Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
In our 12 Questions blog series, we feature interviews with someone from the crowdSPRING community. For these interviews, we pick people who add value to our community – in the blog, in the forums, in the projects. Plainly – activities that make crowdSPRING a better community. Be professional, treat others with respect, help us build something very special, and we’ll take notice.
We’re very proud to feature Ann Lowe (crowdSPRING username: solarcap) today. Ann lives and works in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
1. Please tell us about yourself.
Hi Everyone, My name is Ann Lowe and I am a resident of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, the Nation’s capital city….Yes I went there…. Sorry Toronto and those of the world that believe that Toronto is the Capital of Canada, it is not! I live here with my Husband and our two teen Boys and of course my dog Jake. All men….the testosterone levels in my home are so high that the toilet seat automatically rises in relinquishment to the male powers. Girl power doesn’t live anywhere in my home except my office.
Designs, logos, girlfriend photos and organization, not something you will find anywhere else within the walls of my home. I do however have a vintage set of leather hockey gloves hanging on the wall! Homage to growing up in a home with three brothers and a Dad as avid players and watchers of our national sport! I grew up all across Canada; my Father was a Military man. When I moved here and got married I said that once I had children I wouldn’t move until they were old enough to go to University. I never wanted them to feel like the new kid, something I had experienced at least eight times before I turned 18. They have the same friends that they have had since birth. I think that is really cool!
Being a wife and mother are very important in my life but that is not the only thing that defines me. I am a 20 year old stuck in the body of a 44 year old woman. I love top 40 music, everything colourful and dancing around my kitchen with a “more juice than vodka” martini! I can sit for hours looking through design magazines at Chapters and get lost in writing out website addresses that I intend to visit at some point. I am quirky, crazy and love to watch CNN to the extent that I now feel it is some sort of strange addiction.
There are few things you can do that are more important than delivering a good presentation. Nor are there few things that most entrepreneurs do as poorly. We tend to be dependent on slide decks, but the decks we use are often poorly thought out, thematically confusing, and esthetically challenged. Slide decks should support the presenter, not the other way around, though this is rarely the case and many speakers use their slides a crutch, simply reading to their audience the words on the screen. The rule of thumb should be that the talk should be able to stand on its own, without slides, and if it can not do that, then there is a much deeper problem that a deck can not overcome.
1. Keep it stupid simple. Thematically, visually, organizationally – it is critical that your messaging be clear, concise and to the point. Don’t waste words, don’t waste imagery, and most importantly don’t waste your audience’s time. If what you need to communicate will take the full hour, than by all means do so. But if you can communicate the information in 20 minutes instead, that will be preferable for all concerned. When creating a presentation, I tend to work backwards, considering first what I am trying to impart, and then structuring the presentation around that goal. Here is the opening slide from a presentation Ross and I did shortly after we launched. Sort of says it all, no?
2. Be organized. Like all great narratives, presentations too should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And like a good research paper, they should clearly state the thesis up front, support it with confirming evidence and research, state it again at the end and summarize to tie it all together. So, start at the beginning and work your way to the end and make sure you can defend your assumptions, and that your research is of the highest quality.
About one year ago, Erik Qualman, the author of Socialnomics, produced a popular video highlighting the impressive facts and figures about the growing popularity of social media.
Erik has produced a follow-up video and the updated facts and figures show very clearly that social media continues to dominate many areas of our life. Some examples mentioned in the video:
Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30 years old
Social media has overtaken pornography as the #1 web activity
1 out of 8 married couples met via social media
80% of companies use social media for recruitment
Here’s the video with many more fascinating facts and figures:
Do you think these trends will continue to increase?
In two years, we’ve answered over 40,000 customer service tickets, and tens of thousands of other customer requests via email, private message, and phone. We’ve obsessed about providing the absolute best customer service to our designers, writers, and buyers. And we’ve met many outstanding people along the way.
We love our customers.
We have over 60,000 designers and writers in our community, and thousands of buyers from 70+ countries have posted projects. We’re humbled by their stories about the impact we’ve had on their lives and on their businesses.
Today, we received a wonderful thank-you package from one of our customers – Sweet Waterwear. They currently have a project on crowdSPRING for t-shirt design (this is their second project).
We’re also really humbled when a customer does something so special – to send us a package of yummy goodies all the way from Hawaii. Huge thanks to Sean Sweet & Sweet Waterwear! We’re going to enjoy the candy, cookies & coffee – and dream big dreams about surfing in Hawaii.
