Using Crowdsourcing To Accomplish More with Less

Crowdsourcing is a relatively new term but the idea has been around for years and is a great way to automate your business. Imagine thousands of people all working for you, adding content to your website, generating spam notifications and generally helping to keep your small business website up to date and consistently fresh. To find out what other benefits crowdsourcing has to offer, Listen to Matt and Brandons discussion on this topic in the latest installment of the Automate My Small Business podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Links from the show:

• Yahoo Groups
• Top Coder
• Spudaroo.com
• Open Innovation
• Innocentive
• Bizgloo.com
• Rostter.com
• Windows Phone S7
• Trillian for Mac
• ask.automatemysmallbusiness.com
• Amazon Mechanical Turk
• humangrid.de
• 99Designs.com
• Google Adwords
• Google Analytics
• MediaWiki
• Dokuwiki
• Kickstarter.com
• RocketHub.com
• Kiva.org
• Prosper.com
• Threadless.com
• Reddit
• inklingmarkets.com
• A/B Testing
• Survey Monkey

Transcript:

Welcome to Automate My Small Business where we show you how to set up and run your own automated business on the cheap. So get ready to take back your life and add a little spice. It’s time to build something automated.

MATT: Hello and welcome to episode #17 of Automate My Small Business. I’m Matt.

BRANDON: And this is Brandon.

MATT: And today we’re going to talk about Crowdsourcing and how to put the power of the crowd in your hands to improve your revenues and build your business. But before we get into that, what have you been up to, Brandon?

BRANDON: You know actually it’s been a little bit of business as usual but there’s been a few highlights that I could kind of share with our listeners that I think are kind of fun. First of all yesterday I got an order through our Sky Mall ad and my fulfillment company emailed me and said, “Hey, you got an order from Paris Hilton.” And I thought well, that’s weird. I’m sure it’s not here so I looked up the shipping address and sure enough it is so that was kind of fun that I’m getting through the celebrity circle. So that’s kind of fun and then …

MATT: Cool. Glamorous.

BRANDON: … looks like Porch Potty got mentioned on the Style Network and it has also made it on the show, It’s Me or the Dog and this Thursday, I’m going to the W Hotels red carpet grand opening because the W Hotels have decided they want a Porch Potty on their condo units that they sell next to the hotel which is a new location in Hollywood. That is kind of a big deal. So that’s kind of fun. So that’s been my part of my 15 minutes of fame so that would be fun to be involved with and then I think last time I talked to you guys, last week was my report that I hired my first employee and it was that day that I decided I don’t want any employees.

MATT: So it only lasted a day. Wow.

BRANDON: So I fired her the first day which was a sad, actually it’s not funny. I mean it’s sad because she was kind of wanting to start working with me. You know but I went back to my basics. You know I said this is the automation part of what you and I have talked about is once I start hiring employees, it’s all over. I shouldn’t say it’s all over it’s just that managing people starts to become part of your job and I weighed the pros and cons and I decided at the end that I’m better off to have a VA that I already have that I could train. It would take a little bit more training but in the end I think I’ll be happy that I did that way. So that was a good little veer off my course but …

MATT: Yeah, for a while there you’re looking at onlinebusinessmanager.com or what was that site?

BRANDON: Yeah, I got that from Tim Ferris’ blog post that he had about the website onlinebusinessmanager.com. Now you can get VA’s all the way from a couple of dollars an hour and here in the states maybe pay somebody $20 an hour. Online Business Manager when I contacted a few of them were like $60 an hour and you might think that that’s too much to pay for somebody who’s going to be kind of doing operation stuff but if you think about it if they’re going to be completely running your business for you and if you get to that point in your business where you can afford it, first of all, and that you’ve put the systems in place that you’ve worked out all the kinks and you can get somebody that you can basically hand over the business and say, “Call me if there’s a problem but otherwise it’s all yours, you know. Let her rip.” So if you feel like that’s where you are in your business, Online Business Manager actually has a good directory of people who are certified in doing just that for online businesses. I was impressed.

MATT: I kind of like the BYO VA, bring your own VA model that they’ll train your people for you if you want to bring someone there.

BRANDON: Right. That’s kind of the best of both worlds, right. You pay less for the VA but you train them to be high quality business manager. Yes, that’s where I think I’m going with this. You know it was some push and pull for a little bit there but I think I’m on the right path now so I’ll let you more as it unfolds.

MATT: Yeah. So I’ve been working on a couple of different new websites and trying to bring them up. Awhile ago I talked about my stealth project that I was still working on and you know three months later I had no time to work on it. So I’m finally getting some rolled out. It’s called Biz Glue and we have a link into the show now. So it’s basically it’s going to be an online marketplace for integration software for small business between you know integrating CRM system with your Gmail and whatever you have but basically I’ve just kind of sticking with our mantra, do the minimum and test and get it out there and see what’s successful. So I basically just put up the website and try to feel what solutions people want and we’ll talk about how that’s going to be using Crowdsourcing to figure out one of the solutions that it needs to build and what’s going to be the most popular stuff. And the other thing I’ve been working on is the site called Rostter which is r-o-s-t-t-e-r.com which is going out of our social media episode that we did and try to build the community for Automate My Small Business where we wanted to have a Twitter list that would let everyone in the community be on that list but true to our form, we didn’t want to be the ones to have to approve who got on and taking people off and all those sort of stuff. So I’m building a site to let people add themselves to Twitter list. So making it more community based and once we get that up, we will make sure that we threw that out on our site and you can add yourself to our Twitter list.

BRANDON: Yeah, I thought that was kind of a neat idea that we kind of brainstorm one day where we thought hey, you know there’s a lot of listeners here that would probably also be interested in following other listeners but unless you know who each other are, there’s really no way to know and you know those of you that do Twitter and you know I use Twitter specifically and mainly for business concepts and you know aha moments and then I use my Facebook for more personal things and you know maybe in my blog or my website or LinkedIn for of course more professional career area.

MATT: Yeah, I think it’s the same way I use these stuff.

BRANDON: Yeah, I guess if you’re also doing the same and you have you you know Twitter, you post things on your Twitter of things that you find throughout the day and you find that this could be useful to other listeners, this is I think kind of a neat way to add yourself to our list of which is if you’re not familiar with Twitter list but there’s a way that you can get onto a list if you add yourself and your Rostter.com is the way to do that automatically. So I think that’s a neat application.

MATT: Yeah and it’s kind of in its infancy but hopefully by the time we get this edited and put out, there’ll be a little bit more full featured and ready for everyone to use.

BRANDON: Yeah, nobody’s doing that yet. That was the interesting part.

MATT: Well, what’s my…

BRANDON: Yeah, your quote is you always say, “Yeah, I searched for it in the internet, nobody’s doing it so I made it.”

MATT: Yeah. So it took me about three days to get to the point where I am now and I think about a day away from planning to release it out to the wild.

BRANDON: It was one of your all nighters you spent.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: Because that’s how you are. You love just getting into something and just crazy about it for like 24 hours. That’s awesome.

MATT: So let’s get into crowd sourcing.

BRANDON: Yeah, this is a good topic. I think Crowdsourcing first of all needs to be explained because most of you probably haven’t heard of the term but both Matt and I have got turned on to it after reading a book by Jeff Howe who wrote a book called Crowdsourcing, why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business and it really points out some great areas of utilizing a handful of people or thousands or in some cases millions of people to generate new ideas, organize your information.

