Category: business advice

Five free, easy and essential online business marketing tools

Your customers are now online. Here’s 5 free and easy to use tools to help reach them.

The web has become the shopping strip of the modern economy, where potential customers see what every business has to offer without leaving their home or office. According to the the Sensis e-business report over 90% of businesses and 70% of consumers now do an online search before buying a product or service.

So every opportunity to promote your business online has to be grabbed, even if you don’t have a website. Luckily there’s a range of free and easy to use services to help your business be seen online.

Five of the easiest and most important free services are listed here and it’s best to use all five to help you get the most online visibility for your business.

Google Places

The first and most essential service every business needs is Google Places. Having a Places listing puts a business in the Google search results directly below the paid spots at the top of the page.

It’s a pretty powerful location on the web real estate map and, being free, it’s hard to refuse. Given how Google is by far the most used search engine, a Places listing is essential even if you already have an extensive web site.

Google Places  allows you to upload logos, pictures, descriptions, and other details which makes it an even greater opportunity to get the message out to your customers. For many smaller business, particularly those in the trades, a Google Places page may be all the web presence they need.

Facebook Pages

The marketer’s social media tool of choice, Facebook recently celebrated reaching 500 million users. For businesses, Facebook offers the Pages service which allows you to set up a page for your business.

Facebook’s greatest advantage is it lets your customers talk directly to you and to each other. It’s an excellent way to bring your fans together and keep track of what’s happening in the marketplace.

While setting up the page is simple, there are some sophisticated ways you can improve your Facebook presence. Facebook themselves have good tutorials and sites like SEO Moz have good examples of how to get the most from Facebook pages.

Blogging platforms

Until recently blogs were used as online diaries, today they have become a flexible, free and easy way to set up a web presence.

The two biggest free blogging platforms are WordPress and Blogger. WordPress is the more flexible of the two while Blogger is quicker and easier to setup.

An advantage with using a blogging platform is they are very easy to update and offer far more flexibility and customisation than the other free tools. Keep in mind you can use WordPress on your own website or take up the paid option to use your own domain.

True Local

News Limited’s online listing tool is important for Australian businesses not just because it connects with News’ online and offline publishing networks but also for their content sharing agreements with Google, Navman, Yahoo!7 and some of the mobile phone companies. This means a listing on True Local goes onto all of these services.

True Local offers a number of listing levels ranging from free to $220 a year. Interestingly, News’ Premium service charges for much of what Google Places offers for free, which is one reason why Google is the preferred free site. True Local’s reach in both search, partner sites and offline channels makes it important for business to be listed on the service.

Sensis Listings

Telstra’s directory service, Sensis, offers a free Yellow Pages listing which appears in both their online and printed versions as well as Telstra’s online and mobile services. While listing here will mean you’ll get a polite but anxious call from a Sensis sales representative offering you a deal on a Yellow Pages paid ad, it’s still a very important channel given Telstra’s market share.

As Ken in the comments has noted, Sensis don’t allow you to add a website address to the free listing. While this reduces the effectiveness of a Sensis online listing, it still means your business will appear in Telstra’s online and mobile searches, so it is an important channel to be listed on.

These five tools are a great help for all businesses, regardless of their size or web presence, and each can be set up within in a hour. You could have all five working for you within a day.

Get these free tools working for your business so customers can find you on the web.

Why cloud computing isn’t just about savings

Looking for massive cost savings should not the sole reason for choosing a new product.

“Billions of IT savings in the Clouds” trumpeted the Australian Financial Review last week in a front page article on cloud computing that claimed moving services online could “slash technology costs by up to 80 percent”.

If nothing else, those lines lead any IT industry veteran to rise a wry eyebrow; a business that adopts a new platform, technology or vendor solely on the claim of massive cost savings is in for a world of pain, disappointment and heartbreak.

There’s no doubt that cloud computing and software as a service are the IT industry’s growth areas and there are many benefits for the businesses that adopt these technologies. Reduced costs is one of the attractions, but it isn’t the only factor a businesses should consider.

Other aspects are the flexibility of not locking yourself into specific hardware and technology platforms, reduced capital and labour commitments along with improved security, reliability and data protection.

This last point is probably the killer reason why you shouldn’t be looking for 80 percent cost savings with any product. As we discussed a while back, to go onto the cloud you have to trust your supplier has the utmost competence and integrity. A provider who offers nothing but slashed costs will struggle to provide peace of mind.

