10 Secrets to Crowdsourcing Your Website & Logo Design

I recently used the 99 Designs site to crowdsource the website design and logo for my new company, Extreme Collaboration.  Extreme Collaboration is itself a crowdsource play – inviting salespeople and marketing to help growing companies for a share of the profits they create, and in some cases, jobs

Promising a $1,000 prize for the best website home page and inner page templates, and $350 for the best logo, yielded 82 entries for website design and 225 logo ideas, both including variations on themes. Compare this to the ‘old’ Internet bubble days, where a few thousand dollars to one designer or agency would get you three website variations to choose from.

Here are ways to make your graphic design crowdsource contest as effective as possible:

1. Be a cheerleader. There’s a critical mass with design contests – the more people submitting designs, the more others decide they need to participate too.  After a few days, we only had a handful of designs provided, definitely not our vision… So it’s essential to get to a critical mass of 20-30 designs, which you encourage by providing same-day feedback to the first designers individually and in the group discussion area.  Also, post your contest to friends on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.  Work to achieve 10 entries, even including variations from the first few designers. On 99 Designs, this enables you to guarantee the prize will be paid out to someone (otherwise you can say ‘no thanks’ to all submitters). The guarantee doubled my number of entries by the next day and started an upward level of activity.
2. Be a coach. Once a designer is in the project, they will take your direction very seriously as it increases the odds of a winning payout to them.  So keep the direction fairly open at the outset to allow for creativity, but once you’ve decided which types of designs will work, don’t hesitate to restrict new input in this direction. After the first week, we laid out every desig across a table and applied requirements such as layout of elements you could see without scrolling and colors we liked, then told every designer to follow the same direction in week two. This took some getting used to for the designers who wanted latitude, but it gives you many more options that fit your needs.
3. Stay brief. Our original web specification was 5 pages long, explaining our business, customers, culture and website constraints to give more precise direction to designers. One designer said it was the most thorough spec he’d seen, but it turns out most designers won’t join the contest if the spec is longer than 2-3 pages. In the end, we slimmed the spec down to the essentials for proposing our designs, and relied on iterative feedback to take it further.
4. Cultivate the real experts. Hidden among the many design contributors who are treating their submission as a quick-effort, one-time bet on whether they can make money, are a handful of designers who care about your success and their craft.  These are people you want to make friends with, reaching them through private contest messages or Skype.  They’ll answer design implementation questions like which video player to use and which menu schemes are easier to render, point out if they’ve seen other design submissions somewhere on the Web already.  Realize that you win not when you pick a design, but when it’s successfully implemented, so prefer the designs of these artisans. You should stay in touch with them after the contest, as they can give you input (or services) over the course of your business.
5. Get outside feedback. In a dozen years in marketing, I’ve seen time and again that what you as business exec think is a good design will vary tremendously from what your colleagues and customers think.  When we had 60 logo designs, we polled 25 friends-of-the-firm to ask what handful of designs they liked best. No single design received more than 3 votes! Some folks wanted flashy graphics, other were more concrete in getting ‘meaning’ of the company’s services into the design, some wanted muted colors, other more eye-catching.  My business partner and I picked the 4 designs we liked best, then put it out to vote again (the two of us had different opinions on the best), and finally picked a winner that worked for us and that the majority of input providers also voted for.
6. Be human. The ‘crowd’ of designers is judging you, too and will criticize your process if not run well – not great for the karma of your contest.  In situations where your feedback is less than prompt (let’s see, because you have other priorities running your business?) or your direction changes, apologies are in order. And clarifications both to the group and leading design individuals should follow.

In the end, crowdsourcing designs is a great, cost-effective way to receive a lot of variations that you, or a single designer, never would have considered. The process requires time and nurturing to get off the ground and see through to a quality result.  At it’s best, however, it holds the seeds of a community of creative supporters that can help you even after the contest is over.

Here’s our winning website design by Mads Ejsing of Denmark.

Practical Tools for Law Firms to Expand their Clientele and Mindshare

I’ve been asked recently to present to law firms on practical ways to improve their online presence, and combine this with traditional relationship building methods.   The result is this presentation, which describes specifically how to polish a LinkedIn individual or company profile, obtain speaking opportunities and be quoted in articles with minimal effort, and use surveys and low-key events that allow industry executives (who are your potential clients) to mingle.

The steps require between 1/2 hour and 2 hours a week for your partners who emphasize business development. The range depends on whether you want to be simply “credible” in your online presence, or “facilitative” in blending networking and outreach with online activities, as shown on my slide about the efforts & results continuum from “Simply Present” to “Online Leader.”

For those attorneys and practices that still are challenged to find time to build their presence and relationships, consulting services like my Vital Access make it easy and cost-effective to draft content and research speaking/article/outreach partners, while leaving the final sign-off and interpersonal communications to you.

The slides can be viewed here (the fonts in the original ppt are better aligned):

Getting a Message Across with Your Own, Quick Comics

I came across a fun, effective and underused site for marketing purposes. Bitstrips let’s you create the type of paneled comic strips that appear in newspapers or the New Yorker.

I created characters for myself and my wife in a minute each, then put us in a quick piece for a presentation I’m giving on the value of relationships in marketing and sales. There are options to insert famous characters like Barack, create an ongoing branded strip — your very own Dilbert, or put your creations on t-shirts.

