crowdSPRING

As one uses Twitter to find the customers, it is also possible to find suppliers there. For example, Crowdspring portal where business representatives and graphic designers meet, used Twitter to form its author collective.

Crowdspring: "Post a creative project. Watch the world contribute ideas. Choose the one you like." Some of these are more Web centers/platforms than "shops", but nonetheless it's clear that crowdsourcing already exists as a business model accessible by advertising professionals.

The term "crowdsourcing" generally refers to when corporations ask their customers or the community at large to come up with business ideas traditionally generated by employees and contractors. Ravenswood-based online retailer Threadless is a pioneer in the practice, while West Loop-based CrowdSPRING last year raised $3 million to fund a Web site that invites graphic designers from all over the world to bid on contract work.

Capacity – especially to plan and execute effective marketing strategies – is a big challenge for every small business. In this post, I’ll offer 10 suggestions for how small businesses can supercharge their marketing efforts by leveraging social media.

crowdSPRING put me in contact with Rachel Stene, from Sparta, Wisconsin. Rachel is a freelance graphic artist by trade, specifically motion graphics. When her husband lost his job, she had to add something to her animation work to make up for the lost income. She started looking into crowdSPRING.

Companies can work wonders before Twitter's vast interactive audience of consumers, but it's best to start slowly and build credibility. Companies are joining Twitter for the same reason politicians attend the funerals of famous people: It's where they can find their constituents and hold close, informal conversations with them. For example, CrowdSPRING, a tiny Chicago-based startup, uses Twitter to find buyers and sellers for its online professional graphics marketplace.

Your company's logo is critical -- in terms of branding, getting customers, and presenting the right image. And, the good news is that there are many affordable options to get a top-notch one. Crowdsourcing: Yes, you can use the power of community to develop your logo. This is possible at a site called crowdSPRING.

Dion Hinchcliffe’s Next-Generation Entreprises. Crowdsourcing: 5 Reasons It’s Not Just For Startups Anymore. One of my favorites is Crowdspring, an online design service. I've submitted work there in the past and was amazed at the number of community responses I received (well over 40 for a single design request) for the smallest fraction of what it would cost using traditional services.

How To: Launch Your Own Indie Journalism Site
For low-cost logos and design help, more good resources include Crowdspring.

I am lucky enough to have a close friend who happens to be a great graphic designer and she volunteered to create my save-the-date cards and invitations, but prior to her generous offer, I was planning to use a crowd sourced design site like crowdSPRING to get my wedding collateral created.

crowdSPRING is a small company. For a small company, efforts spent on one marketing initiative typically take away from other marketing initiatives. Entrepreneurs and small businesses often ask us about how we market - and especially about SEO and SEM. Here are our top ten suggestions, based on our own experience, for supercharging your SEO and SEM efforts.

The search for a new logo was conducted online, with the university paying Internet company crowdSPRING $250 to host a Web site for the project. Anyone could submit a design to the site; visitors could also comment on or tweak proposals from other submitters. University officials then narrowed the contenders down to the two finalists with the help of on-campus focus groups. The designs' creators each were paid $500.

If panning for gold is your idea of fun, then user-generated content might be just the thing for you. There's no question that crowdsourcing can be very powerful. Garfield tells how he chose the cover design for his book from more than 100 entries submitted by bidders on the CrowdSPRING.com designer Web site. Total cost: $500.

Since its launch in May 2008, crowdSPRING has grown to host more than 34,000 creatives from 150+ countries with more than 5,000 projects posted to date. They've seen highs like winning a Stevie Award, being a two-time nominee for a Webby and being named Wire Magazine's small business of the year. But with every peak, there are valleys. crowdSPRING discusses the awkward, screw up moments when your online product or service crashes and what to do to keep your community coming back.

Alex Bogusky and Ross Kimbarovsky discuss crowdSPRING and the power of crowdsourcing.

Mike Samson, Co-founder of crowdSPRING, joins hosts Anita Campbell and Steve Rucinski to discuss the awkward moments when your online product or service crashes, what to do to keep your community coming back – and how a litle honesty can go a long way.

Ross Kimbarovsky of crowdSPRING discusses a very important start-up tip - the difference between leadership and management.

A nationally recognized author and industry consultant, Kuczmarski in 2002 founded the Chicago Innovation Awards with former Sun-Times business editor Dan Miller. The goal of the program is to showcase how Chicago area organizations -- from startups to nonprofits to Boeing -- best bring new ideas to the marketplace. Gogo Inflight Internet Service, CrowdSpring and SurePayroll are among the companies that made the cut.

LG seems ready to embark on a little risk-taking, however. The Korean electronics maker recently awarded about $80,000 to designers in a contest at the website CrowdSpring.

