Since the 1980s, the term ‘outsourcing’ has become fixed in business jargon.  Outsourcing refers to the transference of duties or management to a third party, usually outside of the parent company’s country.  This is sometimes used synonymously with “off-shoring,” wherein a company opens another office in a foreign country to take advantage of a cheaper labor force or better tax situation.

I’m sure I’m not the only consumer who has routinely been at the end of a baffling and/or sometimes annoying phone call with companies who outsource.  I’m not saying that outsourcing is bad, but I think sometimes companies ignore the problems with outsourcing over the obvious advantages.

Advantages to Outsourcing

1. Your support desk or QA team can work around the clock.  You can have people working a typical 9-to-5 in your home country, and with an outsourced team in Asia, for example, they will start work at the end of your day and end at the beginning.  Thus, work continues twenty-four hours a day.
2. Outsourcing dramatically reduces cost.  Skilled labor in most countries where outsourcing occurs is a fraction of the cost of someone you might hire for your home office.  I recently spoke with a colleague whose job is being outsourced upon her departure from the company, and she said that the new person would be getting approximately USD 450 a month – a good salary in India – compared with her $50-60K per year.
3. Outsourcing can allow you to focus on the more time-sensitive responsibilities.  One of the main uses for outsourcing is using a lower-cost labor force to perform the day-to-day, repetitive duties that previously had taken your eye off of the more important tasks at hand.  This is why using outsourcing for customer support is so popular.

Disadvantages to Outsourcing

1. The language barrier can prove to be a huge obstacle.  I’m not saying that many of these outsourced folks aren’t fluent in English, because they are, but some outsourcing communities play down the other factors that are involved: strong accents and a lack of knowledge of American colloquialisms.  I recently placed a support call to a very popular CRM and had to repeat my problem three times.  The gentleman on the other end was very nice, but just couldn’t seem to ‘get’ what I was trying to say.  Or perhaps he did, but I couldn’t understand him when he spoke back to me.  Either way, this is not a good thing, and it’s happening more and more often.
2. Outsourcing means a loss of control.  You will have managers at your outsourced location, who will do their best to follow and enforce the rules included within the outsourcing contract, but be aware that you run the risk of losing the proper management techniques that you have employed at your headquarters.  Because of this, productivity and quality of service can suffer.
3. Communication becomes less cohesive.  The time difference means that duties may often take longer to do than if you had a full-time, in-house employee.  If the tasks being outsourced are HR- or website-related, you may find that it takes an extra day or more to get a simple task completed.  Similarly, if you have an urgent matter to attend to, calling the outsourced company in the middle of the day your time will get you nowhere, as it will be the middle of the night there.  There is also the matter of quality control, as it is much harder to explain a design concept, for example, in person than it is over the phone or via WebEx.

On a final note, one must also consider the social ramifications of offshore outsourcing.  In the 1980s, outsourcing was limited, for the most part, to manufacturing; that’s where the campaigns against cheap labor came in, especially in the case of children being used as workers.  Now, though, outsourcing has taken more of a high-tech route.  On the one hand, outsourcing creates jobs and opportunities in areas that otherwise might not have seen the economic growth that it has.  On the other, this does mean that well-educated, skilled American workers are finding it harder and harder to gain employment because so many technology jobs are being shipped overseas.  The Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit and (self-proclaimed) non-partisan organization, recently said that 18 percent of all jobs in California are susceptible to outsourcing.

One must also consider the current state of the world.  Before outsourcing to a specific country, do your research.  Ensure that the political climate is conducive to a safe, productive workplace.  The last thing you want is for communication to be completely cut off between your headquarters and your outsourced entity due to, say, a terrorist attack on the external country’s capital.  Don’t presume to think that this is a long shot; one major location for outsourcing is Pakistan, which has seen a steady increase in violence over the last year.

Is outsourcing right for you?  I can’t answer that.  I only ask that companies take a look at the big picture, instead of focusing solely on the allure of a cheaper workforce.

