“The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.” – Henry Kissinger

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” - Peter Drucker

“You have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy.” – Steve Jobs

Strong leadership without strong management can result in chaos and inefficiency. Strong management without strong leadership can result in tunnel vision and paralysis. Here’s a wonderful short video in which Steve Jobs talks about managing people and his leadership style.

Spring is here, which means opportunities for fresh air, bike rides, and sunshine will soon abound. The trees will bud and the masses will open their windows. It also means the return of wedding season and flowers popping up in people’s gardens.

And nobody knows flowers better than this week’s Small Business Spotlight, Red Poppy Floral Design. Based out of Ann Arbor, Michigan, Red Poppy Floral Design specializes in wedding and special event floral arrangements. Owner and designer, Tracy, actually studied with Jane Packer Studio in London– they were the ones responsible for all the flowers at the Olympics! She continues to spread the love by teaching flower classes, including one coming up here. All of Tracy’s arrangements are hand-crafted and created in her home studio.

Tracy talks a little bit more below about her blooming business:

How would you explain what you do to somebody’s grandmother?

I design wedding and special event flowers in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  I love designing bouquets with a twist of elegant, modern and outdoorsy feels.  I focus mainly on weddings so I can take plenty of time working with each client to understand the feel they want and carefully designing each piece in the days beforehand.

What are some industry specific challenges you faced?  

Wedding work is always under pressure, but I think that’s part of the rush for me.  Flowers are perishable and for Michigan summer weddings you have to try to keep them cool, and for winter weddings you have to keep them from freezing – there are a lot of logistics to consider beyond the designing!

What was your biggest learning curve/experience?

The best learning experience has been working with other floral designers in Ann Arbor.  When I moved here I wondered how the existing floral designers would feel about a new kid in town.  But when I approached the three leading designers, they welcomed me with open arms and we’ve since created Bloom Florist Collective, where we teach floral design classes and we get together frequently for fun and to support each other in our businesses. I’ve learned a lot from these ladies – they are generous business owners and have created such a positive environment for creativity!  Read the rest of this post »

Back in 2011, we announced a monthly cS Award to honor quality work by designers and writers in the crowdSPRING community.

The May cS Award

We’re pretty excited for the May cS award. It’s our first foray into video! So dust off your reel, brush up on your AfterEffects skills, and let’s get ready to render.

We’re asking for :30 to :60 second clips from a favorite, existing motion design, visual effect or animation project. The submissions can be brand spanking new and created especially for this award or they can be a favorite existing clips for which you own the rights.

Show us the fun, creative work you’re most proud of. Show us WHY your clients love you.

When you submit your clip, please include a small statement along with your submission that talks about what you like about the clip you chose and why it’s special to you.

We’ll invite the world to vote on our favorite clips and the winner will get $1,000.

So upload your best and favorite clip here. And please tell your friends! We’re all looking forward to seeing your directorial debuts!

And now…. the April cS Award Finalists….

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It has been some time since I last discussed business plans in these blog pages and I thought it might be time for an update. When Ross and I were developing the idea for crowdSPRING we wrote an extensive business plan – over 80 pages of detailed description, research, tables, charts, models, and projections. The very process of writing the plan was an integral part of developing the business: we were building ideas and analyzing the research we had been collecting for months and we were synthesizing it into a single document to be shared with investors and advisors; it was a roadmap for a new concept and a new business.

When I look back at that time, I question whether writing that plan was really the best approach for us. Not that the process itself didn’t actually help us to get the business of the ground and not that the document lacked value. Rather, I question whether we made the best use of time (around 2 months) and capacity (literally hundreds of hours between the two of us)?

If I were to have a do-over, I would approach the process differently. Don’t get me wrong, I would have still completed the extensive research on the market that we did, but instead of running endless projections and building incredibly detailed financial models, I would devote that time to prototyping the product. Instead of creating an 80 page document, I would create a 20-slide presentation. Instead of a detailed marketing plan, I would start with a list of 10 tactics to experiment with in small batches. And instead of creating (on paper) a fairly complex product, I would have pushed to launch with a very simple version to build on going forward.

