A question came my way recently about outsourcing using Elance.com as a means of reducing costs for the client’s video-editing requirements in his business. Elance is an Internet company that makes it possible for people with computer skills anywhere in the world to connect with people who need work done. It’s like a people version of Ebay – you can see the results in the feedback on work done for other clients from each company offering to work for you.

Outsourcing isn’t a new concept. All businesses use contractors for work and the idea is to keep more profits. Everyone knows that American businesses have been outsourcing IT to India and China since the ’90s, to varying levels of success. We’ve all heard customer-support outsourcing debacles, but don’t let those stories keep you from outsourcing. A small business has a great chance of being successful with outsourcing. 

What’s not known is how widespread outsourcing has become for small businesses for projects of every conceivable type of work, from office administration, graphics, web development, creating content, copyediting, SEO, bookkeeping, to software development and media development (such as audio and video editing). Make a visit to Elance.com and do a search for anything you’re interested in, and it’s likely you’ll find a dozen companies willing to bid on your work, regardless of its size.

The point: Big business is not the only one on the path to leveraging the benefits of outsourcing. It’s equally beneficial, if not moreso, to small businesses, but you’ll likely have to learn many of the same lessons that large businesses learned over the last 10 years about cultural sensitivity. You may enjoy a movie called Outsourcing because it’s an interesting story with many cultural insights.

I worked with outsourcing teams at Motorola in the mid-’90s, including setting up teams in India and China and then interfacing with them in a way that we all understood each other well enough to accomplish various project goals. And I’ve worked with a team in the Ukraine and other places in Eastern Europe for smaller projects for my own business. I use Elance periodically for projects, and I’m currently taking bids on a project to write a requirements document for a multimedia-based iPhone application.

So back to the question about reducing costs in a business that needs video editing. I am familiar with this client’s business, and the nature of his video projects is pretty much the same from project to project.  It’s likely he can outsource some of his editing tasks; however, he will need to learn how to bid on projects with people remote from Austin, Texas, and, more importantly, learn how to collaborate with people whose native language is likely not English.

It’s all about the relationship, and as we all know, relationships take time to build and they don’t always go as planned. The difference in working with contractors on Elance is it takes a lot more time to grasp the nuances of the relationship, especially if you’re using only email (therefore, I’m always suggesting Skype). Sometimes this is not an issue for short-term, simple projects that take only a few hours, but for longer-term, on-going work you’ll need to be aware of the relationship-development time factor.

Consider your initial projects as a kind of testing period. Look for smaller chunks of a project that you can portion out and see what it’s like to work with people overseas.  This will help you see the time required to develop a relationship through the email that you send back and forth. For example, on my iPhone applications I’m seeking bits on just the requirements development piece. I’m willing to risk $100-$200 for a firm that says they specialize in this area to see how it goes in creating the specification for the application. Typically the hourly rate will range from $10-$20 or more from companies in India or Eastern Europe. This is low enough for me to potentially have two companies collaborating to put a requirements document together so I’m sure I’m getting a range of ideas about what’s possible.

Sometimes I recommend using Skype for both chat and audio/video calls to help you get a better feel for the person on the other end. For video editing I think it’s going to be imperative to have text, audio and video chat capabilities with the person(s) you’re developing a relationship with. One simple trick to check on the status and ‘feel’ of a project early on is have the editor point their webcam at the screen to show you some incremental results. This will help you feel more connected and keep the feedback loop tighter.

You might not do this for a simple 1- to 2-hour project. For that, email is fine. But if you’re doing something like video editing you want to get to know the contractor so the end result is more what you’re looking for. If you think about it, it’s the same thing you’d do if you hired a local editor. You’d meet him or her for coffee and just talk some. So you’re going to need to do something like this in a more abbreviated form with Skype calls or Skype video to develop rapport.