MATT: Or even like fund your businesses and drive revenue for certain things, right?

BRANDON: Right. So it’s basically mass collaboration of people that you maybe you have a platform that you put out there, you know. Examples of it might be something like Digg where you know people post or vote on what websites they like or maybe blogpost that they like and you know after a while the cream of the crop will come to the top and allow people to see which was the best out there at the moment.

MATT: Yeah, I think Wikipedia is probably the quintessential example of content creation by the mass, right. So you have Wikipedia which has millions and millions of articles now that are all written by the people who read Wikipedia. I mean they incrementally grow you know. Someone writes an article and someone go through it and changes a few sentences and then someone else comes along and adds a whole another section to the article and they just gradually grows and Wikipedia has done a great a job of setting up their system to manage itself and promote consistency amongst all their articles.

BRANDON: And so the bottom line here is that ones may have been considered something that could have never worked or you’ll never be able to get better information than the Britannica Encyclopedias. I mean these are highly funded very well sited relics really but they’re books you know that have entries in them that were professionally put together and now Wikipedia is definitely become the forefront and is many cases providing better information and yet the people who are contributing this information are not being paid a cent and so the lesson learned here is that in some cases, getting information through a crowd can result to better information or better results than …

MATT: Getting it from an expert, right?

BRANDON: Than getting them from even a few experts, yes. So that’s the power that we’re trying to tap into here and we’re going to go through some examples of maybe how you can utilize it with your business.

MATT: Yeah, I mean the term crowdsourcing is really new. It’s only about two, three years old at this point.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: But the concept of doing it has been around forever. I mean as I was listening to the book and listening to all the examples, I thought back and I thought you know democracy is basically crowdsourcing choice of a succession in the government, right?

BRANDON: That’s true.

MATT: I mean if you look back and see how did these impact us in the past and all the things that we think of is you know super successful democracy or market based economies, all sort of stuff. I think they’re based on the same idea of lots of people in the crowd doing small amounts of work that add up to you know huge successes.

BRANDON: Right. The New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq I mean those are all examples of crowdsourcing in an effect.

MATT: Right. I mean with Communism you had central planning and you know with Capitalism you had market based economies work because of the crowd because people took different paths and contributed a little bit of growth and a little bit of innovation that you can never do when you have one person or one group of people trying to manage and create something new. They just don’t get out of their comfort zone and see the possibilities that a big crowd can see. So let’s talk a little bit about some of the benefits of crowdsourcing.

BRANDON: Yeah, I mean first of all it’s scalable. You can definitely increase scale of content or input and participation by including a whole host of people.

MATT: Like Wikipedia scaled to millions and millions of users, right. So you could never hire that many people to work in your company so you it’s been scaled almost instantly, right to provide much more that you could ever do you know which is a couple of people in your company. I think we mentioned before about the idea that the wisdom of crow is better than a few experts but the reason that that is because we get lots of people, they all have a little bit of private information or something that they know that someone else doesn’t know and as they contribute that to the solution, it causes other people to see the problem in a different way or the solution in a different way and adding these little bits over time helps you come up with a far better solution than if you just had a couple of people that were working on it by themselves as experts.

BRANDON: Right. So the experts may know a lot about a particular topic but they don’t know everything and when you aggregate thousands of people together, you can have thousands of idiots but together they put all their information into one bucket and you’re going to come out with a better result.

MATT: And they collaboratively filter that, right. So as people contributed the rest of the crowd goes, that’s dumb. We’re going to ignore it or this one we think will spun the spark and a bunch of different people and that trigger some big leap forward in the quality of the information and the quality of the content or whatever they’re creating.

BRANDON: Right. Alright so that’s a good benefit. Another benefit is you’re going to be engaging your participants. You know if anybody’s going to be participating in your Wiki or in your contest or if YouTube is a marketplace where people upload their videos, they’re participating in it and by doing so they…

MATT: It drives brand loyalty, right? They’re going to come back to that site.

BRANDON: Right and it drives the spread of the word of mouth and it snowballs in effect. So yeah, there’s benefit to that.

MATT: Yeah, we talked a lot about that in the social networking episode so yeah, engaged participants is going to equal you know better brand loyalty and it’s going to really help it grow and spread to other people.

BRANDON: Right. So another benefit is that you’re going to have access to expertise that you don’t have. You know you may think you’re an expert in an area but you know take an example of something like professor at a university you know who might be the number one expert in an area. He puts on his website that he wants to put a contest out there for the best designed biological enhancement on something he’s been working on for decades, and all of a sudden he’s going to get all sorts of ideas that he may never have thought of before even though he’s the expert.

MATT: Yeah and the last benefit that we came up with was that it can be more cost effective. If we go to YouTube I mean there’s 20 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute. If you tried to hire someone to create that much content, I mean I don’t know how you are going to afford it. It’s probably trillions of dollars of effort well because you provided the platform for participants to do this they get involved and they’re doing it for very, very cheap and you could never create that much content for that cheap any traditional sense where you’re paying for someone to create that content for you.

BRANDON: Yeah. So there’s some pitfalls to kind of sourcing to. It’s not all good. It’s…

MATT: The flipside can be more cost effective is can it cost you more because you have to manage all that content that’s coming in. If you had to pay someone to review 20 hours of content that comes in every minute, you know, that can really be expensive.

BRANDON: Right. You know you asked for all these submittals of information and then you get thousands and you start to say to yourself, what the heck am I going to do with all these? I have to spend hours if not years going through all these information so yeah, be ready for the onslaught of information coming in if you take that approach. But there’s ways around it though.

MATT: Yeah, I mean a lot of it people is looking at crowd sourcing and they think of it as kind of the off shoring outsourcing model where you know you’re trying to get something for cheap that should be more expensive but really crowdsourcing can cost a lot of money. It’s not free by any means. You can do things like the way that you engage the crowd to try to reduce that cost and manage that cost but it’s definitely not free. There’s going to be effort.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: It just allows you to access that scale and those ideas that you might not be able to access otherwise.

BRANDON: Right. You know I decided to put a little contest on Odesk somewhat of an experiment. As we were thinking about discussing this topic, I thought you know what if I put a contest on Odesk that said, I’m going to accept the first 20 offers to design an adwords ad for my website, right. Something real simple, not a lot of work just because I wanted to get as many participants as possible and I told them look I’m going to give you a dollar if you just complete the project as I ask for it. You know just give me two lines where the title on as the top line that you would run on on a Google adwords platform and 14 people applied, three of them actually completed the job as I asked them too which I guess could have been my fault but I don’t think it was. I mean I think it was pretty clear. So after a few emails back to some of those that did applied but did not give me the ad as I asked them for, they did send in more submittals so in the end I got about I think eight full replies which I’m actually in the middle of testing right now to see which one is the best and there’s even one or two that I kind of thought it was a joke and they put something up just to get a dollar but the contest winner would get $20 and so the teaser at the end was whoever came up with the most conversions in a one week period after running all of the ads simultaneously, would win the 20 bucks. So my lesson learned was that it was actually a little bit more difficult to manage all these people. I guess Odesk really just doesn’t lend itself well to doing this.

MATT: It’s not really a crowdsourcing platform.

