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Who Ya Gonna Call for Help With Your Business? Not Ghostbusters, But Crowdsourcers

Small Business often get the  feeling they are alone on an island.  Sometime they can feel that island is haunted by competitors, new entrants, angry customers and all sorts of other folks who can scare a small business.  A small business can really feel like they are alone trying to keep their head above water managing their day to day business business.  But what about growth, what about adding product and service enhancements that your customers have been asking for over and over or that upgraded website that you know you need?  And how about all of those branding and marketing initiatives you have been hoping to spend time thinking about, creating and designing?

Enter Crowdsourcing. This is a method to get your business to address many of these issues.  Even better, typically you can use crowdsourcing to get help from individuas and suppliers with subject matter experience and at a low cost.

Wikipedia defines crowdsourcing as “taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee and outsourcing it to a group (crowd) of people or community in the form of an open call.”  So what this means is that there are people all over the United States and in  fact the world who have skills that your business can start using immediately.  There are actually multiple websites or skill portals that are solely devoted to specific areas of a business.  At these website and skill portals, talent of all skill levels and expertise congregate and compte to provide services to small, medium and large businesses.

Here is how it works:  You posts a problem, project or an idea related to your business directly on a particular website or portal.  The crowd of folks that have an interest or a level of expertise in that problem, project or idea then give you feedback.  Then the crowd can even comment on the crowd’s feedback or your follow-up feedback to the crowd.  After this, you can ask someone from the crowd to assist you with your problem, project or idea if you decide their feedback is in line with what you would like to use.

Review Profiles of Suppliers Most of these sites have supplier and user profiles that you can review. during the exchange of feedback over a project.  The supplier profiles typically detail a supplier’s or individual’s skill set, expertise and even examples of their prior work on similar issues.  Many profiles have a feedback mechanism so you can see  feedback that has been posted from prior users of that person’s services.  This allows you to make an informed decision for your small business about what member or supplier from the crowd you want to hire.

Inc. magazine recently had a nice example of a crowdsourcing success story for small business. Another good post about how crowdsoucing is even involved with American Idol can be found here.  And even the city of San Francisco is using crowdsourcing through an application called City Sourced to address city issues.

Here are just a few crowdsourcing services that small businesses are using to help themselves.

1)99designs – Use this service if you want something designed.  Crowd members specialize in providing graphic design and logo design services.  Get your next logo or product brochure designed here.

2) Odesk – Use this service if you want to get a website designed or even if you would like to have a quick IT project such as a computer application built for your website or company. You can even get sales and marketing services, customer support and translation services here.

3) NameThis – Use this service for naming services.  So if you need to rebrand a product, create a new product name for a line you are launching or need a new catchy name for your blog, NameThis and the community there can help your business.

4) Threadless – Use this service the next time you go to a trade show and pass out some cool T-Shirts with your brand name on it.  Threadless was profiled in Inc Magazine where they described Threadless as a place where The Customer Is the Company!” The community of designers will help you design your next company shirt.

5) iStockPhoto Use this service when your business needs an inexpensive image, illustartion or video for your company brochure, website or presentation.

6) Guru – Use this service for your business to access freelancers who work on legal, finance, accounting, data entry and evenHR and payroll matters.

Remeber when using any of these crowdsourcing sites, ask a lot of questions, do your dillegence and make sure to utlize the escrow and payment milestone services that some of these sites use.  That way you can protect your business when you use these services.

So if you add these recources to the great small business tools and widgets we identified previously you can know you aren’t alone anymore on the small business island!  Start using these recourcss to beat back those ghosts and competitors.

Please share your crowdsourcing experience with us in the comments.

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Archive for the ‘Online & Small Business Resources’ Category

Diary of a Tech Start-Up: Funding…Dance with the Devil or Not

One of the ongoing debates going on with our tech start-up is whether to seek outside investment or not.  The first point that is often made by one of us is that it is too early to be thinking about it.  Heck, we just launched the beta version of this site and are now getting our first customers…isn’t it a bit presumptive to think about asking for $$ from a stranger? 

