A Different Look at Creativity IV: Home Depot & getting started

The last parts of this series looked at the needs of cre­atives and tried to match those needs with the tools avail­able. The goal of all of this was to  set out a basic palette of avail­able choices to pro­vide a lit­tle back­ground. Every­one does this whether they know it or not when they encounter some­thing new much like a per­son who wants to build some­thing does to under­stand how to join two or more parts together.…they know there are tools out there to put things together but they don’t know what does what. Imag­ine know­ing you want to join two pieces of wood but you have never seen a ham­mer or even worse a nail. A visit to Home Depot could be very con­fus­ing with­out the basic knowl­edge of tools.

This arti­cle is a tran­si­tion from describ­ing the tools and how they meet a need to learn­ing how this knowl­edge alone is not enough to walk into Home Depot with. Unless you know you need a drill or a ham­mer just walk­ing into Home Depot and buy­ing what­ever strikes your fancy will not help you build a house unless you know that

1. you want to build a house and
2. you know or at least have some idea as to what kind

But even this won’t help you until you know more details like

• What does it look like
• how big does it need to be
• how many rooms
• where is it to be located…

The list can and should go on until you have a clear idea of what it is you want to build. Once you have clar­ity and focus you can then go into Home Depot and KNOW pretty much what you need to buy, both in mate­ri­als and tools. Basi­cally, you need to have a goal then broad strate­gies for meet­ing that goal then ground level tac­tics for imple­ment­ing strate­gies that will get you to your goal.

So what does this have to do with this series? Well, know­ing that Twit­ter is cool doesn’t help you if con­nect­ing many dif­fer­ent peo­ple in a col­lab­o­ra­tive way is not some­thing you need. The same goes for Face­book or for that mat­ter a blog, if your goal/s do not depend on what the tool does best then fool­ing around with it because it is cool will be a huge time suck. So for the pur­poses of this series I am just going assume you are all small busi­nesses that are based on cre­at­ing, mak­ing or pro­duc­ing art and you have a lim­ited knowl­edge of capa­bil­i­ties of the intern­ter­net and also know that you need to con­nect bet­ter with your buyers.

I am skip­ping the entire brand­ing process and devel­op­ing a mar­ket­ing plan for brevity. What fol­lows is basic strate­gic infor­ma­tion to give you a start­ing point for your journey.

First things First

The very first thing you can do is to start lis­ten­ing, both in per­son and on-line. In per­son talk to your buy­ers, find out what is impor­tant to them, what makes them tick, why they come to art shows or buy art. Find out what prob­lems they are fac­ing what makes them happy what they look for­ward to, how they live. Then you will be in a posi­tion to say to them ” You know I think you might like this doll, if you hang it over your desk it can help you stay focused and cen­tered” or ” you might really like this pot, it is designed to make serv­ing soup easy and drip free”.

While you are engag­ing your buy­ers in per­son spend some time on-line. Find blogs writ­ten by artists or other cre­atives and also read other gen­res, use that “google thing” and search for sub­jects that inter­est you or might inter­est your buy­ers. Next go to Twitter.com and search around sub­jects like, art, visual art, or what­ever might be related to your medium, bet­ter yet open a twit­ter account (it’s free) start fol­low­ing some of the peo­ple you find inter­est­ing. Take note of what they have to say keep in mind …there is no right way here you are try­ing to find out infor­ma­tion and get your feet wet.

Intro­duc­ing.…

Let’s meet Sarah. She is a self described ” lud­dite”  who until recently has seen lit­tle ben­e­fit in mar­ket­ing and in many cases felt that it was cheap­en­ing her art. She has avoided the inter­net for a vari­ety of rea­sons most of which have to do with not know­ing how it can help her. Recently she has real­ized that she indeed was in busi­ness and if she didn’t make a liv­ing from her art her abil­ity to share it with oth­ers would decline. Last we talked I sug­gested that she begin “lis­ten­ing” to the web in  a num­ber of ways.

