To reassure you, my comments about NASA were tongue in cheek, for entertainment purposes, it wasn’t a serious dig at NASA. Actually, I’m a fan of the space program.

Regards

Andrew

qoute:”Since 1983, NASA’s work in materials science has led to the creation of the “Jaws of Life.” This lightweight cutter is used to free accident victims. NASA’s innovations also have resulted in more effective protective helmets used by the NFL and the construction industry, tennis rackets, golf clubs, and roofing materials. Dental braces, rechargeable batteries, cardiac-monitoring equipment, global communication systems, wireless telephones, satellite television, and even computer bar codes were all made possible by NASA’s innovation.” end quote

My husband has worked for NASA for 26 years and is surprised by how many folks don’t realize the innovations we enjoy today due to space inventions.
Rusty

You can click on the ‘past episodes’ button at the top of the page, then select #77.

Regards

Andrew

I liken your situation to the local butcher who discovers that the first WalMart is coming to town. Some give up. Some find creative ways to INCREASE their business. Seriously.

I respectfully disagree with your comments and I think you’re too close to the situation. Here’s why…

There are countless things in life which are inherently good, that are abused.

Services like 99Designs are sometimes abused by SOME designers, but that alone shouldn’t discount them from being used in my opinion. I have posted many projects successfully without any issue. In fact I’ve never been less than thrilled with the result. The projects were so specific in nature that I can’t see any possible way that they could have been plagiarized. I believe that’s the key – providing VERY detailed information about what you want and expect. Many contest descriptions are too general, and that allows room for abuse. My descriptions are very specific, including font types, colors, text to include in the design, orientation, style, influences, things to exclude etc etc.

Every time I’ve used services like 99Designs or Hatchwise, I’ve had more than 100 designs to choose from! That wide range of creative input resulted in me being completely delighted with the final logo designs. Every time.

While there are occasions that I would employ the services of a single professional graphic designer, services like 99Designs often serve the interests of the customer in a way that no individual graphic designer can possibly replicate.

Look, to be frank, there is no one holding a gun to any designers head to submit designs to a contest. In most cases, the designers are located in foreign countries where the dollar amounts of the contest represent the equivalent of a months salary or more. To them, it’s worth submitting designs to multiple contests because they only need to win one each month to make it worthwhile. Again, no one forces any designer to participate, they do it freely and willingly.

Your distaste for crowdsourcing is understandable and I sympathise with the fact that you have got to take action to overcome this “problem”, but I encourage you to look at ways to add value to what you do so that you appeal to the right audience who would like to use your service. You say that your business is suffering. Sorry to hear that, but you can either whine about the competition, or you can do something about it. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I’m trying to put things into perspective here, for your benefit.

Crowdsourcing for design isn’t going away, which means you can either bury your head in the sand, or confront it head on.

Recognize that there are 2 types of people out there. On the one hand there are computer literate individuals who love sites like 99Designs. On the other hand there are plenty of people who have no idea that 99Designs even exists, and besides they simply want to employ someone who they can talk to on the phone, sit in a room together, brainstorm etc etc.

My final advice for you: CHANGE your marketing to attract more of the latter type of clients! You CAN succeed. Stop believing that crowdsourcing is evil and focus your energies on building your business with creative marketing, great customer service, and all the other elements that you’ve heard me talk about on the show.

Again, sorry if that sounded harsh, my intention is to help you see the bigger picture here.

Regards

Andrew

Dan and Deanna “Marketing Unscrambled”

Pay Attention if you are going to use it.

USE THE FEEDBACK FUNCTION. As artists submit their designs, the person posting the job can give feedback on the designs in a star system. USE IT. (Many, most don’t…big mistake. I’ll explain…)

As people post their work, let them know what YOU think – be specific(“I like the color you used”, “this logo in the upper right does nogt work because…”, “can you move the opt-in box to…”).

This works because it helps the artist do what you want – keep in mind, you’ve paid nothing to the winner yet.