This scenario reminds me of a scene in the greatest movie of all time — Waiting for Guffman.  Corky St. Clair is charged with directing a play about Blaine, Missourri’s history.  Corky approaches the City Council and states that the ONLY thing he needs to throw the play is “one hundred thousand dollars”.  When informed that the City’s annual budget is $100k and that includes swimming, Corky responds “there won’t be swimming in my play.”  How does this tie into our discussion for asking for outside investment?  Well, maybe it doesn’t but it’s a great movie.  No, my point is that we before we seek out investment, we need to clearly establish a need for our services and that we have a competent management team that will know what to do with the money if/when we do get it.  We can’t go in all Corky St. Clair, not having a clue as to what is a reasonable amount of investment and establish what we are going to do with the money will have a strong likelihood of showing a return on investment.  See Corky asking for money

Now comes a more pressing question.  Assuming the time is right (and we don’t ask for the entire City Council’s budget), do we seek out investment at all?  As Raj pointed out in an earlier post, there are now a lot of tools that exist that make starting and running a business very inexpensive.  To date, we’ve been self-funding KikScore and we’re pretty good at stretching a dollar.  While it would be great to have a swank office and have the ability to throw an awesome holiday party with a DJ, it may not be worth the equity and control we’d have to give up (it really depends on how good the DJ is).  We’re not alone in our thinking.  According to a recent posting on www.rockyradar.com — 84% of Inc’s Fastest Growing 500 companies never received venture capital (though many did likely get angel financing). 

Several of us on the KikScore team have been part of venture-backed companies previously.  Some of us had good experiences, some of us did not.  So, as we continue to grow our customer base and improve upon our core product, the debate within KikScore will rage — do we continue to self-fund or do we seek professional investment.  We’ll keep you updated (and we’d love to hear your thoughts about it).

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Archive for the ‘Online & Small Business Resources’ Category

Diary of a Tech Start-Up: Idea to Soft Launch

One of our ideas that we have here at KikScore is to provide a running blog on how we started business, what challenges we face, and what we’re doing to make our concept a viable (and hopefully profitable) concern.  There won’t be one voice in this diary, as each of us have a different view of events.  Hopefully this spectrum of views and running history will help our readers with similar challenges (and if you have some advice on approaching a similar problem, we’d love to hear it as well).  We’ll try to be useful and interesting, but most of all, honest (and hopefully humorous).  Ok, let’s get to it.

About 3 years ago, a thought comes across my mind.  I recall this moment well, as I usually don’t have a lot of thoughts.  The concept was to come up with a way to provide some transparency to shoppers — allow an ecommerce site to provide verifiable information on who they are and why they should be trusted (so they can compete with established brands and brick-and-mortar stores).  And if we can supplement this transparency with third party data on these businesses and score the likely shopping experience — well, that’s a home run.  Shoppers benefit from more competition and an excellent shopping experience, Sellers use their good name to sell more online, and we have a nice business.

In an effort to save readers from lighting themselves on fire out of boredom, ala Airplane: The Movie, I can summarize what we did between coming up with this idea and now having our soft launch of KikScore.  We hired a patent lawyer; filed a patent; hired outside developers to supplement our efforts; we futzed around with these developers far too long; 12 months later we fired those developers; we spend 6-8 months working and re-working on our scoring model and securing third-party data sources; we developed a look-and-feel of the site (twice); and came up with a name and trademark (twice).  We all did this while each of us were working full time (and often overtime) with day jobs!  Alot of late, late nights and plenty of weekend work got us to where we are at. 

We’re now live and have several beta customers out there.  While the past couple of years have been busy, we know that the next two will be even busier.  Though it will be a lot more exciting actually being in business, instead of talking about it.

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Black Friday Is Coming

No Black Friday is not every Friday during the NFL Football season before yet another Cleveland Browns loss. If you are an online retailer, you really know what Black Friday is and what it means for your business.  We at KikScore wanted to pass along this very good article on dealing with shopping cart abandonment before Black Friday.  Some interesting statistics from the article are:

• Shopping cart abandonment can result in a loss of 70% of a merchant’s potential sales.
• Merchants that take steps to proactively address shopping cart abandonment by re-marketing to shoppers who abandon their shopping cart can recoup up to 50 percent of the losses from those abandonments
• SeeWhy’s Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Charles Nicholls says that if you re-market through email within hours of the shopper’s abandonment,  merchants can get up to a fifty percent checkout rate on those abandonments

With Black Friday coming, the lesson learned is if you can take proactive steps to address those shopping cart abandonments through re-marketing, you can turn those abandonments into conversions.  That will make Black Monday much better than Orange and Brown Sundays after another Cleveland Browns loss!!!!

Tell us if you have any ideas or suggestions for addressing shopping cart adandonment in the comments.

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Lexis Survey Finds that Small Businesses Drink the Ratings Kool-Aid

A new survery from LexisNexis and Martindale Hubble provided a very interesting trend amoung small businesses and their use and perceptions of rating sites.  According to the survey, small businesses rely on rating and review sites — for service and product choices — at a rate that is double the average consumer.  This is in despite of the fact that these same small business owners indicate a couple of things: (1) that the normal review sites are easily biased by positive or negative reviews; and (2) the reviews can easily be faked by the businesses being reviewed.