The inspiration for this piece came from Ian Lurie’s amusing article, 38 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started In Marketing.  He’s a guy with over a decade of experience in marketing; I’m just finishing up my first post-college job.  Clearly, he has some lessons that I have yet to learn, so it’s well worth a read for those of you in the business of marketing.

I entered university convinced that I would one day become ambassador to a swanky European country.  I left university with a Master’s degree in international relations and the realization that testing the waters of the private sector was really more my thing.

In 2006 I moved up to New Jersey from the DC-area and got a call about an executive assistant position that needed to be filled at an enterprise software company.  Within a month of holding that position, I had wedged myself into the fledgling marketing team.  Two years on, I am preparing to leave this position for a new opportunity, and I will take with me everything I learned in this tumultuous start-up environment.

1. Everybody has a different definition of marketing.  Some say it’s the promotion of a company’s goods or services; others maintain that it includes the “processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers.”  But fixating on the definition of marketing doesn’t mean you’re actually doing anything.

2. Marketing jargon, while thrown back and forth between marketeers with undeniable enthusiasm, is misused and misunderstood more often than not.  For those of you who have no idea what I mean by “marketing jargon,” Michael Bloch at TamingTheBeast.net provides an example:

“Through an inverted dynamic and proactive CRM process,  we are a best of breed online company – a goal-directed, innovative digital firm which fast tracks cyber stickiness through turnkey solutions that guarantee targeted eyeballs using multiple streaming channels and viral e-services, providing the best ROI on your media spend.”

3. Using two monitors instead of one is the best decision I ever made, especially where collecting data and doing graphic design are concerned.

4. Work for a start-up, and not only will you get to wear jeans every day and blast music in the office, but you’ll also get to go for beers on occasion with the C-level executive team.  Where else would you get that opportunity?

5. If you can’t sell a ‘new media’ idea to your old-school boss, continue to slip it into conversation wherever possible.  Eventually, it will stick.  Or, it will become so ingrained in their minds that they’ll shout it out at an executive meeting and get the credit for it.  Either way, your idea will be put into place.

6. Don’t be the sole administrator for a CRM system for longer than six months.  If you are, be aware that training a new person to take over, who has never used the system before, is a bit of an overwhelming affair, especially if you only have your obligatory two weeks to do it.

7. Metrics are great, unless the team can’t agree on them.

8. Success in marketing isn’t black and white; everything you do ends up looking a funny shade of gray.  If you want black and white, join finance.

9. If you must, use the first month or so on the job to be a listener in meetings.  After that, you have no excuse.  Speak up.  No matter your level, your opinion does matter.

10. People laugh at off-site, team-building exercises, but they work.  Especially when you get to be completely honest and blunt about your team members, and they get to do the same to you.  Think of it as a character-building experience.  Constructive criticism is the way to build loyalty and trust.

11. Knee-jerk reactions generally don’t end well.  For your newly-implemented marketing processes to succeed, you really need to give them at least a few months to mature.  One week doesn’t give you a clear view of anything, especially in online marketing.

12. If you don’t support the product you’re supposed to be marketing, you shouldn’t be marketing it.

13. You’re going to make mistakes, but you learn from them.  And it’s nice if you have a boss who realizes this point and who believes in giving second chances.

What other advice would you give entry-level marketing folks?

• 38 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started in Marketing
• 10 Marketing Lessons I Learned from 10,000+ Message Forum Posts
• Internet Marketing Makes the Grade

The CEO of my company once said to me, “A good website is worth ten sales guys.”  The surprising part of this assertion is that our CEO is a die-hard sales guy, and has been for many years, and to him, a great sales team – that is, people on the phone and in meetings with potential customers – is his number one priority.

But he does have a point.  In the online world, your website is your number one sales and marketing tool, and the way you present it to the public can determine your company’s immediate and long-term future in the marketplace.