In the spirit of experimentation, we have turned the cover of the issue over to the crowd, using the service CrowdSpring, and the results have been intriguing do far. Sure there's the Max Headroom Bogusky, and Old Man Bogusky, and covers with no Bogusky whatsoever (the horror).

Starbucks, IBM, and other companies rely on Twitter to reach customers. The site's outage could encourage them to speed up implementation of backup plans. CrowdSPRING, an online marketplace for artists, also found itself unable to communicate with potential buyers. "Once you get customers used to communicating on Twitter, it's hard to tell them to communicate in a different manner," says Ross Kimbarovsky, who co-founded the site.

Last night, I attended a very thought-provoking Ad Club (#adclub) event, “All About Crowdsourcing,” featuring authors Edward Boches and John Winsor. John, VP of Strategy & Innovation at Crispin, Porter & Bogusky, recently wrote a piece in BusinessWeek about what crowdsourcing means for innovation. Edward, Chief Creative Officer/Chief Social Media Officer at Mullen, is a marketing guru and has a very cool blog called creativity_unbound. I was surprised to see so many people have such strong opinions on crowdsourcing. But whether they liked it or not, it was obvious the model is having a big impact on businesses today. As Edward pointed out, “Crowdsourcing is here to stay.”

If you’re working on a start-up or have an established company, there will come a time when you’ll need to evaluate your competitors. There are three components to a good competitive analysis: (1) defining the metrics and identifying the competitors you’re comparing, (2) gathering the data, and (3) the analysis.

You've heard about Twitter--that curious, strangely addictive social-networking technology that facilitates torrents of truncated messages among millions of users. You might even know your hashtags from your re-tweets. But how can you make money with it? Forbes canvassed scads of businesses and pricey social-networking gurus looking for honest answers. Admittedly, we were skeptical. After all, how much can you accomplish in 140 characters or less? Twitter can snag customers, but how about suppliers? Crowdspring, an online marketplace that marries businesses with graphic designers used Twitter to build up its stable of contributors--now 12,000 strong globally.

You can and need to continuously add to your skills toolkit and your experience examples. This is so you always seem fresh and in-the-know, so that you are always doing something progressive and not feeling hopeless, and so that you keep looking for opportunities instead of waiting for job listings. Make it happen!
Sign up on a free/low-fee project marketplace site like Crowdspring where you can bid for bits and projects - but focus on fair and real bids/projects.

Ross Kimbarovsky, the co-founder of online design studio CrowdSpring.com, faced a dilemma last December. CrowdSpring, which matches designers with companies that need Web site graphics or logos, was less than a year into existence and needed to promote itself on a limited startup budget. Kimbarovsky took a page from his own social Web playbook. He asked a group on one of CrowdSpring's online forums for marketing ideas; one user suggested designers contribute a Web site to a nonprofit group free of charge. The group picked a charity that helps fathers of children with autism.The project garnered attention—enough that Kimbarovsky landed a major new client, LG Electronics, within several months

ChallengePost is a public marketplace for companies, non-profits and individuals to create contests and award prize money for solving problems. It is launching in beta today. The company is one of many that try to crowdsource innovation, but it’s open to a lot more fields of interest than companies like crowdSpring and TopCoder, which target designers and software developers.

A new generation of online service marketplaces is giving small companies more opportunities than ever to find specialized expertise and affordable labor. Main Street businesses can shop a virtual international bazaar of freelancers to recruit computer programmers in Russia, graphic designers in San Francisco or data analysts in India.

Crowdspring.com provides a venue for designers in the U.S. and around the world to compete for prize money offered by organizations needing logos, stationery, and websites. Twenty different designers from several countries submitted 171 entries for the Remembrance Tree Papers logo over the course of one week.

As recently as April-June 2009, LG crowdsourced the design of their next mobile phone. In a job posted to crowdSPRING in April 2009, LG has issued a challenge to people everywhere: Design the future of mobile communication device.

The crowdsourcing marketplaces are CrowdSpring, InnoCentive, TopCoder and uTest provide platforms for companies to host their projects. Participants utilize this opportunity to create a design as per the company's requirements. After all the entries are submitted, the best design in the 'Crowd' is selected by the company. The marketplaces reward the winners of the contest with up to $50,000. According to Businessweek, due to crowdsourcing, traditional forms of compensation connecting corporations to creativity are splintering beyond money to include fame and community.

A soured economy has prompted a boom in crowdsourcing, but this is a creative, efficient trend that will outlast the recession. If LG crowdsources a new cell phone design on CrowdSpring for $20,000, as it did recently, what happens to the old model of paying a design firm millions of dollars for the same project?

Congressman for California’s 15th congressional district, Mike Honda, has decided to put the fate of his website in the hands of his supporters. More precisely, he used crowdSPRING, an online marketplace for creative services, to have designers create designs for his new site, and the public can vote on the design they like best.