Why do small businesses find review sites to be of such value when they can be manipulated?  Despite these short-comings, reviews allow for much needed guidance in aggregating data and sorting out, in relatively quick fashion, where to get your goods and services.  Another point that the survey reveals is what something we already know (so it’s really a stretch to say it’s “revealing” anything) — that not all ratings are created equally.  More trust is put into the rating if (a) its from a independent third party; and (b) is based, in part, on actual customer feedback (but again, for some of these review sites, it can be hard to know if the data is from real customers or the reviewed business faking the review).

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2009 Trends in Ecommerce: Open Up That Box of Tools!

The economy made the last few months a challenge for everyone including online merchants.  The good news for merchants is the growing availability in 2009 of cost-effective tools that can make an online shopper’s experience better.  Every online merchant should consider using these tools to enrich the experience for their customers and also reduce a merchant’s costs.

1. Widgets

Widgets are everywhere.  Developers around the world have developed small applications that can be installed quickly and for free to nearly any type of website.  Widgetbox and Google Apps and Gadgets are just two of the places where merchants can go to download a host of widgets such as calendars, feedback mechanisms, sales and discount applications and many more.

2. Outsourcing Applications and Staff

Merchants now have a number of options to use outsourced staff to support their business and their customers.  Need back-office help or staff to support your customers.  Vendors like MyBusinessAssistant.com offer end-to-end support for merchants for answering customer service calls, providing phone numbers, serving as a virtual assistant to coordinate tasks.  Companies like FreshBooks give small businesses the ability to easily invoice, track expenses and manage the finance operations for the merchant.  These tools allow the merchants too focus on their business and allow them to better support their customers.

3. Open Source Applications

The growth of open source applications has only helped small businesses.  SugarCRM is an example of a completely free (they also have higher end paid options) open-source application that gives merchants a fairly sophisticated CRM offering so that they can track, monitor and value customers and leads, among many other things.  There are also end-to-end solutions for customer support applications that are open source that a merchant can buy at a fraction of a cost of an enterprise application.  Soon there will be open-source applications for nearly every part of a small business.  This will only help small businesses and make them more competitive while cutting their costs.

What tools are you using or have begun using for your merchant?

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KikReport: Helps Businesses Demonstrate Trust to Shoppers

Are you losing sales because shoppers do not know enough about your business? It is human nature that when shopping online customers look for indications and information that they can trust the online business that they are about to buy from. More and more shoppers decide that if an online merchant does not have indications of trustworthiness, they will not buy from a business. That is the reason it is so important for online merchants to quickly and in a powerful manner demonstrate trustworthiness and security to shoppers. If merchants fail to do this, they will lose the chance to close a sale.

Shoppers Concerns When Shopping Online

When shoppers look at an online store that they want to buy from, they often want to know more about the following:

1) Who is the management for this business?
2) Where is the business located?
3) What kind of return and customer service policies does the merchant have?
4) Does the business store credit card and other sensitive information securely?
5) Does this business have a track record of delivering a product?
6) What have other customers thought about shopping with this merchant?

Use a KikReport to Answer Shoppers Questions Regarding Trust

Merchants can use a KikReport to help answer each of these questions.  By answering each of these questions, a merchant has a much better chance of getting a customer to understand that the merchant’s business is trustworthy.  The KikReport acts as a merchant report card that provides dynamic and real time information that is organized in an easy format for shoppers to understand.  Each KikReport contains detailed information such as:

1) Details regarding the management for a business;

2) Information regarding website security and website traffic for your business;

3) Key pieces of information about your return, privacy and customer service policies;

4) Recent comments from other shoppers and customers of yours;

5) Information on where your business is located; and

6) An optional video that you can use to introduce yourself to shoppers

The KikReport allows you to display this information to shoppers.  Using the KikReport and your KikScore is a powerful way to demonstrate trust to online shoppers.  By using these tools to demonstrate trust you can get more shoppers to buy from you. To see a sample KikReport, click here.  This is the KikReport for the Interactive Security Group.

More information, means more trust which translates into more sales for your business.  Find out more information about KikScore and KikReport here.

Please let us know if you have any feedback on the KikReport.  We would love to hear from your.

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Startup Checklist for Small Businesses

As we know, most business start out small. Starting a business is a very busy time in an entrepreneur’s life. So busy that many critical steps are often overlooked. In an effort to help those small, but soon to be large, businesses identify critical areas for success, we have put together a short 10 step checklist to make sure you are covering all of your bases.