It’s likely in a few years time only the biggest of the biggest companies will have inhouse IT staff and servers as most business IT operations will run over the internet and through web browsers. Most businesses will think having IT staff on the payroll is as unusual as employing a full time plumber or electrician in the office.

Although we probably won’t get to bank those savings — as we’ve found with the roll out of IT services in the last 20 years, new industries will develop that will soak up the labour and create new cost centres. While today’s services may be 80% percent cheaper, just as today’s computers and mobile phone are 80% cheaper than those of 20 years ago, we’ll be using other services and the price of those will soak up a lot of those savings.

A bigger concern is for the cloud and software as a service industries themselves. If online services are identified as merely a cost cutting product, then these markets are going to be rapidly commoditised with a race to the bottom not dissimilar to what we’ve seen in the PC industry. Which will perversely mean security and reliability conscious businesses will keep their IT in house rather than risk it to a cheap charlie data service.

History’s shown that selling and buying cheap in technology is a mug’s game. So don’t get seduced by claims of ridiculous savings with any technology; be it cloud computing, telecoms services or any other line item. All too often that cheap price or massive saving hides some nasty traps.

Because of the compelling benefits cloud computing is the way businesses will go over the next few years but those who choose a platform simply because it appears 80% cheaper probably won’t be around to tell us about it.

Does innovation scare customers?

US consumers ranked Facebook with airlines and cable companies in satisfaction. Is this because of innovation?

Read Write Web reports the 2010 American Customer Satisfaction Index found Facebook in the bottom 5% of trusted US companies. The article goes on to quote Larry Freed, CEO of ForSee Results, as saying “it’s clear that while innovation is critical, sometimes consumers prefer evolution to revolution”.

There’s no doubt Facebook’s many user interface and privacy changes have upset consumers however can this be blamed on “innovation”?

Perhaps Facebook’s problems were because those “innovations” largely didn’t benefit the site’s users and the few that did were poorly communicated.

For innovations to be accepted by the market they have to provide some benefit; generally people don’t like change and the old saw “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” applies. If something is working fine, then why make a change that isn’t going to benefit the people who use it?

An overlooked angle with social media platforms like LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook is how their business model is more like a free to air commercial TV station where the users, or viewers, are not the customers; the advertisers are.

So to put Facebook’s recent mistakes in context perhaps we should be looking at how their innovations were aimed at improving things for their customers, the advertisers, but had the unfortunate effect of upsetting users who are the reason advertisers buy space on the site.

Perhaps Facebook’s changes didn’t upset their customers and, given users have stuck with Facebook despite their fall in reputation, it shows their innovations have actually delivered.

Preparing for the industries that don’t yet exist

just as today’s kids are being educated for industries that don’t exist, business too have to prepare for those future sectors.

In 1999, the then Clinton administration Education Secretary, Richard Riley, said “We are currently preparing children for jobs that don’t yet exist…”

Last week’s COSBOA conference in Brisbane showed another aspect to that statement; in the next decade most businesses will be operating in industries that don’t yet exist and all organisations will using technologies yet to be thought of.

The day’s conference sessions reflected this with the topics consistentently coming back to technology; for instance, discussions on taxation coming around to e-tax and marketing covering e-commerce and social media.

In many ways, the emphasis on social media is a bit unfortunate because these tools are really yesterday’s news; Twitter has been available for three years, Facebook for six and blogs since the establishment of the World Wide Web in 1993.

The mobile Internet, location based services and augmented reality are the current frontier as described by Ben White, Optus’ Director of Strategy and Corporate Development in his keynote to the conference.

Darren Alexander of Launceston based company Autech emphasised this change later in a later forum by describing how his business has evolved over ten years and where technology was taking regional businesses. If you doubt the value of the National Broadband Network, have a chat to Darren sometime.

Also on that technology panel Mike O’hagan of mini movers  described how outsourcing and crowdsourcing has changed his, and others, businesses. This is something we’ve covered previously and discussed how this presents challenges to many established businesses.

While this means we’re in a great era of great opportunity, it’s also a time where the slow movers will fall by the wayside. When nearly 50% of businesses don’t have a website and where retailers are ignoring their customers moving online, you can’t help but think many of these enterprises are heralding their own doom.

On a national level this is clear as well. While I’ll leave the commentary on the politicians’ promises to small business at COSBOA to others, it should be pointed out that accelerated depreciation and small business ministers in cabinet are nice, but without an overhaul of the tax system that puts investment in Australian businesses and innovation on the same footing as passive investments like housing and shares then Australia’s investment structure is going to remain unbalanced and much of our business and intellectual potential is going to go untapped.