BRANDON: Right. Your having to deal with sending messages through the inbox on Odesk and you know there’s no way for me to just write an email to all of them at one point on that platform which would have been nice. It would have saved me a lot of time. Also I had to hire each one of them and make sure that each one only bid $1 and then I had paid that $1 to each one of them going through each and every contestant and then having to fire each one and then soon giving the $20 to the winner. It just was not an easy experiment to run even though it was at only 8 people.

MATT: Yeah, so if you don’t do it right or you try to use tools that aren’t design for crowdsourcing, you definitely are not going to decrease your cost…

BRANDON: Exactly.

MATT: Or your effort involved in managing it so I think more of these examples as we go through more of the pitfalls and how to manage the crowd and all the different examples that are out there but there are some lessons to be learned and it can be difficult to do. So I think one of the things that we saw in this example was that you also kind of had a lack of participation, right? You didn’t get your full 20 responses that you wanted to.

BRANDON: That’s right. I mean I thought 20 was reasonable.

MATT: Yeah, I thought you’ll get 20.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: So lack of participation. So getting the crowd engaged and excited about participating is kind of the first step of trying to kick start this thing.

BRANDON: Right. So there was a lack of participation. I thought my incentive was good. I mean…

MATT: $20 bucks for a minute of work, yeah.

BRANDON: Yeah. I mean my wife is saying well, why didn’t you just put it to $40 or $50 and I’m thinking whoa, the person puts like one minute maybe two minutes of thought into putting a line of text on a reply back to me. It didn’t seemed like it was all that hard to me but you know what if I did it where I gave them nothing to participate but added that money into the price money. So would have that changed the results? Maybe. I don’t know.

MATT: Yeah, I think it would have.

BRANDON: You think if I would have given them zero dollars just to submit it and I double the price money to $40, you think that would have increased the participation?

MATT: Yeah, I would have zero to participate. Put a five star rating and $40 or $50 for a winner.

BRANDON: Yeah. So you know I guess trial and error a little bit.

MATT: Yeah, I guess, look at non-monetary ways that you can reward the crowd as well, right?

BRANDON: Right and that’s one of the items that the book mentioned was you know not everybody is looking for ways to make money on this. So a lot of it could be reputation.

MATT: Yeah, reputation is a huge thing.

BRANDON: Yeah, ways to you know just to even if it’s not reputation but just a way to socialize what other like-minded people, that’s…

MATT: Yeah. Because it connects with people definitely.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: So some value for the crowd. Not just the reward at the end of the rainbow.

BRANDON: Exactly.

MATT: I think you kind of saw this in your little micro experiment but difficulty managing large scale projects can definitely be a pitfall as it grows so you saw how much effort it took for you to manage that small contest but if you’re at a contest of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, that can be difficult to manage.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: I mean Wikipedia is probably an example of something that’s well managed and well done but they put a lot of structure into their site to do that.

BRANDON: It’s true and you know something like YouTube seems like it runs automatically but I’m sure they have a whole host of software engineers working on that 24/7 usually.

MATT: And another thing is the quality work and you definitely saw this in your little micro experiment as well like you got a couple of really good responses but you got a bunch of really bad ones, right?

BRANDON: I really did. I was actually surprised at how bad some of them were. You know I replied to a few of them saying are you thinking this is a joke or I mean some of them made me laugh out loud and I was saying, “Hey, you did make me laugh so thanks for that.” But if you want to be considered as serious contestant, you got to give me something serious here so yeah, you do get some shoddy work sometimes.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: But you know in numbers, you end up getting better quality I think. You’re always going to have something at the bottom.

MATT: Yeah, so you got to get good quality and you’re probably going to get good quality work from people that like invested in the site and not necessarily financial but they have some drive they want to participate in that like YouTube really has a lot of people that have drive to post their videos. They get something extra out of that. And I think the quality goes out as there’s a lot of bad that go down in YouTube too but I think there’s a lot of those who really post really good stuff on there as well.

BRANDON: Is there ever bad content? Yeah. Alright. Any other pitfalls we’re missing?

MATT: I think one of these you got to do when you first going to set up those, figure out what the contracts and licensing agreements are going to be with the content that the crowd submits, right? You can go anywhere from Creative Commons really open licenses like Wikipedia or you can take something or whatever the crowd produces, they give up full rights to and you know it then becomes a property of whoever paid for the contest or did whatever right? 99designs is an example of something where the creator gives up rights for that.

BRANDON: Right. Tell us what 99designs is again.

MATT: That is a contest website for website design and graphic design.

BRANDON: Yeah we’ve talked about that I think in the past.

MATT: Yeah, we’ll go into it a little more in this episode I can go away and pull up some of the featured providers for certain things.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: I think the last couple of things you got to deal with are spam and you know you just got to have a system that deals with the spam that you’re going to get because that bad content that we talked about is going to come around and people are going to try and take advantage in getting the system. Think the biggest thing to that is making it easier to get rid of the spam than it is to create the spam. If you have that basic economic balance in place then you know you’re going to get rid of that spam. You know Wikipedia has tons of spam. People upload stuff but they have really good systems for tracking it and banning it and getting it out of there so you know it takes more effort to put the spam up than it takes to rip it down so overall you get a spam free environment. I think the last thing is political, right? A lot of people are up and arms about speculative work. You’re basically getting people to work for free and then they don’t get anything and there’s a lot of people that aren’t too happy about crowdsourcing in the event especially the contest sites.

BRANDON: Like which one?

MATT: The 99designs, I mean a lot of the websites designers and traditional graphic designers are not very happy of it that this site exists and that people work but …

BRANDON: They don’t get paid for it if they work. The spec work.

MATT: Yeah, yeah. So there’s a big discussion around that.

BRANDON: Well, you know I kind of can see where they’re coming from. If I was a designer which I’m not but if I was, I would have a tough time deciding whether that was worth my time to be among 99 or 100 or 300 people you know trying to come up with the best logo and then being kind of subject to whoever is putting on the contest their subjective judgment of whether my logo is better than somebody else’s and you know you’re going to be putting in that time. You kind of have to calculate what your odds are. It’s almost like it’s going to Vegas and thinking, alright what are my odds? There’s only three people in this contest but there’s three hundred in this one. I’ll probably fair better on the smaller one so yeah.

MATT: Yeah, I mean that’s kind of what 99designs I think the types of designers that are on that site are one that you have the very kind of introductory people. The people that are in graphic design school or just got out of college or they’re getting started out in their careers and they’re trying to build portfolio and this is a great way for them to learn and get feedback and you know improve their work …

BRANDON: And maybe get paid.

MATT: And maybe get paid.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: And then you also have people that are really good that have confidence that they’re going to win.

BRANDON: Because they’re that good.

MATT: Because they’re that good so I don’t see as many people in between. I don’t know that true in all crowdsourcing sites but that seems to be kind of the range of people that are in 99designs.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: So we’ve covered the benefits and pitfalls, right?

BRANDON: Right. And now we kind of have to go into how do you go about doing this and managing the crowd.

MATT: Yeah, some strategies for that, right?

BRANDON: Exactly. So you know you have to ask yourself, what kind of crowdsourcing are you going to do. Are you going to have the participants actually aware of that fact that they’re doing this or you know are they just clicking something that they normally would have clicked on anyways and you’re just capturing that information and they’re unaware of the fact that they’re even participating and that’s on a much more passive level.