For over a week now your entries have been coming in thick and fast from all across the world, and there are dozens of excellent logos for us to choose from. Now the submission deadline has passed, and it's time to examine all the logos. But first, we want to thank you all for your interest in the contest. This outstripped even our wildest expectations - we are very, very grateful to you all.

Congressman Mike Honda (D-CA) wants you to help redesign his website. He's using a platform called crowdSPRING, which encourages users to "just post your project, watch the world submit ideas and choose the one you like."

Like many Members of Congress, Rep. Mike Honda Tweets his day-to-day thoughts, posts hearings on YouTube and friends constituents on Facebook. But the California Democrat recently took new media a step further than his colleagues, turning his Web site redesign into an open forum. Honda hopes constituents and others will create a viable Web page through “crowdsourcing,” which allows anyone and everyone to submit designs. The winner gets a $1,000 contract.

When LG, the cell phone manufacturer, started work on far-reaching future concepts for a handset, it had two choices. The most obvious one was setting up a competition between world-class design firms, getting a stampede and a bidding war as a result, and picking one firm to work on its concept phones. The Korean electronics giant took another path: crowdsourcing. LG Mobile Phone teamed-up with crowdSPRING a marketplace for creative works, to organize a contest...

Democratic Rep. Mike Honda, whose 15th District covers parts of the South Bay and Silicon Valley, has fervently embraced the Web. Honda was already on Facebook and Twitter. This week he asked his constituents to vote on a new design for his government Web site. Constituents who want to take him up on his pitch should go to crowdspring.com, run by a company that posts projects and collects ideas.

In the market for a fresh look and image, Cal State San Marcos is tapping into the power of the Internet to come up with a new logo. Companies and other organizations typically hire professional graphic artists or use in-house talent to design their logos. However, Cal State administrators sought the help of crowdSPRING, a Chicago-based Internet company that describes itself as an online marketplace for creative services.

A recent article was posted on crowdSPRING regarding meetings. A man came to the defense of meeting’s with valid points throughout the article. His company has a five minute long meeting every morning. They discuss what their business did the day before and what they want to do that day in business.

LG and crowdSPRING have joined force to launch a contest to get as many people as possible to submit their designs for a future LG mobile phone.

In a world of user generated content, crowdsourced Super Bowl commercials and Skittles on Twitter, LG has decided to take tap the wisdom of crowds yet again - but this time they are asking for more than a 30-second Doritos spot.

Using your local design shop, programmer or assistant for work is fine. We work best with those we know and feel comfortable with. However, you never know how better (in price or in delivery) you might be able to get your next project unless you use a new vendor.

LG Mobile Phones is partnering with crowdSPRING and Autodesk to hold a new competition to define the future of personal mobile communication.

Want a chance to win over $80,000 in awards? LG has announced a contest to deign the next revolutionary mobile phone in partnership with crowdSPRING (an online marketplace for creative services) and Autodesk (a leader in 2D and 3D design and engineering software).

So you think you can design a mobile phone? Here's your chance. Got an idea? Got a sketch pad? That’s all you need. You have 43 chances to win, too.

In the last few months, we've seen the headlines dominated by news of systemic layoffs as agencies shed talent that they can't afford to keep. Some of this talent has forsaken the hope of finding a new job and transitioned into self-employment to become part of the so-called gig economy, where they jump from project to project as a freelancer or consultant.

There is a brand new way of doing business thanks to the World Wide Web. Kris Hammond of Northwestern University introduces us to the popular phenomenon known as "crowdsourcing," and tells us how it works.

Much has been made of savvy marketers using "crowdsourcing" to connect their brands with customers, and plenty of pixels have been published on the success of crowdsourced programs... But quite recently a much different discussion has emerged, as crowdsourcing is starting to change the very way we think about creativity, both online and off.

By now it’s fair to say most of us have heard the term “crowdsourcing.” One of the ways small and large businesses alike have been harnessing the power of the crowd is in the area of branding and marketing. Companies are now realizing that customers are often more than happy to tell them exactly what customers want and, at times, even willing to build it for them, too!

TweetPhoto, a free photo sharing service for Twitter, today announced it is using CrowdSPRING to crowdsource its company logo design. Crowdsourcing has become the best way to bring customers into the creative process. Many companies are turning to crowdsourcing due to its successful ability to effectively elicit customer feedback and involvement.

Ross Kimbarosvky and Mike Samson, co-founders of CrowdSPRING.com sat down and talked business but was sure to make time for some word association fun with StartupsLIVE host Charissa Cowart.

The Illinois Technology Association (ITA) is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2009 CityLIGHTS Awards. ITA will present the awards, which honor outstanding information technology companies, executives and advocates in Illinois, to the winners at ITA's tenth annual CityLIGHTS Gala on April 23 at Union Station in Chicago.

