There’s a lot to be said for outsourcing some elements of your business operations. As Matthew Franceschini from Entity Solutions says one in five Aussie workers are independent contractors.
Jacinta Whelan says that contract workers have always been used for providing specialist expertise to project-based work. Today, though, more companies are seeing the benefits of outsourcing ongoing functions too. It’s an approach that can ensure your company doesn’t become too inwardly focused — something that is becoming more important with the increasing openness demanded by the Internet and social media.
Morris Miselowski says many companies are now taking outsourcing to the next stage, to what’s called crowdsourcing. Yvonne Adele runs a company that crowdsources ideas — if you have a problem, she has a team of people ready to help problem-solve.
Another example is Zooppa, a US website where companies can organise contests for amateur, or even professional, video makers to produce advertisements for their brands. Founder Will Merritt says entrants help each other build on ideas. The community that emerges helps strangthen your brand and build an affinity you can’t achieve through old fashioned one-way marketing.
It’s an approach that can apply to all lines of business — ignore it at your peril!
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Australia’s distant cloud
The National Broadband Network (NBN) will provide fat pipes into our homes, creating an appetite for more content, more quickly. Yet, 80 per cent of what we consume resides in the US. Won’t we hit capacity problems?
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Inequality – are we stuck with it?
Inequality is being driven by the growth of the rentier class says Steve Keen. But is technology making it worse?
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A recovery plan in need of a rescue
Even though EU leaders didn’t reach an agreement on their rescue plan, NAB’s Tapas Strickland says the argument is over the shape of it and the need it too much for it not to happen.