MATT: Yeah. I think a good example of that dichotomy is you know something like Digg where you’re actively voting and saying, “Hey, I like this content,” versus analytics that Google collects where it says, “Hey, we have this position number one and this percentage that people click through and they’re tracking all that information as they’re clicking through ads and results on Google and they’re you know making decisions based on those analytics and you’re basically voting for things if you click on it but not many people think of that way.

BRANDON: And you don’t even know you’re doing it, right?

MATT: Yeah. So that’s what we mean by aware and making a conscious participation in the product or in the site versus unaware and a passive collection of data.

BRANDON: Right. Probably the unaware and passive collection of data is a lot easier to administer. I mean you’re not having to deal with forcing anybody or asking anybody to be a part of something so if you can do it that way, you’d of course might want to choose it that way.

MATT: The thing I like about the unaware is that you get I think more truthful data. Like if you ask someone to take a survey and they know they’re taking a survey they might not answer the same way as if they’re actually online shopping on a site and trying to buy something.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: So if you ask them a question in a survey, hey would you buy this at $10, they may say yeah I’d buy it but when you actually have them try to buy something on a site like in a muse testing, you’re really going to know that they would have bought because they try to click on that buy button.

BRANDON: Right. Yeah, it’s a great example. Yeah, we’ll go into more of those examples how we can utilize that on our business a little bit later. So what else? Then there’s the isolated versus group thing.

MATT: Yeah, so group thing really is where you have a set of people that are working on a problem and because they’re interacting with each other, they start to think about the problem the same way and you don’t get that diversity of opinion that you would have gotten normally. A good example in the book is there’s a site called marketocracy. And they’re basically doing portfolio training on stock market and they track all these people and introduce this feature where the different traders could talk to each other. And as they started to talk to each other, their investments became more and more similar. So they stop investing in things that they have some special private knowledge about and the whole group started investing as this one kind of individual, right? They all kind of thought the same way and they didn’t take their own chances and they actually decrease the quality of the portfolios they’re holding because they’re all thinking the same way and they weren’t using their own brands to make their own decisions.

BRANDON: Right. They kind of followed each other’s advice sometimes and that kind of breaks down the whole purpose of wanting to get a number of independent opinions or independent votes or in this case trades on the market. So the more independent each vote is the more effective it is. So if you get them collaborating with each other it can be less effective of getting quality results. However there is an example that also goes away from that but it has a little bit of a twist that there is a software coding contest where they actually allowed the participants to upload their code and let the other participants see what everybody else code is and they ended up building on top of ideas that they saw others using and providing better code in the end because they’re able to kind of take ideas from each other so there’s both ways.

MATT: Yeah. You can do this in 99designs too. You can either make it so that the designers can see each other’s work or that they can’t see anything else and it’s isolated. And I go back and forth about what’s the best way because I don’t want the group thing where all send everyone’s design and start looking the same and I get no diversity and no creativity outside of that realm but at the same time I want the designers to be able to see, “Hey, this is really good idea. I should build on top of this and make this better.” So it’s a hard balance. I don’t know.

BRANDON: There is no right answer.

MATT: Yeah, there’s no right answer. I mean you want to avoid group thing but you want to also get the incremental improvements of the group seeing each other’s work.

BRANDON: Right. Inspiration between each other, yeah.

MATT: Yeah, I mean as you do this I mean the ultimate success of this is that you have people incrementally building and then you kind of get these big leap forward of this new creative ideas outside the box and then refine, refine, refine and then leap forward again. That’s the way it work when it’s really working.

BRANDON: Right. So another area of strategy might think about is whether the crowd can be self governing or not, you know. Can the community police itself?

MATT: Yeah, I mean so you saw this with your little micro experiment that you have to govern a large crowd project or manage a large crowd project. It’s going to take a lot of effort, right. So things that you can do to help the community police itself, things like looking for spam you know when someone post spam on Wikipedia, it’s not the people that work at Wikipedia that take it down. It’s someone that looks at the site and says, hey this is spam and hits the flag button or anything like that, right?

BRANDON: Right. Anytime you see flag this or report this, you’re basically voting among the community to police a group of data.

MATT: Yeah, even in your Gmail when you hit spam I mean Google is looking that, right, and they’re looking at across millions of mail boxes and they’re saying hey this person sends us email and 50 thousand people voted it as a spam. I need to shut this people down.

BRANDON: Yeah and it’s really effective. I mean Gmail has got to have one of the best spam filters out there and it’s all just community based. It’s a great idea.

MATT: So letting community police the spam and you know enforce the rules of itself, let the community organized itself you know who’s going to be the leader within the community, who’s just kind of be a passive participant in the community. You can’t really define that up front. You got to set up ways that the community can embrace that and build upon themselves. I think another thing that you did really well within your little micro experiment of outsourcing was figuring out how to choose the best of what people submitted. A lot of things are subjective and that makes it hard to participate but I think you can move with a really good metric of how you’re going to measure success in your contest, right. You said whoever rates the highest conversion rate is going to succeed. That’s going to be the winner.

BRANDON: Yeah, because you know if I were to just tell them I’m going to choose who’s the best one, they’re all going to be like well, if I did send the best one, how am I going to be assured that you’re going to choose me but if you just use a metric that’s measurable and you know who am I to say which one is the best. I mean I don’t know. I in fact used crowdsourcing on both ends, right.

MATT: Yeah, you got to let the crowd choose the best one by …

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: … measuring the crowd through your adword state, right.

BRANDON: Exactly. So it’s a double ended crowdsourcing experiment. Getting the content creation at the beginning using a small crowd unfortunately but and then at the backend getting the crowd who is the internet users clicking away through the ads, voting on which one was the most effective and ended up resulting in a sale. So there’s two ways there that you can use that kind of crowdsourcing experiment.

MATT: Yes. So you actually use the active crowdsourcing and the passive crowdsourcing the same experiment in the same project.

BRANDON: Exactly.

MATT: So there’s lots of ways you can use these and you know just because we say one way is better than the other in this case or the other one I mean look at both sides of this coin and figure out how you can use that in everything you’re doing.

BRANDON: Right. So we’re hoping that you can take away from these ideas as to how you can maybe use crowdsourcing in your own business ideas and hopefully through this, you’re going to be like oh, you know what I can do, I could put up a competition or a contest and get maybe content created for me and one of the areas that we’re going to talk about here is content creation and what exactly is that? That’s basically what we’re discussing before. My example of maybe you ask people to create content for you in small chunks and then in the end maybe it aggregates to a larger creation like Wikipedia or you use user generated content like YouTube does.

MATT: Yeah, I think a good example of us doing this within our own small business is the Automate My Small Business question and answer site, right. We are basically crowdsourcing to you the listeners, the community to submit questions and vote for questions and all that content that gets created is going to be helpful to the rest of the community.

BRANDON: Right. So there’s higher quality of information available to everybody by utilizing everybody’s input.

MATT: Right. If it was just limited that only Brandon and I could answer the questions, well there’s a lot of things that we aren’t experts that you guys are working on but there’s probably another listener out there that has that expertise and so by accessing all that private information that you guys have, we’re able to create this great resource for the whole community.

BRANDON: Right. So another platform that you could use to create content is I think we mentioned 99desigs which is basically a contest platform which let’s say you wanted to get a new logo and you decided I could hire one guy to make my logo and he can even put together 10, 15 versions of a logo that he thinks is good and then I get to choose from those 10 or 15 logos. Well, you’re only getting input from one brain, one person whereas 99designs goes the other direction and basically puts the contest out there to as many people who are willing to apply for it and they’re saying, “I’m going to give you my best logo,” and they’re going to be basically competing with everybody else and they can submit multiple times. It doesn’t have to be just one logo. So in the end you’re getting a much more diverse set of logos that you could choose from.