Top 10 Checklist:

1. Research the Product or Service You Seek To Sale.
2. Create a Business Plan.
3. Determine Your Capital Budget.
4. Choose and Register Your Business Name.
5. Decide on the Legal Form of Your Business.
6. Open a Company Checking Account.
7. Determine if you need any state or local licenses/permits.
8. Obtain a Federal Employer Identification Number.
9. Set up a business website and business email address.
10. Research various trust products in the marketplace to help you fast track your credibility with your potential customers.

As you may know, there are many more factors that determines a small businesses success; however, if you were to ask me what are the top 10, then you the ones above are it.

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Make Me A Clown Now! While You Are At It Teach Me What to Expect When I Start Selling Online Part 2

This is the second part of the two part posting about starting to sell online. You can read the first part here.

Yes, you can be a clown and you can start selling online pretty quickly. You can even be a clown while you are selling online. The trick is to make sure you do not act like a clown when you get set up to start selling online. This post will cover some key items that every person who wants to take their business online needs to think about as they get going.

Test, Test, Test

It is painful, but you must be constantly testing changes to the website. The tests should not be wholesale changes, but should be controlled. So many people focus on getting the product line-up just right, or the purchase flows streamlined or the website to have the ideal color. The truth is you need to keep testing changes to your website. Nearly every component should be tested to see how visitors to your website interact with the website. Controlled testing is key. That is commonly known as A/B testing and here is a great summary of A/B testing. It basically means you show a change to the website to only 50% or so of the visitors and 50% of the visitors do not see the change. The analysis that is so valuable is what happens to the other 50% of visitors who see the changed website. Do they convert at a higher rate, do they stay on the website longer, do they click the new link that you added etc. This is the value of testing and more testing until you optimize the various areas of your site, but even then continued testing will help you as shoppers’ habits evolve.

Be Flexible

This may be the most important of all. To be a seller online, you need to be flexible. You may think that customers and shoppers will respond a certain way, but you need to be prepared to expect the unexpected. Inflexible folks just can not make it as merchants online.  Even better, if you are flexible and are addressing your customers needs that will create customer loyalty with your business.  Remember customers like to deal with businesses that listen to them and also take action on customer feedback. This flexibility can also lead to your customers being your best advocates through word of mouth recommendations about your business and products.  All of this from just listening to your customers and acting on their feedback!

These are just a few of the things to keep in mind. Do you have any lessons learned from your experience selling online that you want to share?

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Make Me A Clown Now! While You Are At It Teach Me What to Expect When I Start Selling Online Part 1

Yes, you can be a clown and you can start selling online pretty quickly. You can even be a clown while you are selling online. The trick is to make sure you do not act like a clown when you get set up to start selling online. This post will cover some key items that every person who wants to take their business online needs to think about as they get going.

Website

There are many ways to approach your website. Many people just jump in a buy a ready-made template from a website template company. Be careful of doing that too quickly. The trick is that before you actually dive into buying a template or building your website, you must take the time to plan out a few things about your website. Take some time to review websites that sell similar products that you are going to sell or are in a similar industry so you can see different looks and feels for websites. After you have done this, sketch out the pages of your planned website on a piece of paper. This will help you visualize your website and better inform you when you get to the point where you are considering different options for templates or designers that will design your website. The key is taking a few minutes to plan out the vision of your website. If you do that, the process for building your actual website will run a lot smoother. Too many people just skip this step and go to the template or design stage and do this on the fly. You can do this, but it will be a much bigger challenge than if you planned it out.

Your community

Customers…..Who are going to be your customers for the products that you sell? Figure out who are the customers, but go one step further and try to think about the influencers for the customers. That is the community that you want to build for your website and your products. For example, a seller of athletic equipment like wrist wraps and weights are selling to customers that want to use this equipment to get healthy. But other influencers for this can be athletic clubs and personal trainers. As the seller of the equipment thinks about building a community through a blog or other forms of social media, the seller should aim to serve the greater community of customers and influencers in order to build a community of followers.

Tracking and Interacting with Customers

Once a customer has purchased from you that is not the end of your relationship. Now as a seller online, especially where shoppers have so many options it is imperative that sellers maintain a relationship with the customer. Part of this is selfish because only the customer can give you feedback about their experience with the products that you have sold them. But more importantly, the customer’s feedback before, during and after the purchase experience will give you important feedback that will help you improve your customer experience. Without it, you are literally flying blind. So how do you interact and track customers. There are a number of customer tracking applications that will help you work to interact with your customers. These include Kampyle (feedback tracker), SugarCRM (customer relationship manager) and CrowdSound (feedback widget). Not to mention, you can always just pick up the phone or email the customer to get feedback. This may be the most underrated way to interact with customers because most sellers just do not think about doing that. Call your customer! You will not regret it, but be prepared for the feedback because it could be brutally honest.

Stayed tuned for Part 2 of this post tomorrow.

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