Business planning is critical: you can not develop a new business or a new product without a deep understanding of the demand, the competition, and the overall market, but it can be done with a leaner approach that emphasizes small batch experimentation, fast iterative cycles, and modest funding rounds to arrive at a plan for your business that can get to market quickly and with fewer resources. The message to your investors? Let’s take a great idea and start learning how it works “in the wild” instead of spending weeks or months writing about it and talking about it.

Photo by: Ryan Hyde 

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 image above shows how different colors impact people’s emotions. There’s a science to marketing, and colors play a big role in helping to persuade. For the full post, look in the Social Media & Marketing section below.

Small Business Marketing Guide: Types of Traditional and Online Marketing – http://crowdspring.co/10VnaeI

Five Branding Mistakes That Will Cripple Your Small Business (and how to avoid making them) – http://crowdspring.co/11CaeWD

How Customer Service Impacts The Success Of Your Business – http://crowdspring.co/10uNO6J

How To Attract Customers And Not Waste Your Marketing Budget – http://crowdspring.co/15RhuD5 

Why is Facebook blue? The science of colors in marketing | The Buffer Blog – http://crowdspring.co/15WzlbY

Empower Your Small Business: Small Business Marketing Guide, Branding Mistakes, Not Wasting Your Marketing Budget – http://crowdspring.co/11CYHpA

Can you put a dollar value on a Facebook fan? Should you? | by Gene Marks – http://crowdspring.co/11qVvgP

As Pay-Per-Click Ad Costs Rise, Small Businesses Search for Alternatives | NYT – http://crowdspring.co/11DfAR6

Attract Customers Who Want to Buy: 7 Ways – http://crowdspring.co/ZpBTvH

10 mistakes startups make when talking to users – http://crowdspring.co/10m2LIs

Steve Jobs was hyper-curious and willing to fail. Here’s what you can learn from him – http://crowdspring.co/11qUrtd 

Avoiding Burnout | by Andrew Dumont – http://crowdspring.co/10WvdrD

How Customer Service Impacts The Success Of Your Business – http://crowdspring.co/10uNO6J

3 Actions That Will Make You a Terrible Leader – http://crowdspring.co/11qUzZR

How to Raise Money When You’re Not in a Major VC Market | by Mark Suster – http://crowdspring.co/ZcAkxq

The Best Business Ideas Come When You Least Expect It | WSJ by Brad Keywell – http://crowdspring.co/11DfOaL

How To Attract Customers And Not Waste Your Marketing Budget – http://crowdspring.co/15RhuD5 

Meet 31 year old Ashish Thakkar – Africa’s Youngest Billionaire – http://crowdspring.co/11qVlWE 

Hunger Beats Complacency. Almost Every Time. | Technori by Melissa Joykong – http://crowdspring.co/10S91ix

“Many VCs don’t understand which founders to fund, and they don’t really understand consumer-facing ecommerce.” – http://crowdspring.co/ZIj9IN

10 Things Entrepreneurs Can Learn From High School Seniors – http://crowdspring.co/11xBEwN

Risk Aversion Is More Common In Entrepreneurs Than You Think | Forbes – http://crowdspring.co/ZAx3eW

Well, He’s Not Going to Get Very Far - http://crowdspring.co/13Nplhl

Peter Thiel: Twitter will outlast the New York Times – http://crowdspring.co/ZAvApa

What a stupid idea – http://crowdspring.co/ZSTKfA

10 mistakes startups make when talking to users – http://crowdspring.co/10m2LIs

3 Start-ups out to Change the Publishing Industry – http://crowdspring.co/13Ke4y7

Specialization Provides Online And Offline Growth Opportunities | Forbes – http://crowdspring.co/10SEZLp

Mailbox’s Gentry Underwood: What Hackers Should Know About Design Thinking | Co.Labs – http://crowdspring.co/ZdnkHZ