MATT: Another site that we just found today as we’re doing some of the research for this is Spottedroo.com which is almost set up exactly like 99designs but it’s for copy writing and business plans and you know financial research and all that stuff. It goes into building that business plan the first beginnings of your business, right.

BRANDON: Unfortunately, it’s kind of a new site so there’s not a lot of users. I don’t think they’ve actually crossed the threshold to get that critical mass that you need to have really great feedback but the concept is awesome. One of their examples was financial forecast. You know, if any of you put together a business plans which I’m sure many of you have, you know you can pretty much put any numbers into spreadsheets and come up with the winning business plan even if it’s the worst idea in the world and really it’s because you’re making assumptions and guesses as to whether your sales are going to be 10,000 units a month or 10 units a month. You don’t know until you kind of put it out there. So you know, business plans many times have been said are worth less than the paper it’s printed on especially financial projections is part of it because it’s anybody’s guess as to how well the business will do but if you outsource that to a crowd and you say, look here’s my business idea, here’s the marketplace that is present today, what would you think I could make on this? What are my financial projections and you know what the crowd is a smart crowd. Eventually they’re going to come closer to the right answer then you would alone and it’s a fantastic way of getting more of an accurate assessment of how well you’re going to do and maybe save you a lot of money and say hey, this isn’t worth it. This is a bad idea. Move on.

MATT: Yeah, I mean like a prediction marketer probably is the next step beyond that right. So if you look at some of the researches coming out of economics and science and things like that prediction markets are really, really hot topic. And you know if you’ve never heard of prediction marketing, you don’t know what it is, you can almost look at like the betting line on a sports game in Vegas as being a prediction market of who the crowd thinks it’s going to win they’ve worked almost the same way and for that reason they’re usually illegal in the United States. I don’t know if they got their exemption yet for low monetary value prediction markets but you’re basically asking the crowd to bet on what they think the right answer is and because they have to put money in and you know I guess the problem of the voting sites is that you only have one vote. Everyone gets one vote. It’s just like democracy. Everyone gets one vote. It’s all equal but there’s no degree of how confident you are, right. So when I can bet $1 or $50, by betting $50, I’m really, really confident that my answer that I’m providing to that market is the right answer versus when I put $1.

BRANDON: Well, you bring up a good point. I remember about the one vote per participant. There’s a company that actually has a patent on this concept of the weighting the vote per participant based on short survey that they take that asses their risk taking attitude or their attitude towards risk. So those who have a more conservative approach would be weighted more because their vote is more sensitive I should say on the scale versus one that you know, Oh yeah, I’ll put a $100 bucks on that,” and you know not knowing really what it is. So there’s that dimension that is also considered.

MATT: The other thing is really called prediction markets. This is not just a point in time survey like you send out survey you get it back and you go, oh, here’s the results for this time. Because it’s the market and it’s always trading until the final end or it pays out, you can see changes in that as it goes along like they use this for political campaigns, right. So as a political campaign goes along, and they see that like in a primaries when Obama and Hillary were going at it, you can see the inflection points of you know where the crowd suddenly thought Obama was going to win and then following up on that is him winning in Iowa and all that sort of stuff, right? So it gives you kind of real time projections. If something changes in the circumstances, you can see that change in the markets and you can adapt to it and understand it. And there’s a site that we find called Inklingmarkets.com which is even accessible at you know at small business level. I think the cheapest plan is like $39 a month and they even have kind of a free trial to set up a market and see how it worked. So when you’re talking about a financial forecast that might be a really good example of testing out a business idea, right. So if you set up a market that said how much is this business going to make and you actually start it and whoever gets closest is going to win that, you going to get predictions trying to be really, really accurate on what they think the business can make.

BRANDON: Yeah. I think it’s a fantastic idea. I hope Spottedroo gets more participants because I think it could be kind of neat.

MATT: Yeah, I think that’s a cool idea from that side but I think the prediction market is even better.

BRANDON: The Inklingmarkets?

MATT: Yeah, InklingMarkets.

BRANDON: Yeah, that’s a great idea too. I mean to make your own prediction market. Did we go into who the participants would? I mean of course you have to go get your own participants, right.

MATT: Yeah, I’m not sure how you get participants but I’m curious about that. I think I’m going to try it out. I’m going to find out what I want to put out there.

BRANDON: I mean even though this isn’t business related, the Hollywood Stock Exchage, hsx.com, I mean people throughout the year bet on which movie will get the Oscar award at the end of the year for best picture so there’s all sorts of ways that the prediction markets are being used.

MATT: Yeah, I had a friend when I was in college. He would bet on those things and he made a ton of money doing that. But yeah, I mean if you’re a film maker and that’s your business, then you know maybe you can get some feedback from that. I don’t know what their minimum threshold they do for setting up marketers in there as they do it for Indie films too or not.

BRANDON: Yeah. I mean any of these it all really depends on what your business is but there’s all sorts of great examples of people utilizing crowds to predict success rates on a lot of things. You make a great point. If you are a in the film business, maybe you should look at some of these areas. I remember Will Smith was quoted, he was doing an interview one time and he was asked well you know you’ve had the five last biggest blockbusters every summer for the last five years. This is just a couple of years ago. And they said, well, how did you know what scripts to pick? And he said, well, I just looked at the data and that basically said that every big box office winner was a movie that had a love story plot in it. It had monsters or aliens or some sort of sci-fi little twist to it and had lots of action or something like that. And so he pretty much picked scripts that match that data set and sure enough they worked for him. So when you have a business and when you’re thinking about how do I utilize some of this information? It could be powerful stuff.

MATT: Yes, so even if the data is not about your company, you can still look at how the data is affecting other companies and glean stuff from that end and apply it to your business right?

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: It doesn’t have to be directly about you.

BRANDON: So another area of crowdsourcing is information and organizing that information. You know anytime that you put keywords or metadata on your website, you’re basically organizing that for Google and Google is using that as a crowdsourcing source of data to help organize that information into the search engine.

MATT: Yeah, I think even more than just you putting the metadata on your site is the tags that are being put into Digg and Reddit and Delicious and some things like that where people are bookmarking your site and saying this site is about dogs, right?

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: You’re really getting this categorization of things that is amazing at scale because you get people reinforcing the really good ones and you know people try to put some tags in there and they might be the only tagged to that, right, but you see that you know 700,000 people have tagged that with dogs.

BRANDON: Yeah, so you’re using the crowd to kind of categorize and index your own information which could really be useful. You don’t have to hire somebody to do that full time for weeks on end. Put it out there for a crowd to do. Maybe they got a better idea of what is the right information and where it should go. YouTube ratings are also a good example of that.

MATT: Yeah, I mean like we talked about the 20 hours of video every minute, right. So we said, how would you ever hire someone to rate all these stuff? Well, YouTube doesn’t. They let the crowd rate it and based on those ratings that’s what gets filtered up to the front page of YouTube.

BRANDON: Right. I mean when I look for an app on my iPhone, I definitely sort through and filter by what ratings and how many stars it’s gotten, you know. So it’s useful.