In summary:

• Take a project and break it into steps and find pieces you feel comfortable outsourcing
• Get familiar with the process of bidding on eLance with something you’re not in a time crunch on
• Remember, you’re working with someone whose first language is not English, and even if they are taught English (as are people in India) their culture and work behaviors will be different from yours

Outsourced projects often take 2-3 times longer to complete. This isn’t always the case but quite often you’ll feel a sense of frustration when dealing with people in companies overseas. Very often those companies are 1- to 3-person businesses – just like yours. Remember, you live in a different time zone and culture. You’re hopefully going to get quality work at a lower price, so be patient if they take longer than expected to get back with you and complete the job. Focus on the relationship and communicating clearly and even-handedly.

Be willing to fail. In some cases you might start a project with a company and, despite your best efforts, you don’t get the results you want. Be willing to let that go and work with another. I’ll say it again: It takes time, and you know how relationship-building can go.

A word of caution: If you notice that you’re not having good luck with local contractors you might take a close like at what’s going on on your end before you try outsourcing. I say this because people are people and even though they are located in a different country they can sense when they are working with someone who is difficult in some way. You could end up with the same experiences in outsourcing as you have with contractors locally.

This may seem like a lot to keep in mind. Sorta like the first time you go on a date and you’re gettting all kinds of advice from others about how to proceed. That’s my point, though. You’re building a relationship with someone to perform important work for you. Make it clear that you believe ‘they’ are important and be patient (very patient) as you communicate in various forms.

Tom

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“Twenty years from now we’ll look back and say, ‘Gee, telephone numbers were a goofy thing,’” predicts Internetologist Len Hause

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In this Talking Portraits interview, Hause predicts that phone numbers will no longer be needed. After giving a summary of the evolution of telephone numbers—from simple 4-digit numbers accessed through a local exchange to today’s numbers that designate locality, region, state, and nation of origin—Hause describes how content and context (the mode of transmission) are becoming more and more orthogonal (independent of one another).

Given the number of choices we have now, including Internet voice applications that use only name-based addressing, Hause describes how and why the telephone number as we know it will give way to a futuristic persona-based system that allows us to contact one another using a names.

Bio

Len Hause is an Internetologist and founder of MashBrain where he consults on Internet marketing and technology strategies. He was a Fellow of the Technical Staff, Associate of the Science Advisory Board, and Marketing Director at Motorola where he spent more than 30 years in management roles and as an individual contributor. He has been recognized as a pioneer in the adoption of Internet protocols and culture within the Enterprise for collaboration and organizational learning. While working in the semiconductor business, he learned firsthand about the importance of the convergence of the Internet and cell phone technology.

Hause frequently participates on executive, educational, corporate, and government advisory boards and consortia. He is also an active member of Austin’s musical community. He holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Lehigh University. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently updated my client presentation on the topic How to Do an Opportunity Assesment to Leverage Social Media at a Business. Special thanks to Susan McElhenney and John Rasco at Refreshweb for fine-tuning this.

After reading a Mashable blog post today – Data: What Are the Benefits of Social Media Marketing? — I started wondering how I can continue to refine my conversations with clients about social marketing strategies. Why? Because, according to this survey of marketing folks, Customer Engagement was at the top of the responses: 85%. So what does this mean, really? It the kind of statement that rolls off the tongue easily and sounds comforting to hear. But I think there is a lot of silent genuflecting going on about the fear of cost, fear of staffing, fear of organizational changes and so forth.

Social Engagement, another way of saying Customer Engagement, is a vague topic to discuss. Without some clear direction and leadership in the conversation, the client is often confused to the point of losing their motivation (or self-confidence) to pursue funding and defining requirements, out of fear of making a career-limiting move to support a long-term project on the web. So what happens is during a presentation you get peppered with questions that become sharper and more direct about ‘how’ are they going to measure the results of social marketing strategy.

It’s helpful to step back and think about your sales projects before heading into that first ‘group’ presentation so your time and the clients’ are well spent. It’s hard to get back to a client if your presentation runs out of gas. You can avoid this with some preplanning and thoughtful pre-sales collaboration efforts.

