knows why for sure) but they were de-listed by big G and went out of business. A few hundred employees out of work because some bureaucrat didn’t like something and pulled the plug. The management swore that they were not doing anything unethical or illegal and they had no idea what happened or why.

Never put all your eggs in one basket with Internet Marketing! Make sure you have a good footing in many areas and not just one. There is too much power in the hands of some of these people and this is ripe for corruption.

If they would pull the plug on $1,000,000 per year in advertising dollars, they will certainly do it for a lot less, and possibly any other reason they can think of.

The Internet has made Crowdsourcing Viable

Crowdsourcing has replaced a number of those internal design teams with consumer created designs and products that businesses only then produce when enough orders have been placed, thereby greatly reducing the risk (Boutin, 2006).
Since the Internet is “likely to reinvent tried-and-true models” (Rappa, 2009) the purpose of this study is to expose this trend to businesses that are unaware of its impact so they may decide whether they must adapt to it or not. This is a review of 3 articles written on the subject of crowdsourcing and what they have discovered on the subject.

The first site under review is from Wired.com with an article entitled “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” (Howe, The rise of crowdsourcing, 2006). The article covers the subject of crowdsourcing from four different examples. It starts off with a story about the project director at the National Health Museum in Washington DC named Claudia Menashe. She needed some photos of sick people and several years earlier had run across a stock photo collection by a photographer named Mark Hamill out of Manhattan Beach California. There was some discussion about the price of the photos and since it was for a nonprofit organization he gave her a discount equal to about half what a corporate client would pay and thus a total sale of approximately $600. After several weeks the offer was refused because Claudia had found a company called iStockphoto, which sold photographs for approximately $1each.

The article goes into fairly detailed information regarding iStockphoto and how it shook up the stock photo industry. The main reasons given were the fact that digital cameras have greatly improved an average photographer’s ability to get a somewhat decent photograph, thereby opening the door to millions of would-be photographers. These photographers can easily contribute to iStockphoto’s archives because of the Internet and the fact that there was no loss in quality because of film production or scanning and that makes them very competitive in this creative industry. Combining a digital image with a program like Photoshop, which allows for infinite alteration, the article then claims that the day of the high-priced photographer is almost dead.

The last piece of the profitability equation in the photography world was a micro-payment system that allowed these new photographers to be able to receive a commission on every purchase. For example, instead of selling one photograph for $100 they would sell one photograph 100 times at a dollar each. The professional photographers have had to dramatically change their business model and even made statements such as “I just don’t see much of a future for professional stock photography.” (Howe, The rise of crowdsourcing, 2006, p. 1)

The next story called “The Packager” shows how viral videos have made a dramatic change in VH1, the music television station (Howe, The rise of crowdsourcing, 2006, p. 2). They created a program called “Web Junk 20″ which featured the 20 most popular videos shown on the Internet in a particular week. This became a way for the station to provide entertaining programming at a substantially reduced rate and in the process, increased viewership because the people producing the videos are the ones watching the show. In other words the viewers create what is viewed. This user-generated content is then part of a large award ceremony each year to spur competition and increase viewership.

The third article on crowdsourcing is called “the Tinkerer” (Howe, The rise of crowdsourcing, 2006, p. 3). It talks about a company called InnoCentive which posts difficult scientific problems on their website and anyone in the network can take a shot at cracking them. Those on the network must be approved to provide information on such a subject and it is not open to everyone on the web. Those who do solve the problems are paid anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 per solution and more than 30% of the problems have been solved this way. This proved to be a significant savings over in-house research firms and a greater increase in the number of problems solved. Other similar companies are using crowdsourcing networks that allow companies to find and hire retired scientists for one-off assignments. It also shows how using crowdsourcing has improved the profits of Proctor and Gamble and increased the number of new products it produces.

Crowdsourcing Effects All Businesses

The last of the four articles is called “The Masses” (Howe, The rise of crowdsourcing, 2006, p. 4). It shows that by using a web-based marketplace, companies can find people to perform tasks that computers are generally lousy at, like: identifying items in a photograph, skimming real estate documents to find identifying information, writing short descriptions, transcribing podcasts, etc. He gives a number of examples of companies who have used this technology such as Amazon.com, Alaska airlines, and one called iConclude outside of Seattle Washington. It shows how this last company reduced its expenses for a particular project from $2000 down to just $5 by using crowdsourcing.

The information presented by Wired.com seems to be very reliable and valid. There is no apparent ulterior motive in presenting the information even though there is no documentation as to the sources of the story unless it is the author himself. But there is one person who claims, “that Wired Magazine is a publication of general interest topics although its mission is not clearly stated. What is clear is that Wired Magazine is not a scientific or technical journal” (Lange, 2006). He goes on to say that, although he is writing about a completely different subject than discussed here, that of vehicle theft by circumventing the transponder systems, “Wired Magazine is not a publication bound by scientific foundation nor are the articles subject to traditional protocols of scientific scrutiny such as the “peer review” process” (Lange, 2006). In such a fashion almost all magazines fall into this category and should not be compared with the same level of value as a peer reviewed paper.

