Marketing and branding

5 Things Your Small Business Should Do Today To Increase Profits

Ross | September 8th, 2009

I never fully understood, until co-founding crowdSPRING, the challenges of operating a small business. There’s a lot to do but so little time to accomplish everything. Here are five practical tips from my own experience with crowdSPRING that you can implement today to increase sales and profits for your small business: 1. Evaluate What’s Working [...]

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Start-Up Tip: Leadership Is Not Management

Ross | August 24th, 2009

In the book Tribes by Seth Godin, Godin suggests that anyone, anywhere can be a leader. The one thing holding most people back is the fear of failure. Tribes is about making a choice – to lead or not to lead a group of people. Using real world examples, Godin tells stories about how famous [...]

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How crowdSPRING Works – The (Very Short) Movie

Ross | July 17th, 2009

Most people say that a book is way better than a movie. But we’re not dummies. We know you won’t read a 500 page novel about how crowdSPRING works. Instead – here’s a 1 minute 42 second movie.

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Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Day?

Ross | May 22nd, 2009

Today is Shakespearean sonnet day at crowdSPRING. We all took turns reading sonnets. Here’s Kevin, who was brave (or not too smart?) to let us video him… Kevin DeLury Reading Shakespeare from Ross Kimbarovsky on Vimeo.

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They Like Us, They Really Like Us

Bethany | May 21st, 2009

Over at crowdSPRING, we’re starting to think of ourselves as the Slumdog Millionaire of the online awards.  Here we are, just a bunch of nobodies in India (or the West Loop of Chicago—I mean, if you want to get technical) who came up with an idea that we thought might entertain a small business or [...]

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A Three Minute Interview With Ross About crowdSPRING

Ross | May 12th, 2009

Last week, I traveled to Hamburg Germany for the next09 conference. After my presentation (titled “Crowdsourcing Creative”) I was interviewed about crowdSPRING. Here’s a short (3 minute) segment from that discussion. We talked about crowdSPRING, the advantages and disadvantages of crowdsourcing, the reaction from agencies, and other topics. Here’s the interview.   Link:

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Can Social Media Can Help My Company?

Ross | April 30th, 2009

There is an astounding amount of press about social media. Some companies – Dell and Comcast, for example – have strengthened their brands by engaging social media head on. Some others have stumbled – but it’s clear that Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and the many other social networks around the world offer opportunities for businesses [...]

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The Agony of Choosing the Winning Design: Will you get it right?

Jay | March 31st, 2009

So it’s time to pick the winning design of your crowdSPRING project. You’ve narrowed it down to the finalists: the best three or four designs. You agonize. Which one should you choose? Well guess what: It doesn’t matter. Whichever design you choose, it’s likely that your customers would choose something different. It happened to me [...]

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Don’t Underestimate The Value Of Listening

Ross | March 30th, 2009

It never ceases to surprise me when people  think that listening to users is bad business. Michael Arrington recently questioned Facebook’s decision to revert back to some “old features” based on input from Facebook users. In his article titled “No! Never Surrender To Your Users, Facebook”, Arrington argues that you should never listen to your [...]

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We’re in freaking Forbes

Pete | February 5th, 2009

Look mom – we’re in Forbes! What? No – we didn’t do anything illegal! Umm, no, we didn’t meet Barack either. We just – oh, forget it. It’s not a big deal.  Say hi to dad…

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