If you haven't heard the term "Crowdsourcing," brace yourself. It's one of those shiny new vocab words that, as soon as you learn it, you find leaping off of everyone's tongues.

According to Wikipedia, Crowdsourcing is:

The act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an "open call" to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions.

If this 37-word explanation peaks your curiosity, rest assured there are millions more written on the subject. Hot titles include Crowdsourcing, Open Innovation, The Wisdom of Crowds, and Here Comes Everybody.

As I was reading Crowdsourcing, I came across an outstanding example of the theory via a fortuitous Twitter posting: Macaroni Kid.

Facebook answers the question "What's on your mind?" Foursquare answers "Where are you?" And Macaroni Kid answers the all-important question facing every mom: "What's there for my kid to do around here?"

By enabling local moms to share the family-friendly happenings in their communities with others, Macaroni Kid "crowdsources" to Publisher Moms. Within eight months of launching (in April 2008), Macaroni Kid had 60 different communities. Today, they average a new community a day and recently launched in Hawaii (hey, those kids can't go to the beach every day, you know).

Publisher Moms run their own "franchise" of Macaroni Kid online in their communities, gathering local content and building a subscriber base. There's also a closed forum (Facebook-style) for the Publisher Mom community, where moms share ideas.

"It's like Avon meets the Internet with an ad revenue share model," explains Joyce Shulman, the company's founder (and a lawyer which I imagine comes in handy when building a media empire, zip code by zip code).

This phenomenon beautifully dovetails with earlier posts I've written about the underutilized talent of moms who've left the corporate world to raise kids. The Publisher Moms are grateful to have a forum for their talent and energy, plus they're doing something that benefits their own families. Not to mention that they've saved thousands of kids from the worst fate on earth: being bored.

Labels: crowdsourcing, Working Mothers

Please leave your thoughts and opinions in the comments section below, even if -- no, especially if -- you don't agree with what I've written.

Here's a quiz that might surprise even the most seasoned mom marketer.

How much likelier is it that a woman without a child works than a woman with a child over age 1?

20% likelier?

30% likelier?

50% likelier?

How about not at all likelier! I myself was shocked to learn from the US Census Bureau statistics that 72% of women with a child over the age of 1 work: the very same rate as women without children in the home.

Now I confess that the reason I was searching out these statistics was a nagging feeling that working moms were becoming more commonplace. I just hadn't realized how much things were changing. In 1976, only 39% of women with children over the age of 1 held a job outside the home.

What lead to my hunch that SAHM were becoming less common? A lot of different things, ranging from:

1). Websites sprouting up like HireMyMom.com and momcorps.com.

2). A flood of books garnering headlines, ranging from the provocative Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, to the hopeful Getting to 50/50, to the thought-provoking Mama PhD, to the insightful Mothers on the Fast Track.

3). A recent Talk of the Nation segment about the explosion of online education, perhaps the most family-friendly on-ramp for women seeking to brush up their skills and return to the workforce.

So women are juggling motherhood and career more than ever. Which means that the What's Your Blanket? philosophy of Maternal Instinct is more relevant than ever.

What are you doing to care for the caretaker? How might you alter your message or your product to make it even more appealing to a mom in the workforce? If you were to look at your company's depiction of moms -- in both photography and copy -- might it reflect an outdated notion? Really get granular in your assessment. Are you timing your email or twitter blasts to coincide with a working mom's rhythms? Are you putting mobile marketing to work?

If not, then by all means: get to work.

Labels: US Census Bureau, Working Mothers

Please leave your thoughts and opinions in the comments section below, even if -- no, especially if -- you don't agree with what I've written.