“So..Sarah how are you doing? Have you started ‘lis­ten­ing’ as I sug­gested last time we talked?”

“Ya” she said, “I had my doubts at first, but then I found some amaz­ing artists who shared their ideas and their work on their blogs and…they didn’t seem to spend hours try­ing to write the per­fect arti­cle! I am not sure I can do that. I also found  the more I poked around the more ideas I got…which I wasn’t expect­ing at all. But now I am even more con­fused and slightly overwhelmed…where do I begin? I feel like I have way to much to learn and not enough time to learn it.”

“Well” I said,“the best way to get over that sense of con­fu­sion and being over­whelmed is to first stop judg­ing your­self and sec­ond take lit­tle steps towards your goal and be ready to change course if need be. So with that said let’s get going. When we first met you said you wanted to con­nect with your buy­ers more  on a per­sonal level…you wanted to make a human con­nec­tion that brought them into your life… within lim­its I know! You also wanted a way to keep them abreast of what shows you were going to be in and what you were making.”

“That’s right” she said, ” So how do I get started, what should I do first? What is going to be the best use of my time? And the eas­i­est and quickest”!

“Well, you are in luck because now the eas­i­est and quick­est way to begin is through a blog.”

“Why is that? I thought I needed a web site…how will a blog do what I need?” She  said.

“That’s why I said you’re in luck! You see, web sites are sta­tic, the con­tent on them sel­dom changes and when you need to change it, you need a tech per­son unless you know web design. The other prob­lem with web sites is they don’t get indexed often by search engines since most search engine’s cri­te­ria is how often the con­tent changes. So… now the busi­ness com­mu­nity from Microsoft to your neigh­bor­hood cafe have begun blogging.”

“But if I use a blog won’t I have to write some­thing every­day? I don’t have time to do that…and I don’t know what I’d write about. I get writer’s block even think­ing of it! And how will that help me do what I want to do…get closer to my buy­ers?” Sarah said in frustration.

“First you only need to write when you have some­thing to say which can be every­day or once a week. And you don’t have to write a novel each time you sit down at your com­puter. When I started my first blog as a pho­tog­ra­pher I only posted when I had pho­tographs and when I had some­thing to say about an event or a shoot. My blog was a place for poten­tial clients to not only see my work but also my process and approach by read­ing about the ses­sion or event or what­ever I had shot. The beauty was that clients could com­ment on what they saw and read giv­ing me the chance to have a con­ver­sa­tion with them. You see a blog is the first step to lay­ing the foun­da­tion of a poten­tial two way conversation.

A blog gives you the oppor­tu­nity to con­tin­u­ally show how valu­able you are to your readers/buyers. By open­ing up and being trans­par­ent to your poten­tial buy­ers you open the door for them to get to know you and most impor­tantly know whether they have any­thing in com­mon with you. It is the first step in sep­a­rat­ing out your best buyers.”

” Ahhh!!” she said, “the fog is begin­ning to lift. I think there may be some pos­si­bil­i­ties here. So how do I get started with a blog? Like, where do I go to set one up? Do I need to know code or are there  sim­ple ways for a Lud­dite like me to get started?”

“At this point I would strongly rec­om­mend the sim­plest way pos­si­ble. You have a few choices depend­ing on bud­get etc. You can go free using ser­vices like Blog­ger or Type­pad but free has some lim­i­ta­tions which we can cover later. Another free option is to use Word­Press and host your own blog but this might require some help from a tech per­son. Our time is run­ning out now so here are a cou­ple of resources for you and an assign­ment. For next time spend some time look­ing through blog­ger and blogspot sites, check out what they pro­vide given your needs. Also go here to see how sim­ple it all can be…”

Become a blog­ger and watch the free videos,

To begin learn­ing about social media  check Chris Bro­gen out.

Com­ing next: More con­ver­stions with Sarah and pos­si­bly a cou­ple of her friends. We’ll be talk­ing in more detail about blogs and some basic social media strategies.