MATT: Like I’ll be sitting in you know Target looking to buy something and I’ll pull up the Amazon app on my phone before I buy anything just to see what the reviews are.

BRANDON: Yeah. I mean we had this whole podcast on you know social media and reviews and you know reviews are a big deal. It’s a great way to know what’s good and what’s not without feeling like you’re being sold. You know you’re getting use of the crowd that’s you know information. In my case, a lot more useful than having the company who’s selling it to me tell me about it so yeah, for sure.

MATT: Yes. So you can definitely get the crowd to classify and organize and tag and provide extra information about the data or the content that you have but you can also try to get direct information from them in the form of things like feedback. Using Survey Monkey to have the crowd fill up the survey is a way to get some direct feedback, measuring the actions of the crowd, right. So muse testing, we mentioned before I explained that.

BRANDON: Yeah, if you have an idea for business we’ve mentioned this before. A great way to test that idea is maybe throw it out there and do some AB testing and when I say AB testing you basically measuring the performance if we’re talking just two different versions of maybe you’re website, right or maybe three versions. You can do multiple versions. You can use adwords. You know when you’re talking about running an ad, when you sign up for an adwords account you can do 10. 15, 30, 50 different variations of an ad and find out which ones is going to work best for you and then you focus on that one and do 50 more variations of that ad and then you’re continuing to optimize every variation and so…

MATT: Yeah and the AB Testing and the analytics will even let you analyze within content on your website so you can change a picture for half the user and see which one converts better with you know a red button versus an orange button or you know a picture of a person holding a puppy versus a picture of your product, right?

BRANDON: You know what? And I didn’t realize this until recently but you can even do it with your prices. There’s ways that because the sophistication of the AB testing software out there and I think Google will do this, it puts a cookie on the person who may have gotten the A and somebody else who got B, it puts a cookie on their browser to say hey, anytime they pull up the site again, in the future make sure they show the same price so that you know they’re not looking at two different prices so I mean you may get into some trouble with this if you don’t do it correctly but you can even really hone in on what the right price is charged by testing multiple prices.

MATT: Yeah so the Bizgloo site that I’m setting up in probably another month or so have it up fully but that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. I’m muse testing where I may have different prices, I may have products like I don’t know which of the integration is the best one to build so I’m going to put up all the ideas that I have up there as products and measure them with a muse of how successful each product is or each offering is then I will built them in that order.

BRANDON: That’s a great idea.

MATT: Yeah, so that’s how you can do it. The muse testing charm I think came from Tim Ferris, right? Have you heard of it before that?

BRANDON: No, you’re right.

MATT: So if you want to know a little bit more about muse testing, check out the 4-hour Work Week.

BRANDON: Yeah. Now, another area that you could really use crowd sourcing is funding. There’s a lot of companies out there that are offering ways to micro loan or do small capital infusions to great ideas. Kickstarter.com is a new one that we came across. Kickstarter.com is a website that basically allows start ups to post their businesses and their ideas.

MATT: Yeah, this one is more for like film maker, musician or something but you put out your idea and then the crowd will basically funded or not funded so they’ll pledge you know if you say I need $5,000 to create this short film. You’ll just say that and you’ll try to get people to pledge money towards your short film and then you give them some sort of reward at the end of that either a copy of the film or something that you know…

BRANDON: Some reward, some tangible benefit.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: Yeah, I remember it though one of the top projects on there was I think about three or four women who had this idea of doing urban gardening and the hosted a video of basically their business plan to utilize small plots of land that aren’t being used inside cities to allow the growing of vegetables and fresh herbs and even cabbage and lettuce and things like that or the locals to grow fresh vegetables and other food and you know it’s kind of an eco friendly way doing it because you’re buying local and you’re not having it trucked in and using gas and polluting the air and all that. What they wanted to do is basically experiment with the idea of doing this and seeing if it truly could be financially viable for you know handful of people to manage a plot of land inside of a large city to pay for their own salaries while doing this and yet still contribute to the community. Well, I thought that was kind of a neat idea.

MATT: I think it’s really cool because like you’re essentially finding out if you have customers before you ever build anything. You say, “Hey, would you buy this?” And they’re pledging money up front and saying, “Yeah, if you build it I’ll buy it.” Or I’ll contribute to this.

BRANDON: That’s right so they’re not necessarily investing in you. They’re kind of pledging that if you did get enough pledges they would then invest, right? Is that kind of how it works?

MATT: Well you’re not giving up any equity so it’s not an investment. You’re giving them some reward either you know a copy of the product or something….

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: … once you build it or once you finish but they’re not saying I’ll invest a $1,000 or $10,000 for 20 percent equity in your idea. They’re saying, hey, I’ll give you a $100 bucks and if you build it, then I’ll buy it.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: And the thing is you have to raise all the money to get your project funded. If you say I need $10,000 and you only raised you know $7,000, well you get nothing. It’s all or nothing.

BRANDON: Right. Yeah, it’s an interesting idea and maybe sparks an idea for you guys to maybe utilize that website if you wanted to, Kickstarter.com is what it’s called.

MATT: Yeah and I thought that was the one that was all creative stuff but there’s another one called Rockethub which is very similar which is the creative one. So Kickstarter has not just creative projects but entrepreneurial and anything that you guys be interested in.

BRANDON: Right. What is Rockethub? I didn’t see that one.

MATT: It’s the same idea but for more creative stuff.

BRANDON: Okay. So movies or books or artwork or dance or performances and things like that, right?

MATT: I think so.

BRANDON: I’m sure everybody’s heard of Keva.org. It was on Oprah so assuming that the Oprah effect is true.

MATT: Yeah. So we’re basically going from the rewards basing where you’re just you know getting money up front before you build stuff to getting a loan. So Keva is loans.

BRANDON: Right. And they started off overseas in third world countries. Now, they’re doing in the US, is that right?

MATT: Yeah, they just launched the US, I don’t know, five or six months ago or so.

BRANDON: So if you did want to use Keva, you could. As far as I know you can raise money through Keva by posting your idea, your business online and then getting micro loans from a number of people.

MATT: Yeah. I don’t know if there’s like a limit of how much you can get but I mean you can definitely get a few thousand dollars.

BRANDON: Yeah. I signed papers today actually for business line of credit which I was surprised to get because as far as I knew from all the news, banks aren’t getting lines of credit any longer and so that’s good to know that the banks are actually starting to open their door up again. So a little tidbit of news on that probably gives you warm and fuzzy.

MATT: Yeah, another crowd loan site though is Prosper.com. Have you seen that one?

BRANDON: Yeah. That’s the one that if you have money to give, you could actually give small loans and charge a little bit higher interest rates because they’re unsecured but if you wanted to get money you could basically get an unsecured loan, you might expect to pay a little bit more in interest. What were the interest rates?

MATT: I think they’ve started as like seven and a half and go up to like 25 percent or something like that.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: Depending on how risky the venture is, what your credit rating is. I think there’s a couple of things that go into the score.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: But yeah I thought was pretty interesting. It’s been really hard to get a loan from banks so I’m glad to hear that it’s getting a little bit better but when that was an option, this could have been really good option for people and if you can get that seven and a half percent rate, that’s a reasonable rate for a business loan.