The creative agency business that insists on the traditional way of sourcing for work could be in peril. Not because of the worsening global economy, although that is one reason, but because of one little company based in Chicago called crowdSPRING.

There are silly feuds and then there’s the crowdSpring vs. Threadless vs. “Spec Work is Evil.” At South by SouthWest (SXSW if you’re kewl) panel "Is Spec Work Evil?" a three-way fight occurred.

There are different types of outsourced design solutions, but nearly all involve working in the traditional model, where you’d put out a request for proposals and people would bid on the work. While that model works for many, we saw an opportunity.

As retailers’ budgets are increasingly slashed, many are trying to find creative ways to do more for less. A service called CrowdSpring can help them do just that, says industry analyst Keven Wilder, president of retail consultancy Wilder Inc.

"Widely perceived as the wave of the future, Crowdspring has also been characterized as the design Antichrist, a force that will destroy the profession."

Ross E. Kimbarovsky founded crowdSPRING with Mike Samson to help people from around the world access creative talent, and to help creatives from across the globe find new customers. "By helping creatives reach a new, global market for their creativity, we hope to challenge the current thinking on where great ideas come from."

"Since it launched last May, the crowd-sourcing design website CrowdSpring.com has been causing a stir in the design community."

"At only eight months of age, crowdSPRING has hosted more than 2,000 projects; paid out $600,000 to designers; and seen marked growth in its revenue, number of users and average project value."

"Outsourcing started as a corporate trend, driven by large companies that had the sophistication to shift factory and office work to English-speaking locations overseas. Now new online tools are giving small businesses and entrepreneurs the same ability to assemble and manage teams of workers anywhere in the world, providing lower-cost, skilled labor without the benefits that come with full-time jobs."

"When the company launched last spring, the founders thought they could avoid the payment headaches other small businesses and start-ups face by requiring all customers pay in advance by credit card."

"And if the task requires someone closer to home, sites like Guru and CrowdSPRING offer workers both in the U.S. and abroad."

"Ideas like this have the potential to change the economics of how agencies sell their creative work."

"The beauty of our site is that it doesn't matter if you have a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design or if you're a grandma in Tennessee with a bunch of free time and Adobe Illustrator."

"After losing a key marketing person, we were at a loss for what to do. We thought about taking out a personal ad but something about "7 guys seek adventurous creative type" just didn't seem like a good idea. So, we turned to what we know: the internet..."

After months of judging, crowdSPRING comes out on top!

"Nothing compares to the thrill of a great team working as one at an entrepreneurial company. Every day is about learning something new, supporting our employees and building a sustainable new business model."

"Co-Founders Mike Samson and Ross Kimbarovsky are not your typical dot com entrepreneurs. Prior to crowdSPRING, neither had worked in technology or run a business..."

"We felt that there had to be a better model for sourcing creative services, that would give buyers real choice in selecting a design."

Keith and Jason, fresh from DEMOFall 08 in San Diego, recap the show and bring you their eight favorite companies.

“CrowdSpring gives struggling graphic artists a shot at the big time; companies put jobs (like logo design) out for bid, artists submit their designs, company picks its favorite, winning artist gets paid. They'll be launching a similar service for copy writing later this year.”

“CrowdSpring offered its online marketplace for creative professionals.”

“Small businesses who'd otherwise never be able to afford to use a graphic designer can use CrowdSpring to get work done. And people who might otherwise never be given an opportunity to do graphic design work can do so through CrowdSpring.”

“CrowdSpring offers an alternative business model for design work. CrowdSpring's developers believe its open model will promote broader innovation while providing opportunities to undiscovered, talented designers.”

“The company is not new, but I still love the idea. It's a new twist on the open marketplace for intellectual work. At Demo, the company will unveil CrowdSpring Private, which lets companies create their own, closed markets, so creativity doesn't leak out onto the Web, heaven forbid.”

"Roughly 5,000 designers from about 125 countries have joined CrowdSpring to bid for work since the Web site launched in May."

"Need graphic design for your website or a new logo for your company? Maybe your business has other artistic needs, but you don't want to shell out the money to contract an artist. A new website, crowdSPRING, may be your answer."

"Clients spend time being clients, and creatives spend time being creative..."

...by allowing both established creative professionals and talented newcomers to compete based solely on their creativity and the quality of their ideas—rather than bids, proposals or portfolios—crowdSPRING could also level the competitive playing field for creative people worldwide.

crowdSPRING is well set up, offering legal protections for both buyers and sellers and a guarantee that all projects posted on the site will get at least 25 entries.

crowdSPRING is an upcoming startup that aims to provide a transparent process for obtaining creative talent, with a strong emphasis on quality content and trusted freelancers that companies can work with.

If you’re a web designer with time on your hands, you might want to take a look at crowdSPRING's home page...

“What we believe is that there is a huge pool of talent out there that is untapped and cannot compete effectively in a traditional model...”