Why More Is Not Always Better – http://crowdspring.co/10M6u9D

Well written Google Glass review from Engadget – http://crowdspring.co/ZkLpwq

“The absence of candor is the single largest roadblock keeping companies from being effective.” – http://crowdspring.co/ZHXtwm

A Guide for VC’s When Talking to Women Entrepreneurs | Huffington Post – http://crowdspring.co/10lNQ0R

“Google Glass is designed by engineers who clearly don’t understand interpersonal interactions” http://crowdspring.co/10m2DIW

Attract Customers Who Want to Buy: 7 Ways – http://crowdspring.co/ZpBTvH

What Would Ashton Do—and Does It Matter? | HBR – http://crowdspring.co/ZWYxMY

Why is Facebook blue? The science of colors in marketing | The Buffer Blog – http://crowdspring.co/15WzlbY

The Louis C.K. Guide to Online Marketing | Digiday by Jack Marshall – http://crowdspring.co/ZxYiXH

The Complete Guide to Reconversion | SEOmoz – http://crowdspring.co/ZAxiqt

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What your customers and potential customers say publicly about your company’s products and services matters a great deal.

In a few minutes, we’ll give you three good tips on how you can improve your customers’ experience when they deal with your customer service team. But first, let’s take a quick look at why you should invest in customer service.

According to a survey conducted by Dimensional Research and Zendesk, 90 percent of respondents said that positive online reviews influenced their buying decisions and a nearly identical number – 86 percent – said that their buying decisions were influenced by negative online reviews.

Facebook was the leading source for positive reviews (see graph below). Online review sites were the most common source of negative reviews, but also a good source for positive reviews.

Does your company show customer reviews on your site? Have customers reviewed your company on other sites?

To give you an example, we show crowdSPRING reviews from customers on our own site, but we’re also very proud of the reviews crowdSPRING has received from customers on the independent reviews site, ResellerRatings.

Here’s why you should care about delivering great customer service: customer service ranks as the top factor influencing how much a customer trusts a company. When you’re nice to your customers – they’re nice to you.

Read the rest of this post »

Many small business owners and young entrepreneurs are intimidated by marketing. There’s a good reason for this: marketing is expensive, can be time-consuming, and can be a waste of time. But marketing, when planned and executed correctly, can also lead to more sales and revenue.

Whether you plan and execute traditional and online marketing strategies yourself, or pay consultants or vendors to help you, it’s important for you to understand the types of marketing available to you.

Today, we take a look at online and traditional marketing. We’ll look at relevant metrics to help you assess whether a specific marketing channel could work for you, and also highlight additional resources to help you get a better understanding of that channel.

Online Marketing

Online marketing relies on strategies that leverage the Internet and mobile devices. In many cases, the goal of online marketing (especially for small businesses), is to directly increase sales by targeting potential customers using different online channels.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing focuses on promotion through search engines (Google, Bing). There are two distinct forms of search engine marketing: organic (search engine optimization or SEO) and paid (pay-per-click or PPC).

SEO focuses on optimizing the site to increase the site’s ranking in search engine results (SERPs) so that more customers will click on the results and visit the company’s site.

PPC focuses on buying ads to make a company’s link more visible in search enginers (especially when a company doesn’t have a very good organic rank). To learn more about SEO and PPC marketing, read 10 Practical Small Business SEO and SEM Marketing Tips.

Display Ads

You’ve probably seen tens of thousands of banner ads and have learned to ignore them. Your customers have also learned to ignore those ads. Studies show that people do not trust display ads. There’s a good reason for that: people have short attention spans and do not like to be interrupted.

Email Marketing

This type of marketing involves delivering content and promotional offers to customers through email. Effective email marketing requires good design and optimization. It also requires you to pay attention to how people consume email. For example, there are some very good guides on the best times and days to send emails for opens and click-throughs. But the data is not universally applicable to all businesses. Some businesses will find that sending email at times we wouldn’t normally consider – such as at night – is better.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing involves the creation of content designed to appeal to your prospective customers and building relationships with those customers (driven initially by great content) to keep them coming back for more. It also involves strategies for converting those potential customers into actual customers. Inbound marketing is multi-channel -  it’s designed to reach people wherever they want to interact with you and your business. Examples of inbound marketing include blogs, podcasts, ebooks, newsletters, whitepapers, and videos.