Australia’s national obsession with property and our dependence on raw commodity exports to finance a private debt habit put us in the same position as the business without a website. We need to be thinking properly about the future and equipping ourselves with the skills to deal with tomorrow’s technologies and the 21st Century world economy.

While in our own lives and businesses we can’t change national policy, we can prepare for the changes by being aware of the trends, experimenting with them and making the financial and management investment in today’s tools that are creating tomorrow’s industries.

Are you prepared to be part of the future?

The downside of social media marketing

Social media is a great business marketing tool, but it has downsides as a Sydney jeweller learned

Until last Sunday, Facebook was working well for jeweller Victoria Buckley; the page for her store in Sydney’s upmarket Strand Arcade was generating sales and had a rapidly growing fan base from around the world.

One of the key parts of her marketing campaigns are porcelain dolls made by the Canadian designer Marina Bychkova. Her classic doll Ophelia features in the window displays, on posters in the store and on the shop’s Facebook page.

Ophelia is a little bit different to most dolls in that she’s naked and anatomically correct — she has nipples.

Last weekend Victoria received six warnings from Facebook about “inappropriate content” on her page. There was no indication of which images or text broke the rules or what would happen to her page if she took no action.

“The frustrating thing is I can’t pinpoint which images” says Victoria, who goes on to point out that over the year she’s used Ophelia in her marketing, including two large banners in the busy shopping precinct, she’s received no complaints.

“It’s all a bit arbitrary”, says Victoria “it only takes one anonymous person to click on the flag content button and there’s a problem”. Earlier this year her Flickr account was set to restricted because of Ophelia’s nudity.

To avoid problems, Victoria has blacked out any potentially inappropriate parts of Ophelia on the store’s Facebook profile and started a “Save Ophelia- exquisite doll censored by Facebook” group until she can resolve the issue.

But here lies another problem; she can’t find a way to contact Facebook. “It’s become an increasingly important part of the business” Victoria says of the Facebook page and “I just don’t know what’s going to happen to the site”.

Right now Victoria has no idea what is going to happen to her business’s profile. As she can’t talk to Facebook, she’s uncertain of the page’s future.

This uncertainty illustrates an overlooked issue with social media sites. All these services are proprietary, run by private organizations to their own rules and business objectives.

In many ways, they are like private mall owners. They are perfectly entitled to dictate what merchants and customers can do on their premises. If you don’t like it, you have no recourse but to take your business elsewhere.

As consequence these sites have a great deal of control over your online business, a lesson that’s been hard learned by many eBay and PayPal dependent Internet retailers.

A good example of what can go wrong are the Geocities websites. Ten years ago Geocities was a popular free hosting site used by many micro businesses and hobbyists. Just over a year ago the now parent company Yahoo! shut them down and all the data on them has been lost.

By relying another company’s Internet platform, you are effectively making them a partner in your business. That’s great while things go well, but you have to remember their business objectives and moral values are different to yours.

This is why a business website is essential; your traffic and all your intellectual property is too important to sit on another businesses’ website with all the risks that go along with that.

The lesson is that while using Facebook, Twitter and other Internet services are an important part of the business marketing mix, your business needs the security of its own website and all your marketing channels, both online and offline, should point to it.

Fortunately Victoria’s across that, she’s pointing her Facebook fans to her website telling them, “You can join my independent mailing list at this link, in case they get really stupid and close this group.”

The collaborative economy

Should you help someone with a business idea even if they could become a competitor?

“I couldn’t help her, she might become a competitor!” said Nick* when I asked if he’d been able to help Angela* with a business idea.

That response, and the murmured agreement of everyone around us, broke my heart as Angela’s business experience could have helped Nick’s struggling operation.

Nick had taken the short term, narrow and reflexive view rather than listen and think through the opportunities presented by collaborating with Angela, a successful businesswoman who had recently sold her previous venture and was exploring new ideas.

As we discussed a few weeks ago, most business is now global. Instead of worrying about the guy up the street, most enterprises have to worry about what’s happening in the rest of the world. Business is now bigger than petty neighbourhood turf wars.

In many cases, identifying your business’s weaknesses and finding partners who have complimentary skills can grow everybody’s ventures and the overall market. This is particularly true in regional areas where locals are having to look outside their districts for the right skills and products.