It is important to consider this as so many of you are veering in a “marketing with social media” direction, which, though still in its infancy, is proving to provide fantastic results with minimal spend, something that is extremely attractive in the current economy.  However, with this migration to social networks, blogging/microblogging, and viral media, a website is often left dusty and neglected in the background.  This is one of the worst things to happen, because, like it or not, in the online world your website will always be perceived as the number one face of your company.  Plus, any good online marketing campaign has a corporate website as its centerpiece.

So what role is your website playing now?  Is it merely a brochure, a high-level glimpse into what your company does, or is it an evolving, informative, and interactive sales machine?

If your answer is the former, but you realize the importance of making your website become the latter, do consider the following points in your mission.

Optimize, Optimize, Optimize

On the very basic level, ensure that your website is optimized for search engines.  If you’ve not done this before, there are plenty of great resources out there that cover the importance of crisp title tags, keyword-rich meta descriptions, effective link-building techniques, and meaty content.  And if you have done this before, remember that things get outdated very quickly on the ‘Net, so it might be a good time for you to do a thorough sweep of your site to ensure that everything is nicely aligned in true SEO fashion.

Exploit the Customizability of Your Corporate Site

By having a presence on MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter, for example, you can easily market to your ‘friends’ or ‘followers,’ but think about how those profile pages are laid out.  You can’t create a realistically usable support forum for your customers.  You can’t create registration forms for potential customers to fill out in order to join your mailing list.  Sure, you can add your press releases, announcements, blog articles, and so on, but you have little to no say over how they look and feel.  Take advantage of the fact that your website – the central hub of your entire online existence – can be changed to look exactly as you want it to look, feel exactly as you want it to feel, and portray your message exactly as it is intended.

Manage the Whole Sales Cycle in One Place

Your web site should not be an outward-looking glorified advertisement for your company.  As with all methods by which people build communities with social media, your web site needs to

• contain information for both potential and existing clients
• allow for discussion about your product or service, whether in a forum or a blog setting
• have enough dynamic content to bring visitors back to your site, or at least have them voluntarily subscribe to your RSS feeds or email list for update notifications
• be interactive enough, whether with forms so that potential and existing customers have easy, straightforward methods for getting in touch with you

Bring the basic theories of social media into your web site and use these as your foundation.  From here, your site can be a one-stop-shop for the community that your efforts are constantly building.  Through the use of these methods, and by working on your web site as much as you work on your other social media outlets, you can turn your corporate website into a smooth, customer-attaining machine.

• Strategies to Make Your Website a Powerful Internet Marketing Tool
  
• How to Use Your Website to Make Your Company More Profitable
• Building the Social Media Marketing Foundation

A number of you – okay, many of you, I’m sure – will say, “I know! I know!” upon reading the title of this post, but the following isn’t necessarily for you.  No, it’s actually for the many people who get to this blog by way of Google searches on phrases such as “social networking advantages,” “social media opportunity,” and “sales in a 2.0 world.”

The big question for many of you is, “I see all of these marketing folks trying to sell the idea of social media, but where is the proof?  What do the actual consumers have to say about it?”  I’d recommend you take a look at the numbers to get that answer.

Cone Inc., a strategy and communications agency based out of Boston, conducted a survey on perceptions of social media and how it can affect consumers’ buying habits.  According to the survey, sixty percent of Americans use social media, of which 59 percent of these use social media to get in touch with companies.

A whopping 93 percent of social media users believe companies should have some sort of presence on social media outlets, with varying degrees of interaction with their customers.  This interaction can take the form of:

• problem-solving (43%),
• seeking feedback on products or services (41%), and/or
• creating new methods by which consumers can use or interact with the brand (37%).

Likewise, other major research firms are responding to the explosion of social media as a key business tool.  With firms like IDC predicting social media’s growth by 815% in 2009, Forrester Research hits it right on the head by saying, “Rapid consumer adoption of these channels indicates that the time is now to enter this space.”

Has your company begun using social media as a marketing/branding tool?  If you haven’t, what are the causes of your hesitation?

• Social Media for Business – Who’s Doing It Well and How
• Social Media and the Marketing Opportunity
• Building the Social Media Marketing Foundation