In a world with too much clutter and not enough joy, a comic strip could be just the thing to share your ideas with the world.  My first creation is here and below.

How Lawyers Can Grow Billings Using Online Networks and Internet Marketing

I’ve been engaged lately in several projects for attorneys and law firms, with the objective of expanding their business clientele through an online presence. Consider it “LinkedIn and Beyond for Lawyers.” An online presence — in social networks, blogs, webinars — has become more acceptable, even expected, for attorneys in the last few years.

• LinkedIn, the largest networking site for professionals across industries, has over 750,000 lawyers and legal services providers with profiles.
• The American Bar Association site lists over 5,000 ‘blawgs by lawyers.
• Specialized communities are sprouting. LegalOnRamp is an online network exclusively for corporate general counsel to interact with each other and law firms; featuring more-than-cursory articles, a wiki to freely publish documents, survey results and industry data; and an active Ask the Expert section.

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Where’s the benefit? The most common question for those starting to focus online is: “What do I get out of it? I created a LinkedIn profile but haven’t gotten any inquiries.” Of course, your results vary with effort. Consider a few common objectives:

• You want to maintain contact with affiliates and other lawyers that will refer business to you. In this case, a profile for each professional, inserting the bios from your web site, is a good start on LinkedIn. Once these are published, you can request connections to your colleagues already on LinkedIn. Xing is a comparable social network emphasizing Europe and Asia and Plaxo is another recommended service with 40m subscribers, in which you receive updates about colleagues’ change of contact information. You can also publish quick thoughts or new to all your colleagues on these sites, which will complement regular emails and holiday cards. This assumes you have a solid electronic contact database. For this, Microsoft Outlook is a good start, with Microsoft Business Contact Manager or Avidian’s Prophet to enable contact sharing in a midsize firm, or Salesforce for a larger, multi-office practice (see this LinkedIn Question & Answer Chat about the best contact manager for a small to mid-sized firm). Creating your LinkedIn presence can take less than an hour in this minimal approach, with cleaning up your contact database being the major task. However, the result is that people who know and appreciate you will find you more easily, not that new prospects will seek your counsel.
• You want prospective clients that are evaluating your practice to find a solid web presence. Here, you’ll want to polish your professionals’ LinkedIn profiles to include a bio written in an approachable first person. Change the standard “Ms. Doe is a patent lawyer representing firms of all sizes…” to include specialties (“I have worked extensively with both manufacturing and non-manufacturing technology entities, such as universities and the NIH“) and benefits (“I… help clients execute on strategies to leverage the value of their IP“). Then, add at least 20 links/connections to clients and colleagues; a photo and a vanity LinkedIn URL with your name, and have several clients publish short testimonials for your work (which you can propose in draft form and have them revise). This may take a few hours but puts you into the realm of credible online presence, beyond your web site.
• You want prospects you’ve met to keep you in mind. For this case, minimally consider a quarterly e-newsletter with updates on law in their industry, and your publicly-known cases. One effective approach is to orient your content by industry of your client, rather than by legal domain — which few lawyers seem to do. A pharmaceutical client, a telecommunications company and an e-commerce startup use different language to refer to their intellectual property needs — one speaks of protecting an new product pipeline, another defending its technology and the third seeing a competitor copy their online brand. For them, it’s insufficient to state on LinkedIn that “I serve all industries” and leave it at that, or to write about patent /trademark activity across multiple industries. Free or for-fee webinars, or local lunches work well, as does joint presentations with complimentary service providers, such as a local private equity fund or networking association.
• You want to solicit new business interest through your online presence. This is where substantial time is needed, because so many lawyers are attempting the same thing. Only a few per domain of expertise can break through the clutter, so you’ll want to strive for the frequency and depth of content that only one or two other firms can match when you search Google. You can accomplish this by writing white papers that help clients, or being the most frequent and insightful blog on a particular topic such as food and drug law, as well as a public speaker. Also, consider creative and even bold offers, such as Clock Tower Law’s offer of a free trademark registration for a startup. And combine online initiatives with local business development, such soliciting speaking engagements. One of my clients and I are working with a cost-effective outsourced service to find and monitor industry events for speaking opportunities, and having an executive assistant at the law firm propose the practice leader as a speaker.

Finally, be aware of how others are writing about you on the web. ZoomInfo compiles career biographies of anyone who has had a professional profile published on the web. Two lawyers I tracked shared first and last names (their middle name differed), but very different track records and some information had been confused between them by the automated system. You can fix this by claiming ownership about your data and correcting it. A site such as Vault.com lets prospective employees write about their experience with your firm. One firm I was tracking had a strong presence on Google, ranking 5th when I searched for “NY intellectual property law firm.”  Yet on Vault, the first comment to appear was from a paralegal job candidate who wrote “If you [even] speak English, they will hire you,”  and another candidate said “the place is in shambles.” Not an attractive situation!

In sum, it takes little effort to get online and stay in touch with those who appreciate your reputation. Actually building your reputation online takes more time, but there are intermediate steps that allow you and your firm to match your business development goals with time availability.

For more thoughts, see the powerpoint I’ve posted below about how law firms can grow their revenues with Web 2.0 technologies. This is an update of a presentation I made a little while ago to the New York County Lawyers Association.

How Lawyers Can Grow Billings Using Online Networks and Internet Marketing

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