To be honest, this issue is personal; one of my IT businesses was constantly hamstrung because I couldn’t establish relationships with other tech support companies. The companies I approached were happy for us to refer work to them but the idea of referring work back or, God Forbid, working together when we had complimentary skills was untenable.

As a consequence none of the businesses grew and everybody was a loser. That reluctance to collaborate between parties is one reason why the IT support sector is such a dog’s breakfast.

Nick’s reluctance to help and engage with other players may not kill his business but he’s lost a valuable resource that could have made his company’s growth easier. It’s a loss for everyone.

If your neighbours or friends have an idea, embrace them even if they could be a competitor, they may be the best allies you ever had.

Nine steps to choosing a consultant

A good consultant can help your business, but choosing the right one takes a bit of time and research

As much as we’d like to think we can do everything, the truth is we can’t. Even the biggest organisations don’t always have the right skills for a task that needs to be done. Enter the consultant.

Consultants have had bad press in recent years due to a combination of misunderstandings and misuse by big and small organisations. Ideally the consulting company will bring a fresh set of eyes and skills to projects that are not central to the daily running of your business. So how do we go about choosing a consultant?

1. Do they show up on time?

If a consultant is unreliable when they are chasing your work, what makes you think they will be any better when you hire them? If you’re hounding them for quotes and proposals then you have to wonder if they are really capable of doing the job. The time required to reply to an enquiry is a good way to whittle down the short list.

2. The internet is your friend

An experienced consultant will have a digital footprint with articles, white papers, blogs and a website. These are a good guide to the areas the consultant is an expert in. For consulting firms, those white papers can be powerful marketing tools to show off their expertise.

3. Read their public utterances

Reading into articles will dig up that consultant’s or their staff’s views on the market and different solutions. Comments on other peoples’ sites by the firm’s principles and employees is a great way how deep their expertise is and how they are regarded in the industry, this is also a good check that their values align with yours.

Something that catches out a lot of the self-proclaimed “social media experts” and marketing people is they often show their talk of trust and openness is little more than talk. If a consultant’s tweets, comments or Facebook wall posts are at odds with what they are telling you, then that should be a danger sign.

4. Check references

The consultant’s website will cite the clients they have worked for. Pick up the phone and talk to them, did the consultant really do this work? How effective were they?

If your consultant is an individual, part of that digital footprint is social media. Tools like LinkedIn and Facebook help in checking references as well.

LinkedIn in particular has a recommendations section that is handy quick reference checker. Don’t be shy to contact those people to check the veracity of their recommendations.

5. Understand their biases

We all have biases towards certain solutions. As the US industrial psychologist Abraham Maslow said, “When all you own is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail”. In technology this is particularly pronounced as consulting firms small and big have made a substantial investment on one platform or another. This isn’t a bad thing but keep their biases in mind and ask questions why they are proposing a certain course of action over alternatives.

6. Know their expertise

The whole point of hiring a consultant is to do a task you aren’t familiar with. If you ask the consultant to do something outside of their immediate area of expertise then your fees are paying them to train in a new area. Good for them but not for you.

7. Are they too agreeable?

If the consultant agrees with you all the time, then there’s little point in hiring them except for self-validation. A good consultant will be prepared to gently steer you away from silly decisions. On the other hand one who screams at you or puts your staff’s views down is best let go.

8. Trust your instincts

If something doesn’t work for you about a particular proposal, individual or organisation then look elsewhere. If you’re uncomfortable before signing an agreement, imagine how you’ll be when the invoices start arriving.

9. Price should not be the factor

Choosing a consultant purely on cost is risky. As I addressed in a recent blog on the crowdsourcing revolution there are real traps in going for the cheapest option. Invariably, the cheaper and inexperienced consultants will require more handholding and demands on your management time.

A good consultant is worth their weight in gold and finding one is a great help for your business. A little due diligence through the hiring process makes sure you get the person right for your needs.

The coming global race for talent

Assuming immigration can grow the nation and fill skill shortages might be flawed.

Yuan Yandong is a Guanzhou factory worker who is saving to open a hotel management company. The New York Times recently followed him through a night on the Foxconn hard drive assembly lines.

The New York Times article asked “is an unlimited supply of Chinese workers waiting to migrate from the poorer provinces”? Joseph F. Coughlin, Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab, points out this isn’t the case and China has a demographic hump far bigger than our own baby boomers.

Recognising their workforce problems, China is beginning to move up the value chain as we see with Yuan’s ambitions and the recent strikes in Guangdong factories challenges our assumptions that China will just be the world’s centre for cheap T-shirts and electronics. These changes in countries like China and India were among the topics discussed by the speakers and attendees at last weekend’s X Media Lab in Sydney, in fact X Media Lab itself relocated from Sydney to Shanghai a few years ago.