Let’s Talk Big-Picture First
This is a critical part of the presentation, and truthfully the pre-visit telephone calls with the client are essential to assess if they are of the right mindset to actually pursue a social marketing strategy at their business. What you want to suss out is who is the champion (or thought leader in the group) and who is responsible for the budget. These are all the usual things you do in sales, of course. But the important piece is to really get alongside them and talk about, encourage, document and direct their expectations on what can be achived over a 6- to 12-month period.

• Welcome online interaction and conversations, listen for opportunities to help
• Brand monitoring (this is now more possible with so many vendors bringing brand monitoring tools to the market. This all sounds good but it’s important to have some screen grabs of search engine results, and blog conversations where products are being discussed for the client to actually ’see’ what it means to monitor the brand on the Internet.
• Company becomes more visible. Stop fires before they start
• Monitor trends
• Emerging and hot issues
• Sentiment about products
• Conversation-starting topics
• Audience style and preferences
• Adjustments to the corporate culture to engage more with your community. This isn’t obvious at first so it’s important to bring this up repeatedly from different perspectives. Ultimately most businesses, if they are successful with social marketing, find that they have to organize themselves different to really utilize the results of their engagement with web traffic.

Here’s What We Do after the Assessment

• Continue to seed your online community thoughtfully with your educational content via blogs, Twitter, forum participation, email lists
• Monitor trends and look for insights
• Create a plan to capture and review what’s being learned from the community (and related social media channels)
• Metrics – monitoring and measuring your program
• Survey - and ask the community as it grows - what does it want? Lead and partner with the community

How We Begin

• Set goals
• Listen, and gather information
• Recommendations and strategy-setting (follow-on meetings)
• Research/discover where your prospects are online and their personas (be where they expect you to be and understand their personality motivations)
• Develop a strategy for engagement at locations where prospects exist, on your site and other websites
• Create a workflow for content creation and reuse in traditional and social marketing activities that align with your traditional marketing campaigns

One of my challenges in communicating with clients is explaining how different the workforce is today and how different the web traffic is now versus a few short years ago. The expectation or mindset that a person brings with them when they visit your website depends on their age, to a large degree.

Have you ever asked a teenager or, for that matter, someone in their 20s or early 30s the following question: What do you think about the Internet? Or, how important is the Internet to you? Something like that. When I do that with my teenager, her friends and my grown kids they give me blank stares. That’s because they grew up on the internet. They live on it, and asking that question is akin to asking a fish, What do you think of the water? It’s just part of how they live. In fact, they couldn’t easily live without it. It’s their tool for conversation moreso than the phone or email. We have an answering machine at the house and I cannot get the kids to actually listen to the messages. For the younger generation, Internet-connected mobile phones with texting are their form of connectivity.

I’m generalizing here, of course, but if you ask those same questions of folks in their 40s and 50s on up, you often find grimaces and scoffing about how much trouble it is or how much time it takes to mess with the Internet. It’s just not central to them. It’s more like getting wet and having to dry off every time they use the Internet, whereas the kids just take to it like, well, fish to water.

This is important because the younger generation has a different expectation when coming to your website. They want instant results. They respond well to Live Chat on a website. If they happen to send an email for help or a question about a product, they expect an answer in a few hours, not a day or two. I recently met with a client where we talked about how traffic to their site will be increasing as they add blogging and more forums and so forth. I said that this increase will come with an expectation from clients that if you’re that involved/engaged on the Internet, then they will assume someone will answer questions quickly. So I said, “Tell me how long it takes for someone to answer emails now.” (Note: This was a B2B company.) Everyone at the table looked at me blankly. Nobody knew.

Do you know the average amount of time it takes to respond to email in your business? What are you learning from your clients via those emails?

This is all part of the elements and channels for conversation. Let’s make 2009 the year we think about this as an opportunity, instead of ‘one more darn thing to do.’ It could impact your sales.

Tom