People’s dissatisfaction with advertising helps to explain why inbound marketing is gaining popularity. To learn a bit more about inbound marketing, read 10 Inbound Discoveries That Will Disrupt Marketing Forever.

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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 Moisés Ferreira (crowdSPRING username: moisesf ) today. Moisés lives and works in Brazil.

1. Please tell us about yourself.
Hello friends from all over the world.
It is a pleasure to share a little more about me.
I’m an artist, interior designer, graphic designer and musician.
I live in a very quiet town, but it was not always so.
I spent the longest time of my life in a big city called São Paulo, in terms of comparison, we can compare it with New York.
I had a busy life and did many things at once.
Working as a web designer, artist, designer events and still enjoying myself. One day I was visiting a small town in the state of Parana, called Ponta Grossa, where my parents had moved a little time. I was charmed by the city, the people and the climate.
I could walk through it with ease and come and go from one place to another very quickly. I worked twenty-five kilometers from the center of São Paulo and took about two hours to arrive. Now go through my town in ten minutes. I have considered that it could work online and earn a living in a more peaceful place, even earning less. Eleven years ago now that I’m here and do not intend to leave.
In the meantime the world of technology has changed a lot and I could relate to people around the world and with great speed, but because of my age, some ports work closed. When a relative of mine who lives in the USA showed me the possibility of working in the cloud, introducing me to crowdSPRING, I signed up immediately. I will not lie, at first it was very difficult. I thought it was going to bulldoze, but actually I have to relearn and change my concepts for introducing me to this world. Designing for the world is different from designing for a particular group. Today caught my initial drawings and see how much I learned. The work in the cloud opened a new world of possibilities and learning, where else could find it all? I found on crowdSPRING.

2. How did you become interested in design?
I am interested in drawing since my childhood. I had many problems with my teachers, because my books had pictures everywhere. Nevertheless I always had good grades, but my notebooks may not be used .. rssss
I got to do cartoon, paint pictures and draw booths for events, with booths for events has to earn well.
After this phase started for digital design, I had a shock initially. How can I turn my graphite drawings in digital design?
While this was not possible because there were no programs vector in my power, I dedicated myself to programming and web.
Only with the release of vector programs I resumed the dream of making digital drawings, which do today.
Not only do logos, I also do digital frames, two of them left the sample at this address: http://mfdigitalarte.blogspot.com.br/

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A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about building relationships with your customers that are based on trust, loyalty, transparency, integrity, and honesty. While writing the post, I had in mind a project we have been working on at crowdSPRING for well over a year now.

The team is really excited that in the next couple of weeks crowdSPRING will be introducing a new site-wide reputation system and a reputation ‘score’ for every user on the site. You will see this score on each user’s profile as well as in the hover-over window which opens above each username in a project gallery or on out Creative Browse page. We believe that having reputation scores for every user will allow Buyers to quickly identify the very best members of our community and will allow Creatives to better choose which Buyers they wish to work with – in other words, one of the goals of our reputation system is to allow users to differentiate themselves from the crowd.

A reputation system is, by its nature, simply a way to rank a website’s users; it provides instant and reliable feedback to community members and lets them know how they stack up against others in the community. The crowdSPRING system is not intended to spur competition, but rather is designed to encourage the very best work and the best behavior. We are implementing it to help our Creatives improve as working professionals, but also to influence Buyers to write better briefs and give higher quality feedback in their projects in order to attract the very best participants.

The cS reputation system is built on the reams of raw data that a site like ours generates. It takes into account hundreds of data points on every user on the site, with the primary objective of promoting and rewarding high quality creative work, but also to incentivize participation, encourage positive behavior, build loyalty, and nurture community within a diverse group of artists, designers, and writers from around the world.  The system is built on a complex formula that looks at everything from how long a user has been on the site, to the number of projects they participate in, to the scores they receive from Buyers on their entries to projects.  Read the rest of this post »