The next website under review is from BusinessWeek.com. The article is called “Outsourcing: Consumers as Creators” (Boutin, 2006). It describes a trend that allows customers to help design the products they buy but tells them not to expect to get paid a fortune for their brilliant idea. It goes into a detailed explanation about a company called “Threadless”, a Chicago-based T-shirt manufacturer whose design process consists entirely of an online contest. People from all over the country submit their designs to be voted on by the masses and the 4 to 6 highest-rated designs are then put into production, but only after enough customers have pre-ordered the design to ensure it won’t be a money loser. The winners receive $2000 in cash and prizes but the real motivation is just to see their work worn in public.

Threadless Shirt Designs

For customers it provides a wide range of choices and from the company’s point of view they don’t have to hire a design staff. They only produce shirts that are pre-ordered resulting in dramatic risk reduction. Another example they give is of a Japanese specialty retailer of custom furniture designs that follows a similar pattern. People submit their designs that are then voted on and analyzed by the viewers and goes into production only after they are ordered.

Business Week should be considered quite valid and reliable because of the fact that they have gone to the extent to put up a page of their code of ethics that every writer and journalist promises to follow which is part of the McGraw-Hill Companies code of ethics and The American Society of Magazine Editors (Business Week, 2005). References to their standards are listed on that site.

The next website under review is from Adage.com or Advertising Age. The title of the article is called “Can Creativity be Crowdsourced?” (Schmitt, 2009). This discusses crowdsourcing from an advertising point of view and shows that certain websites like OpenNet.net and Crowdspring.com offer advertising, marketing and design ideas via the crowdsourcing method where, in one example, a network of more than 11,500 creative people from more than 125 countries contributes their designs. A request for a simple logo generated over 1200 submissions.

Many other companies are also reviewed on this site such as those that do graphic bookmarking services; interfaith designers looking for inspiration to solve common design problems; those focused on sharing colors and pallets; etc.
But this article also goes into the discussion of companies fighting such activity. “For marketers, crowdsourcing creative services pose both great risk and rewards.” They even point out that there is even an online organization called “No!Spec” actively trying to educate designers on the perils of participating in these services.

As for the validity and reliability of Advertising Age it must be remembered that this is also a journalistic organization and well established for many years and not a fly-by-night company. Yes, they are writing about something that has had a dramatic effect on their industry but that will also be of value to those in that industry and help them to see what is happening.

In conclusion, the overall theme of each of these articles and stories is the same: outsourcing certain tasks to the crowds or masses reduces costs and increase creativity, thus it is called “crowdsourcing” and could be likened to the ultimate “design by committee”, a phrase usually associated with poor design and needless complexity (Wikipedia, 2009), yet in this case results in the best solution at the lowest cost. The main reason this phenomenon exists is because of the Internet.

It has been said that, “tools does not a designer make,” (Croft, 2007) but having the tool of a computer in the hands of millions of people opens the doors to all sorts of individuals to chime in, whether they have talent or not. But when an artistic person in a poor foreign country creates an acceptable design and only needs to make a few hundred dollars a month to survive, it logically makes it very difficult for someone who needs a few thousand dollars a month to compete.
While there is much resistance to the implementation of this trend, Eric Schmidt probably said it best: “the crowdsourcing of creativity is proving that a great idea can come from anyone, anywhere. The question then is not whether our industry needs to adjust, but how quickly.” (Schmitt, 2009)

References

• Boutin, P. (2006, July 13). Crowdsourcing: consumers as creators. Retrieved Oct 17, 2009, from Business Week: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jul2006/id20060713_755844.htm
• Business Week. (2005, Apr 20). The businessweek code of journalistic ethics. Retrieved Oct 23, 2009, from Business Week online: ethics statement: http://www.businessweek.com/ethics.htm
• Croft, J. (2007, Sep 30). Tools do not a designer make. Retrieved Oct 23, 2009, from Jeffcroft.com: http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2007/sep/30/tools-do-not-designer-make/
• Howe, J. (2009, Sep 1). Goodbye to all that … and hello to all this! Retrieved Oct 17, 2009, from Crowdsourcing: http://www.crowdsourcing.com/
• Howe, J. (2006, June). The rise of crowdsourcing. Retrieved Oct 17, 2009 from Wired: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html?pg=1&topic=crowds&topic_set=
• Lange, J. (2006, Oct). A review of wired magazine article “pinch my ride” by Brad Stone. Retrieved Oct 23, 2009, from Langetech.net: http://www.langetech.net/uploads/Response%20to%20Pinch%20My%20Ride%2010.03.06.pdf
• Rappa, M. (2009, Jun 1). Business models on the web. Retrieved Oct 17, 2009, from Digital Enterprise: http://digitalenterprise.org/models/models.html
• Schmitt, G. (2009, Apr 16). Can creativity be crowdsourced? Retrieved Oct 17, 2009, from Advertising Age: http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=136019
• Wikipedia. (2009, Sep 17). Design by committee. Retrieved Oct 24, 2009, from Design by committee, wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee
• Winkler, R. (2009, Apr 2). Marketing basics. Retrieved Oct 17, 2009, from Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/SmallBusinessLaw/idUSTRE5314ME20090402?pageNumber=3

(This article was an assignment for the Masters Degree in Internet Marketing course at Full Sail University, Oct 2009)