5 great crowdsourcing solutions to let Web 2.0 work for your business

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The Web 2.0 technology brings together people from around the world to do more than just socialize. Crowdsourcing is a way to put them to work and innovative companies are creating great ways digital professionals can harness the power of diverse talent and resources. Here are 5 ideas to get you started.

Naming - namethis: namethis makes the otherwise time-consuming process of finding a market-ready name quick and painless. Why spend time and money gambling on the ideas of a few, when you can have the market bounce ideas off of you.

1. Someone posts a product or service in need of a name

2. namethis members suggesting names and/or invest points in their favorites

3. After 48 hours of namestorming, the system applies business intelligence to select the winners

$80 out of each $99 naming fee is distributed to the members who create/influence the top three…

1st Place: $40 to Namer, $10 Shared Amongst Influencers
2nd Place: $16 to Namer, $4 Shared Amongst Influencers
3rd Place: $8 to Namer, $2 Shared Amongst Influencers

Design and Professional Services - eLance: With a large network of rated and certified business professionals, Elance facilitates the entire work process from hiring to collaboration to payment. You can search over 40,000 profiles for services including logo design, user interface, writing, translation, finance. Recently recommended in the book “The Four hour Workweek” by lifestyle design guru Timothy Ferris its a great way to find talent. What’s also great is that you can see how many projects they’ve done, read customer feedback and view and compare rates so you get a good picture of the candidates competency.

Programming - oDesk: Much like eLance, oDesk is more technically focused and geared towards finding programmers, creating teams and running a virtual development team or project online. It includes all the tools for collaberation and online project management. You can fund your account and the developers can see the funds which are issued to them as you approve the work. Much of the tech talent from around the world offer very competitive rates from $7 to $40+ per hour. If you want to use this approach its a good idea to test a candidate with some smaller jobs, just like non-virtual programmers some folks can be easier to work with than others.

Software Testing - uTest: Let’s face it; marketers, agencies and most of the folks building websites and online apps aren’t always well set up for it. Just about every digital media pro I’ve worked with admits the QA (Quality Assurance) testing is where we fall short. Quite often its the client and managers testing. Most teams don’t have dedicated QA professionals or the various environments, tools and resources to test properly. uTest is a global marketplace for software application testing providing QA professionals from around the world. This service has all the tools you need to write test plans, select testers, individual or aggregate according to environment, experience and or expertise. You can manage QA cycles, projects and processes. uTest lets testers from around the world sign-up and get paid to find bugs. uTest does a great job detecting duplicate bugs - you only pay for actual bugs.

Word of Mouth Marketing - BzzAgent’s Frogpond: BzzAgent’s Frogpond allows marketers to activate word of mouth (WOM) marketing. Through its network of volunteers or BzzAgents (over 365,000 North American members) and a sophisticated platform they can drive significant traffic, personal recommendations and insights through consumer feedback.

These are just a few ways to leverage crowdsourcing. What do you think about this trend; pros and cons? Other great crowdsourcing services?