Until recently, I’d never heard the term “crowdsourcing”. My computer doesn’t even think it’s a word…so it must be pretty new, right? Well, it was coined in 2006 but perhaps it’s just taken a minute to get passed down to me.

Anyway, for the sake of those who still don’t know, the all-knowing Wikipedia states: Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals.

My personal experience with crowdsourcing began about 2 weeks ago when my company launched a campaign entitled “Help Us Name Us”. We designed the promotion to help rename our growing company using only the power of crowdsourcing via web 2.0 social mediums.

We began with a Twitter account and a Facebook group. We Stumbled our home page and used other social bookmarking sites. Our employees blogged about it, and then we moved to forums. We dropped a social media release on Pitch Engine and PRWeb, and then used social news sites to float it around. And finally, we created a YouTube channel and let employees create short promotional videos.

So how well has crowdsourcing worked for us? As of today, we’ve recieved thousands of entries from all 50 states (plus DC), 43 countries and 6 continents (of course Google Analytics doesn’t show Antarctica on the map overlay so we’ll never really know if we hit that continent too). And we are not located in a major city, we’re a small marketing firm in Knoxville, Tennessee. Granted, we have national clients in DC, Chicago, and New Jersey, but we’ve been able to reach the world from the small city of Knoxville using only web 2.0 technologies.

And was it expensive? Not really…aside from taking some time, it has barely cost the company anything. Companies spend thousands of dollars trying to rebrand, and we’ve managed to do it for the cost of a Kindle2 (the prize for submitting the winning name).

And the contest isn’t over yet! We’re pretty determined to reach our goal of 10,000 entries before it ends on Friday, April 3 at 11:59pm. So if you’d like to be a part of this social media experiment, visit www.HelpUsNameUs.com and enter. (You could win a Kindle2!)