BRANDON: Right. No, that’s a great rate. The going rate right now just because I know because I’ve signed some documents today is about four and half percent above prime and prime is what, three and a half right now. So you know you’re looking at eight percent right there. So yeah, anything around eight or lower would be I think a good loan. This is unsecured loans of course. If you have a house or something to put on the line, it’s different. Now, I’m not a big fan of funding with investors just because there’s a lot of headache that comes with it and if you need money and this is a good alternative.

MATT: Yeah, I mean one of the pillars that we always preach is fund your project with your customer’s money.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: And I think Kickstarter.com is just a fantastic example of that that you can get funding from your customers in the form of pledges before you even start it just like they say, it kick starts your business, right.

BRANDON: Right. And they’re not going to be calling you saying hey, why aren’t you working harder and stuff like that.

MATT: And once you get to that first measure of fulfilling whatever you’re starting out and giving them the product, now they’re gone and you still own a 100 percent of the business.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: And you’re moving now.

BRANDON: Which is golden. Yeah.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: So Threadless, Matt, tell us about Threadless.

MATT: So Threadless is a company that basically gives us crowdsourcing in a multitude of ways. But they did something very similar with like having a proposal on having people vote on it and pledge that they’re going to buy something. They’re t-shirt company until they have the crowd to make t-shirt designs so they have crowd source content creation. They have voting and feedback on those designs so they have you know the information and that side of the crowdsourcing. But they also have people that will vote and pledge and say, hey, I’ll buy this shirt if you make it and so they get hundreds of t-shirt designs. They have the crowd vote. They pick the best one that have the most votes in the most pledges and say, I’ll buy it and they only produce those.

BRANDON: Sounds like a guaranteed sale that they’re going to…

MATT: Yeah, it’s a guaranteed sale so I mean they’re making tons of money and there are just a couple of people doing it.

BRANDON: So there’s no loss. They don’t have to throw out any t-shirts because the already know that there’s going to be buyers when they make it. It’s brilliant.

MATT: Yeah, I think they’ve never not sold out of a t-shirt so…

BRANDON: That’s brilliant.

MATT: Yeah, great idea. I thought that was an awesome case study. So check out Threadless. It’s actually a really fun site. As I started looking at it, they have kind of same format at hot or not when you’re voting so the t-shirt comes out if you say hey, I like this a three or whatever and you know as soon as you vote, it puts you to the next t-shirt. You can just go through it and click through a bunch and it’s pretty cool. So check it out.

BRANDON: Alright so you know we kind of showed you all the areas of kind of crowdsourcing that are being used today. We’re going to kind of break it all down and boil it down to our top, let’s say, six or seven recommendations in each area and the way we’re going to do this is we’re going to say that, well, first of all, there’s a platform out there that you could use to do your crowdsourcing for you. You’re much better off doing it that way than trying to build some platform that’s going to do your organization for you.

MATT: Yeah, so if you can buy services from someone that is crowdsourcing those services for you and managing in that and has a system, I think that’s the easiest way to get you foot in the door and start to understand it. You know as you grow and you become a big company eventually maybe you’ll look at crowdsourcing yourself but definitely as a small business or entrepreneur, look at platforms that hosted services for you.

BRANDON: And our first up, Amazon Mechanical Turk.

MATT: Yeah, so basically this is a way to outsource some of those little things that need some sort of human intelligence to complete a task and these are usually really small little pieces of information that you’re going to analyze or classify or something like that where I think you pay for a thousand task that get done and I’m not sure what the price is on it but something like classifying is this message or comment post spam. Right so if you want to try to filter out someone posting adult content on your site, you can have them look through and say hey, you know this spam is not real, right.

BRANDON: Right. Or you can even use it for personal things if you had a huge library of photographs and you wanted somebody to go through each one and tag what’s in each photographs. You know if there’s a picture of your dog. They’re going to tag you with dog or if it’s a picture of you and your sister, you might have them with your name and her name and…

MATT: Yeah, Mechanical turk is a great example of that. So the way that Amazon actually uses their own mechanical turk system is if you have the Amazon iPhone app, you can actually take a picture of any product around and Amazon will look at that picture and they’ll actually put that product into your shopping cart so you can buy it from Amazon. I do it all the time when I go to Barnes and Noble and look at the books and take a picture and then maybe I’ll see what the price is on Amazon but it pulls it up just by taking picture. What they’re actually doing is they’re sending the picture of that product to this mechanical turk service and somewhere in the world is looking at those picture and they’re going, Oh, that’s this book or that’s a GPS unit from Garmin and it’s this model number.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: But they’re doing that through the mechanical turk service.

BRANDON: I mean the possibilities are endless. Yeah, you could use that for business operations that you just come across on a daily basis if you want. So that’s definitely got to be one of our top recommendations. Next up I think definitely we’ve mentioned this before, 99designs. Matt and I have both used it in the past. It’s going to run you a little bit more expensive than just hiring one person but in the end you’re going to get much higher quality.

MATT: Yeah, I think you have a better solution by using it and like we said you know crowdsourcing isn’t always cheaper than not crowdsourcing but you should be getting higher quality or better results out of it because of the way the crowd works.

BRANDON: Yeah, let’s see. Tracy, your wife, used it recently. How much she spent on it? $350 for the logo?

MATT: I can’t remember what it was.

BRANDON: I think it was $350 and if you bought a logo from somebody else, you can get it for maybe…

MATT: 100 bucks or less.

BRANDON: Maybe it wasn’t 350 but it’s going to be a lot more.

MATT: I think it was around $200.

BRANDON: Okay. So let’s say it was $200. So you’re looking at two to three times the investment but she got how many logos out of that?

MATT: I think there were like 80 or so proposals.

BRANDON: Yeah. Now, if you have one person tasked to do 80 versions of a logo, you’re never going to get that for $200 bucks. That’s like a couple of thousand bucks.

MATT: Yeah. So she got ideas like all over the board that you never would have thought about so I really think it’s the best way to do it and so for logo design the minimum price is $204.

BRANDON: And they do other things than logos.

MATT: Yeah, they did logos, web pages, buttons and icons, stationery, t-shirts, WordPress themes, Twitter backgrounds, and advertising materials with their sites right now.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: Every time I come back, they’ve added new categories.

BRANDON: Nice. And then in terms of analytics and AB testing and finding out what kind of design might work best for your website, we definitely would recommend Google analytics and utilizing Google Adwords.

MATT: Yeah, I think the metrics within both of those are great way to do with the passive testing that we’ve talked about.

BRANDON: For two reasons, really, that’s it’s free. Both of those tools are free and you’re going to get a huge number of volume of participants because you’re dealing with the biggest gorilla on the block.

MATT: And I think the metrics are awesome. I mean it’s easy to measure. It’s easy to see what’s working, right?

BRANDON: Yeah, they’re linked and it’s user friendly and…

MATT: Yeah, I mean I think when you’re going through in choosing from 90th logos and 99designs, I think that’s the hardest part of it is trying to figure out the best one. So that’s what I like about the measurable platforms like Adwords and Google Analytics and things like that is it gives you a framework for deciding what is the best one.

BRANDON: Yeah, if you’re looking to do the AB testing, search on analytics for a website optimization. I think that’s the term they use for the AB testing. So that’s specifically of interest to you, that’s what you want to look for. So then the other area you know if you can put up a Wiki, we have two recommendations for Wiki platforms, Matt.