China’s aging population though is tomorrow’s problem; Japan has this problem today and Western Europe isn’t far behind which means it’s going to get far harder to find workers anywhere in the near future.

For Australian businesses, this means we can’t rely on importing young workers to overcome skill shortages as we have since World War II. The Big Australia idea of using immigration from South Asia, Africa and the Middle East to fix our workforce shortages ignores the competition we’re going to be in with other nations and regions facing much bigger challenges than ours.

In that competition, we don’t offer a great package; traditionally we’ve ignored all non-British qualifications and expected new immigrants to drive our taxis regardless of their skills. Unless we recognise the contributions professional arrivals bring, we’ll struggle to attract those workers.

As businesses, this means we need to be investing and training and making sure our own workplaces and the nation’s workforce are as productive as possible. The first step on an individual business level is to understand what is happening in your sector and how technology is changing it. Regardless of what your industry is, technology is changing your supply chain, customer and supplier behaviour and you need to be understand those changes and how you can profit from them.

Your competition is no longer down the street, it’s around the world and there are millions of young, hard working people like Yuan Yandong looking at your industry right now and thinking how they can do it better. How is your business going to deal with competition like that?

The bedrock of trust

Trust is the foundation of business; without trust you have no business

An article in last weekend’s New York Times described the problems of AXA Rosenberg; a quantitative funds manager owned by the French financial giant AXA. The role of quant funds is to use sophisticated share trading programs that maximise returns to large investors.

Sometime in mid 2009 an error was discovered in the software AXA Rosenberg used to trade on behalf of its clients. They didn’t tell their clients until April 2010, at least ten months later.

As a consequence, AXA Rosenberg are finding clients are fleeing them. This illustrates just how important trust is in business.

You don’t have to be a big corporation to fess up to mistakes; we all make them and the sooner we admit them the easier it is to rebuild or keep the trust of those around us.

Trust is the bedrock of business, as AXA Rosenberg has found without trust you have no business.

Choosing a content management system

There’s no such thing as a straight answer in technology, so you need to ask the right questions.

Last week I was asked by a business owner what is the best open source Content Management System for their website. Like many questions in technology, the answer was “it depends”.

Discussing open source and CMS in the one sentence is dangerous as you enter a world of religious geek wars were relationships and reputations are ruined over arguments concerning which product is best; think of the Mac versus PC war fought on a thousand fronts.

There’s also the danger of business owners misunderstanding what “open source” means; to many it means “free” because they don’t realise most of the implementation cost of technology is in the labour time of setting the systems up, not the initial purchase cost. Another risk lies in being blinded by the word “free” results in the business being locked into an inappropriate and ultimately more expensive solution.

This isn’t say the same thing can’t happen with a proprietary system either and often you’ll find being locked into one software vendor means you’re forced into expensive upgrades whenever it suits the vendor’s marketing plan.

Software licenses themselves are a source of risk, in the case of one major technology company I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that half their customers are in breach of their user agreements due to some obscure, arcane and contradictory clause buried deep in the legalese. Not that the software company itself would know, being just as befuddled by their own license conditions as their long suffering customers.

Of the open source Content Management Systems, three options stand out from a crowded field; Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. Each one has it’s own benefits;

WordPress

One of the features that marks WordPress out as the leader in the blogging world is its CMS functions. For most websites and business, WordPress combines ease of use with a vast range of plugins, templates and features. Because of its popularity, there’s an army of consultants and webmasters who can get a professional, corporate looking WordPress based website up and running.

Joomla

Coming from website development roots, Joomla based sites don’t have a habit of looking like blogs that WordPress based sites sometimes do. Like WordPress, Joomla has a large base of developers and supporters and offers access to a wide range of extensions and templates. It offers more flexibility than WordPress if you want to customise your site’s look or feel.

Drupal

Drupal is the best if you want a technical solution. While it’s more expensive and time consuming to set up, it offers more flexibility and power for the business. Drupal is probably the best choice if you have a high traffic site with lots of often changing content.

The ultimate solution comes down to what is right for your business so it’s best to get an expert in to have a look at what your current needs and future plans are for your website. Both Smartcompany’s Aunty B and Craig Reardon have previously looked at how to find the right experts.

One thing to keep in mind when asking experts is that religious aspect; many websites designers are evangelists for one platform or another, so ask widely and remember to be firm about your budgets.