BUT HERE’S THE THING: OTHER artists who use the service know to look for your feedback – the smart artists, *wait* until the job poster has given feedback *before* doing work so they can use your job posting brief outline, THEN look at your feedback w/ what works and does not work and THEN they begin their work because now the have a more practical way to submit their design.

They can *see* what you like or don’t like.

Make sense? This something so many who post there neglect. Don’t do it. Be engaged in your job posting and check a few times a day as the work that is being posted.

Also, unless your under a deadline, give at least 5 days for folks to submit.

Not sure how HatchWise works, but going to check it out – Awesome, Andrew!!

take care

Also, in regards to Dave Hasletts comments about plagarism: because crowdsourced projects are open to the public you always have unscrupulous people who try to make money without actually doing any work. The upside to that is that with crowdsourced projects those get discovered and deleted very quickly, simply because designers know design, and they know when someone else is cheating. We are also about to debut a feature that lets designers vote on reported designs and automatically bans repeat offenders, so the whole system should balance itself out quickly.

What happens if balloon blows up? Answer is simple, It comes down on someones head. And also you need special permission to make those type of objects to fly.

But lesson from balloon story is you don’t need lot of funds for your business to “get more done, and have more fun”

Some companies are marketing some very high tech looking hearing aids that are either almost impossible to see, or that come in flashy designs, like neon colors or animal prints.

Ironically the latest high tech hearing aids can be wirelessly hooked up to an iPod

I have a tip for the artist: she has to really nail down what she’d like to accomplish. If she’s ok with selling a painting here and there, then simply putting up a site with pictures of her work is probably fine. But it’ll be hit and miss and she won’t get rich of it, unless she can make a name for herself with interior designers or galleries.

Another way to go may be to use existing art, or create new art specifically for decorative purposes (like prints) and greeting and notecards cards for example and create an online store for these items. Lower priced items like this could be marketed locally to start (notecards for fundraisers for example) and online for longterm. Again, working with interior designers can be a great way to drum up business.

For an artist, doing something ‘decorative’ may seem like selling out. But if she can combine her talent with solid business ideas, she can get over that hurdle

I’ve signed up for the marketing minds thing anyway – after all it’s free apart from taking the time to listen to it all. The video was massive overkill though. A 1-minute overview, such as you do with your sponsor sites, would have been so much better.

I’ve just had a look at Hatchwise and while it’s a good idea, if you look at some of the logos that have been designed and read the comments posted underneath, it seems that a few unscrupulous designers are stealing each others work, or taking existing logos from other sites, with little or no modification. You could find yourself in all sorts of trouble if you used one of these designs for your own business. Sure, you might get a good (and unique) design at a bargain price, but you have to be extremely careful and check that it’s a genuine new design before using it yourself. I don’t think I’ll use this site myself.

You featured a lady that wanted to know if selling oil paintings off the web would work. We built a website for an artist some time ago and he has sole his creations from the website in places he never thought he could reach. Sale to Denmark, UK and South America as well as USA.

His website is http://www.abstractacrylicart.co.uk

She may want to contact John Hewitt and have a chat with him,

Regards

David

Thanks for the enthusiasm, the easy-to-see joy in what you’re doing. You are a really great role model for the “engaged entrepreneur!”

Thank you for the inadvertent lesson in marketing. I applaud you for trying new things. (BTW, I thought the program mentioned in the missing episode was outstanding…an unbelievable collection of marketing minds in one place.) I also applaud you for being quick to recognize the mistake in formatting of the show and addressing it quickly. So many of us get stuck on what “we think is right” and forget the customer. You’ve shown that your ultimate concern is your customer. IMHO…if you lose any customers over the faux paux, they weren’t very serious about marketing anyway. Ultimately, it is the marketing lessons that you expose us to… no matter the method. Keep up the good work!

The only downfall is Andrew has to be more careful when selecting his criticism of products or services. It is a one time mistake or a constant mistake. We all make mistakes.

There’s a bug that’s causing new episodes not to show up, please bear with us, there are plenty more shows on the way.

btw, what are your favorite shows on GotBiz?

Andrew