MATT: Yeah, so if you’re putting up a public wiki which if you’re trying to crowdsource it, that’s probably what you want to do. Media wiki is what runs Wikipedia. They provide that software free of charge if you want to install it on your own you know hosting account, you can get that and that is a great collaboration platform that lets people just add content to the site. You’ll need to look at how to govern that and maybe look at some of the ways that Wikipedia runs their media wiki site to try to make sure that you get good content and don’t get any spam on there but if you have a private wiki that you’re trying to have a group called collaborate on then probably docu wiki is a little bit better.

BRANDON: Yeah, there’s some other good wiki platforms out there too.

MATT: There is a ton of them. Like I try to do analysis because we’re going to use a wiki for our membership site and there’s just so many options. It’s really hard to choose the best one.

BRANDON: You know I know you don’t like it, Matt but I know there’s a lot of people that use Google sites as a wiki.

MATT: I like it because it’s easy to get started but it doesn’t have like or at least last time I use it it didn’t have the wiki linking and some of the features that I think of as wikis and maintaining multiple versions of the document.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: I think that’s key for spam especially so like if you want to be able to revert to a good version of the article, you don’t want to lose it all.

BRANDON: Right. Yeah. That’s a great way to store information that everybody is working on. So yeah, I think you know there’s lots of tools out there. Hopefully we gave you some good ideas that maybe you can use and maybe something that sparked an idea that you didn’t have before.

MATT: Yeah. And I think one of the last things that I would recommend is making sure that you’re getting the content of your website into the different voting sites that are out there and trying to get the crowd to give you feedback on the types of content that you’re creating. I know from some of the things that I’ve written like you know I get a lot of feedback about one article and on another when I would have thought the second article would have been better but you know the crowd really likes the first one. Getting that feedback by using things like Digg and Reddit and embedding those coding tags right into your articles is a good way to get feedback and understand when you’re doing something right and what people are liking.

BRANDON: Right. So that wraps ups our episode on crowdsourcing. You know I want to put a personal thank you out there for all of you who have voted and put comments on our iTunes podcast. So far we have a solid five stars all the way across the board so that is awesome. I’m really happy to hear you guys are enjoying our podcast and according to your comments, it sounds like we’re giving you the information you like and it’s packed full of good stuff so keep the comments reeling in and if you could put up some stars or some comments on iTune’s podcast site for us and help everybody else know about us.

MATT: Yeah, the thing I just have been really happy about the participation in the community site, the question and answer site that you can get to by going to automatemysmallbusiness.com and clicking on the community link. You know we’ve got some great questions and some great feedback from some of the users. I think the best question in the last week or so was the follow on from the WordPress episode. We got I think it’s like 15 answers to what are the best plug ins to use for WordPress and there are some that I’ve never heard of like Dean’s permalink migration and CB net ping optimizer. I’ve never even tried these before so I went on and look at some of them and I think these are some great recommendations.

BRANDON: Yeah, we definitely are learning that there’s a huge source of information out there that all of you are learning and trying new tools and giving us feedback on so it’s awesome that you guys are all participating in the community. So keep it coming.

MATT: Yeah so our community star for the week is downyourwaymarketing.com So thank you for contributing so much content to the community site this week. We really appreciate it.

BRANDON: That’s my buddy, John Booth.

MATT: There you go.

BRANDON: They’re out in Switzerland.

MATT: I didn’t know his name.

BRANDON: Yeah. He’s awesome. He does some marketing for me. I told him about the podcast. It sounds like he’s come around and done some community participation. That’s awesome. Hey, John. So one of our other emails we got from Dwayne Stevens gave us a great tip. Matt and I did not know that you could actually go to your public library’s website and download ebooks and audio books. Matt and I are both huge audio book fans and I probably have spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on audio books and who knew they were all available for free at your local library’s website and I’m sure since the web is worldwide, if you can’t get it on one library website, I’m sure you can get it on another.

MATT: Yeah, I actually went and got my LA county library card. So pretty good too.

BRANDON: It’s awesome. So the news recently Windows phone has come out and actually looks pretty promising. Well, yeah they just announced it and they showed a few demos and if you check out YouTube, there’s some screen shots.

MATT: I didn’t see the demos.

BRANDON: Oh it’s awesome. They did a great job. I’m really impressed with it. I think they’re going to be runner up. Clearly they’re late to the game I think if anything that’s going to kill them but if it was side by side and iPhone was being launched at the same time, I think the Windows phone would actually have a good chance, to be honest with you.

MATT: Is it based on like the Zune feel or what did they do?

BRANDON: Yeah. It’s definitely the Zune feel.

MATT: Okay. Cool because I love my Zune. I’m like it’s such a great device.

BRANDON: So you know it takes a lot for me to say that Windows phone is good because you know we’re both iPhone users.

MATT: I had a Windows phone before and it was less than optimal.

BRANDON: No, you know what they did was they completely dropped the entire Windows mobile platform.

MATT: Oh, thank God.

BRANDON: They started from scratch. That’s where I think that was their best decision because they were just dragging too much weight. I think they’re going to make it available holiday season 2010.

MATT: So we still got some time before it comes out.

BRANDON: Yeah. Definitely.

MATT: Okay. So also in the news that Trilian has released an alpha of their instant message client for Mac. I use it all the time on my Windows machines which basically lets you log in to instant messenger accounts from Google and Yahoo and MSN and Facebook and Skype and all hub going through one client. It’s great but I never had that access on my Mac and I always have to use iChat which is awful. So even in its buggy, alpha state, Trillion is hands down better than iChat so I’m really happy about finally having that on my Mac.

BRANDON: Nice. I didn’t realize that. That’s cool. So you like the Mac version of it.

MATT: It’s still kind of basic compared to the Windows version of it but at least it’s there and it’s better than the built in iChat stuff that Mac gives you. But I’ve kind of find myself using my Windows machines more. I’ve really kind of liked Windows 7 and I’m really enjoying it a lot. So I haven’t been using my Mac as much as I had in the past.

BRANDON: That’s good. Usually it’s either you’re a huge Mac fan or a huge Windows fan but that’s good to see that you can actually put between both and feel like objectively that you like the Windows platform better than the Mac. That’s not usual. So cool. And then lastly, we have our list of affiliate links on our website that if you want to go visit any of these websites out there and particularly if you want to sign up for any of them, please use our links on website because it helps support our podcast and it’s kind of our little revenue stream that helps us keep things going so…

MATT: We pay for all the bandwidth that you guys downloading all those audio files.

BRANDON: Yeah, so you know we’re not ashamed to ask for your help in that and it keeps us going so if you think, “Hey, this is a great site, I’m going to sign up,” first thing you can do is come over to our website, click on the link and get signed up after that way.

MATT: Yeah and all those links are in the show notes for all the shows so…

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: If we talked about something in here, just go to the show notes and click through the link.

BRANDON: So hopefully that helps out your information on crowdsourcing and gives you a little bit more info on how to utilize it and we will see you next week. Thanks for listening.

You’ve been listening to Automate My Small Business. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To get a list of the links we’ve just talked about or download more episodes and How To videos, go to automatemysmallbusiness.com. Thanks for being with us and catch us next time on Automate My Small Business Podcast.

Podcast music features, “Nothing’s Got Me” by Big Bad Sun, distributed by Magnatune and licensed under Creative Commons. The Automate My Small Business podcast is engineered by Vincent Furlong and transcribed by Flo Umali. And licensed under Creative Commons Attribution No Derivative Works license and may be freely distributed to share with friends, co-workers and strangers.