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
The Differences Between Good Designers and Great Designers – http://bit.ly/9c1Q5E
Whether you are a startup, a small business or a Fortune 50 company, customers typically resist attempts to change products or services they perceive work well. People prefer to deal with the things they already know rather than get used to something new. But to innovate, companies must constantly find ways to improve their products and services.
How can innovation and resistance to change be reconciled? In this short video, I talk about the lessons we’ve learned along the way in introducing changes to the crowdSPRING marketplace.
Do you have other suggestions of how to make it easier for your customers or your community to accept change? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
In our 12 Questions blog series, we feature interviews with someone from the crowdSPRING community. For these interviews, we pick people who add value to our community – in the blog, in the forums, in the projects. Plainly – activities that make crowdSPRING a better community. Be professional, treat others with respect, help us build something very special, and we’ll take notice.
We’re very proud to feature Michael Irby (crowdSPRING username: 3squared) today. Michael lives and works in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
1. Please tell us about yourself.
I grew up primarily in the Southeastern part of the U.S. where I earned a BS in Industrial Design. Although the school was highly accredited, the program focused on quick sketching and marker rendering techniques. While these are formidable skills, I found myself lacking the much needed computer design skill set that employers wanted and the desire to move to the big cities where they were located. Hell, I didn’t even have a computer. I moved to beautiful Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, seeking that quality of life we all talk about. Since then I have been a bartender, restaurant manager and cabinet maker. I bought a house with my girlfriend and we now have 2 cats and 2 dogs. We recently purchased a Mac (my girlfriend is studying graphic design) and I started reading her design text books. I signed up for crowdSPRING as a way to challenge myself to learn the software, and it has been a blast ever since.
2. How did you become interested in design?
I became interested in design as a child. I collected comic books and would spend hours trying to draw the covers (mostly Todd McFarlane’s work). I could replicate anything I could see, but was not very gifted at creating drawings from scratch. I put the idea of a career in creativity aside and followed a path towards science, until my senior year in high school when I was required to take creative writing and art history. Both reignited the need to do something unique and unusual. When I discovered Industrial Design at my local university, it seemed the perfect blend of both worlds.
Most companies leverage crowdsourcing by relying on external communities. For example, small businesses and startups looking for custom logo design leverage crowdSPRING’s community of 60,000 designers and writers. Companies looking for help with on-demand software testing can leverage the community at uTest. People looking for help with simple tasks can leverage Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Smart companies have also found ways to leverage internal communities. For example, crowdSPRING has hosted projects by some of the world’s top agencies crowdsourcing internally from their own employees (those were private projects and we are unable to share details).
The belief that you can benefit from the collective wisdom of your own employees isn’t new. For the last several decades, many large enterprises have implemented “knowledge management” programs designed to identify, distribute and enable adoption of best practices and experiences across the entire enterprise. Knowledge Management programs are often very costly and difficult to implement and leverage. Enterprises typically purchase and implement complex and difficult to use software tools (and accompanying processes) that make knowledge management programs a burden, rather than a benefit.
I was intrigued yesterday when Google unveiled an interesting strategy for its venture capital funding arm – Google Ventures. Google Ventures plans to invest $100 million per year in startups (9 investments were made in 2009). Google has invited its employees to recommend investment opportunities and already, two to three investment tips a day are suggested by employees. To create incentives for people to suggest investment opportunities, Google promises to reward the original tipster if the investments turn out to be profitable. With 20,000+ connected employees, it’s a smart move by Google to leverage its internal community and crowdsource investment opportunities.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about some online tools for small business, one of which was Wufoo.com which allows users to design and host simple online surveys. They are quick to set up and Wufoo uses a freemium model, which lets a small business find a plan within their own budget. For small business it is of critical importance to understand your audience and how they interact with your product or service, how they view your business, and how they define themselves.
We sent out the survey request to 1,800 buyers from 2009, and approximately 550 responded by completing the online questionnaire! This is a response rate of over 30%, which by industry standards, is very strong. Here’s a sampling of the questions and some results:
Demographics:
Buyer’s gender: 70% male, 30% female
Top industries: InfoTech, Advertising & Marketing, Consulting
Company size: under 20 employees: 81%; over 2o employees: 19%
Company revenue: under $100k: 40%; $100-500k: 28%; $1-5mm: 12%
Customer satisfaction:
Overall experience: 81% rated 8 or higher (on scale of 10)
86% said that they will “come back with their next project”
96% said they would recommend to a friend or colleague
crowdSPRING is the world's #1 marketplace for entrepreneurs, small businesses, nonprofits and agencies who need custom logo design, web design, a new company name or other writing and design services. Over 110,000 designers and writers work on crowdSPRING. We are trusted by more than 27,000 happy clients around the world.
