Joe McKendrick wrote a nice post last week on this blog on Personal Outsourcing, He quoted John Schmidt of Wells Fargo on the concept in an interview by Gian Trotta, “They (enterprise employees) write out their question in their blog and look for their community to respond and help them. …they extended their network of peers to outside the four walls of their company. …they’re taking their problems and their professional challenges to the world.”

This reminded me of a number of people I interviewed for my business blog book and the many ways this outsourcing can work. Here are few examples of personal outsourcing.

First, there is the outsourcing or crowd sourcing of problem solving as John discusses. For example, Buzz Bruggeman of the software tool. ActiveWords, said to me, “Just yesterday we got an eight page critique of our website, our install process, and our product from a very smart woman who has worked for a number of years in software QA and testing. Her insights were sensational. For a small company with a small team to get that kind of free assistance is like a gift from God!” The reviewer found ActiveWords by reading Buzz’s blog. There were many other examples and I have also posed questions on my blog and gotten much helpful feedback.

Second, there is the outsourcing your market research. For example, Buzz views other bloggers as his “intelligent agents”…He finds all kinds of things and has really have stopped reading the local newspaper. Buzz looks at the N.Y. Times on line, but he finds the real-time immediacy of the information on blogs blows away anything in print. For example, engadget posted 65 product reviews from the Consumer Electronic Show on the first morning. The newspapers were covering the same topics the next day, and print journals somewhere between 60-90 days later.

I do the same as Buzz and look to key blogs to help me stay informed of things before they hit the press, as well as alert me to good stuff in the press. But this outsourcing often goes a step further. Often, I do not even have to look at other blogs. People now bring to my attention new developments in the market through comments on my blog or by forwarding me stuff through email that I might be interested in because they know what I blog about. My blog readers have even helped research articles I was working on for other publications. There are many generous people in the web. Some weeks my RSS reader has cob webs but I always know it is there when I need it.

Third, there is the outsourcing of your marketing itself. Many large organizations have “outsourced” some of their PR from their PR department to their own employees through blogs. This good, and more trusted, press then spreads further into the world outside the enterprise through other blogs. I know this is not personal outsourcing in the strictest sense but it is the same concept and underlying principle. For example, Betsy Aoki is a Community Program manager at Microsoft. One of her blogging objectives is to show readers in the outside world that “Microsofties do not have chips implanted and have the same human foibles as the rest of us even while doing their jobs.” This has been appreciated as one reader commented Betsy demonstrated that, “she was just one (person) doing her job and not trying to be fake, overly corporate or standoffish.” This then gets truly outsourced when it is picked up outside the enterprise and passed on such as Phil Weber’s suggestion for a Betsy Aoki Fan Club,

The outsourcing of marketing for small firms who do not have a PR department and individual consultants is closer to personal outsourcing. For example, Dick Costolo, CEO of Feedburner, was amazed at the speed that the word got out around the global about his blog, Burning Questions, and thus his product, when it first appeared. He would post a new item and within hours it was referred to by others in various parts of the globe on their blogs. The news then moved to further blogs connected with these initial commentators. This recognition and global coverage occurred within a few weeks of starting his blog and helped the start up company gain exposure.

Pito Salas of BlogBridge had the same experience. His blog, subtitled, “some stuff I just figured out,” got noticed and then so did his RSS reader, BlogBridge. Not only that but it also provided him, as an individual, with access to a large community of colleagues, something he had enjoyed while inside a large organization. He “outsourced” his community of colleagues. Buzz Bruggeman had trouble getting recognition for his small software firm and did not have a large PR budget. After starting his blog, Buzz found over 100,000 returns in Google within a few months for ActiveWords (as one word) and there are over 300,00 now.

These examples reflect only a portion of the scope of personal outsourcing. I could go on with more examples of but they are all manifestations of the “one single gigantic virtual workplace” John Schmidt describes. They are variations on the same theme. We just need the free minds that Paula Thronton describes in Complexity Happens in order to embrace it and think of new ways to use it.