I’d be interested to hear from business owners what their experiences have been with the different platforms and in seeking advice, so please comment below on what you’ve found when shopping for a CMS. Religious geek flamewars on the topic are welcome as well.

Every business is a people business

Our businesses are all about people regardless of what we sell.

Facebook’s problems with privacy shows how all business are about people. When managers and business owners forget, their businesses are heading for trouble.

When you’re running a web based service, it’s easy to forget those valuable views and clicks are people. Facebook’s current problems are a reminder that it’s people that sit at the core of every business; as staff, management and customers.

Facebook satisfies a basic urge;  our desire to share our experiences, like party and baby photos, with our friends and relatives. We don’t want to share them with some sleazy tooth whitening advertiser and certainly don’t want them shown to the entire world.

Each time Facebook makes a change that opens more data to the world, it loses a little more of their customer’s trust and while the recent Quit Facebook Day only saw a tiny fraction of users leave the service there will be a point where most people stop trusting Facebook and look elsewhere.

It’s a classic case of a technology business not understanding the people aspect of their market.

There’s a wonderful scene in the Mad Men TV series where Kodak have a problem selling their new rotating slide projector, the advertising people fix it by telling the human story behind slide shows, that the pictures are about memory and belonging.

In a funny way Facebook is the modern slide night.

Even if you aren’t in technology, it’s easy to forget the human side of the business. For instance the excellent plumber who walks his dirty boots through the customer’s house doesn’t get invited back.

Mix technology with business and things get worse. We get so tied up in the shiny bells and cute whistles of our toys that we forget our staff don’t know how to use those tools and our customers don’t understand them.

Big businesses are probably the worst for this; over the weekend I came across one of the big telcos using an artificial intelligence web bot to bounce sales enquires between their equally uninformative website, Facebook page and Twitter feed. They were actually messing around potential customers who were looking to spend money.

Those managers responsible in that organisation probably think the system is working fine. Because they’ve been dazzled by the tech they’ve forgotten the whole point is to engage their customers and get them to buy something, not get them stuck in a continuous loop whichadds little value to the business or the client.

Understanding the human aspect of the technology you deploy gives you the advantage over those big telcos and the hottest Silicon Valley stars. So how are you dealing with the human side of your business?

The Outsourcing Revolution

Could your business be a victim of the outsourcing revolution?

Matt Barrie, CEO of freelancer.com proclaimed at The Insight Exchange’s Getting Results from Crowdsourcing that “outsourcing and crowdsourcing are revolutionising business”.

This is true and we need to keep in mind revolutions result in some eating brioche while others walk to the guillotine. The question for every business owner should be is their industry at risk when there’s a global supply of cheap labour at everyone’s fingertips.

Smart Company covered the pros and cons of crowdsourcing in an earlier article and the interesting thing is many people, including experts and business owners, still confuse crowdsourcing with outsourcing.

Outsourcing is hiring in labour to do the job, there’s nothing really new in this except the Internet now allows providers from around the world to bid for work through sites like Freelancer.com, elance and odesk.

Crowdsourcing is where groups of people volunteer their efforts either for free or in the hope they will be selected to do a job such as logo design. Many of these sites rely on free or marginal cost labour with a few exceptions like Yvonne Adele’s Ideas While You Sleep.

One of the points we need to keep in mind with both crowdsourcing and outsourcing is while there are massive savings to be made, there are risks as both require project management skills which are often underrated and undervalued, as anyone who’s built an extension to their house can attest. The big banks found through their outsourcing adventures in the last 15 years that managing your foreign service providers can be expensive, time consuming and not without elements of risk.

As low cost solutions for relatively simple tasks involving no intellectual property, Internet outsourcing and crowdsourcing are a good solution for big and small business. It also makes you fear for a lot of local skilled businesses like designers and programmers competing against these low cost countries.

It’s not the solution for everything though and many tasks are best outsourced locally or kept in house.

Another thought is that if we accept we’ve moved to an ideas based economy, what makes us assume an American, European or Australian idea is any more valuable than an Indian or Chinese idea? So the outsourcing revolution may have some surprises for those of us who think we’ll be untouched by this. Indeed many of the websites and local business advocating outsourcing programs could themselves have competitors from low cost locations.

Regardless of these thoughts the global market is now at your doorstep even if you don’t compete overseas. The question is will your industry be going to the guillotine or one of those eating cake as the global outsourcing revolution evolves?