"Outsourcing" may be the evil boogey-word these days, but let me introduce you to another friendlier one (or three): "virtual talent networks."

A digital workforce is a relatively known concept, but even for this site's clearly superior readers, it's one that might merit some explaining. There's a collective urge to move online, pushing our talent pools and offices into the digital age. So, no more paper supplies or printers, faxes or fluorescent lights; even awkward casual Fridays are on the way out. Oh, the horror. 

Within the realm of online advertising and marketing especially, what is frequently replacing this traditional agency workplace is a highly flexible, if sometimes intangible, workspace made up of an essential core of full-time employees who leverage the many talents of a wide swath of freelancers, fitting these free-agent workers into place as project needs require. That swath of freelancers is what some have come to call a virtual talent network. 

Now, contracting out work isn't some new invention idea by any means -- the original makers of the wheel probably contracted out their axels -- but the virtual part is. Now, we can have a whole array of talented people filling in our weak spots, expanding our business's breadth and experience without ever expanding our basic infrastructure. We can even do it without ever having met the people we work with, which might appeal to some engineers… but I digress.

Like any business model, this operational structure has both an upside and a downside. It's not for everyone, but it can prove to be an invaluable way of doing business, reducing costs and creating happy and freedom-loving employees. 

As business demands, talent supplies
While companies will always cut staff to save on costs to infrastructure, insurance and office space, the reasons for creating a virtual network of talent to draw from is a little more complex than just the bottom line.

"I think if you're doing interactive marketing right these days, you're using a pretty broad pool of talent," Doug Schumacher, president and creative director at Basement Inc., explains. "You need to have that reach beyond what your own staff can get. [But] it doesn't make sense to hire someone who does Google mash-ups for an entire year when you're only doing two projects with that."

For Schumacher, the virtual talent comes in two forms: "One, when we need additional perspective on something, like maybe bringing in some additional designers or some more Flash developers, depending on workload. The second form is to bring in a kind of niche expertise that we don't have on staff and really don't have the ongoing position for but need to fulfill on a specific project."

Whether it's for sound engineers, game designers, 3D modelers, back-end coders or a hundred other specialties, the needs of agencies are changing quickly to meet the oft-morphing technological landscape, and freelancers are the best suited to fill those needs.

"The tools change so you find the people who know how to use the tools," according to Patrick Young, executive producer at Jetset Studios. "Facebook applications are the big deal now; MySpace pages were the big deal two years ago, but the sensibility that goes into them remains the same: understanding the brand and understanding how to come up with some ideas that are going to resonate."

Both Young and Schumacher describe how they've had marvelous work experiences with freelancers who live on the other side of the country, or other side of the world. Young found a game developer in North Carolina, liked their personality, but didn't find the perfect project for them for a few months, biding his time until Jetset was building an interactive Sim-style game to promote "Bee Movie." He also has a number of Flashers around the country who he's never met but describes as "a dream to work with."

Schumacher has people in both South America and down the street, sometimes even former employees who now do their freelance work from home. His company was recently working on a ringtone mash-up project and needed someone to build the back-end audio manipulation engine, clearly not an everyday need. So they contracted out. And now Schumacher can add another contact to his virtual network of talent, expanding his company's future capabilities.

Author notes: Blaise Nutter is a freelance writer.