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Marketing

marketing monday don't talk about your do-do

WARNING: don’t spoil the holidays with your do-do.

Marketing by Bill

Whether you return to your parental units or not, the hol­i­day sea­son is chuck full of times to mix and re-connect with oth­ers, some of whom you may not have seen since day care. Those hol­i­day re-unions are also times when we get to brag about our­selves, to let our old friends know we are not still liv­ing in lava lamp filled apart­ments dec­o­rated with neo-Spanish inqui­si­tion furnishings.

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marketing minute the sodapop shop

What you can learn from The Sodapop Stop

Marketing by Bill

I ran across this on the 5000bc forum and had to share it. While it is about some­thing alto­gether dif­fer­ent than art the con­cepts you need to know to make your art busi­ness blos­som are here. It is 12 min­utes long and may be slow but keep com­ing back to it, each time you do you’ll learn some­thing more. Pay atten­tion to how he blazes his own trail trust­ing in his customers.

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Social Proof in Real Time

Featured Articles by Bill

Found on Chris Brogan’s feed this morning…an excel­lent exam­ple of how social media and Twit­ter specif­i­cally can be used by busi­nesses in the LA Times. Watch the video and read the arti­cle it is social proof that the opt-in/permission based tech­niques now being imple­mented work far bet­ter than the old ways. Con­ver­sa­tions work, engage­ment works, con­nec­tion works and the beauty of it is any­body can do it and any busi­ness that wants to suc­ceed from here on out will need to know how to use these and other tools not yet invented.

Also cool as Chris said is that the LA Times set up the video so it could be embed­ded in anybody’s blog or site just like YouTub not only does it spread the word about a very real exam­ple it also gets peo­ple to it’s site.

To read the whole arti­cle go to LA Times

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A Different Look at Creativity Part II: the social media mix

ArtWorks by Bill

Before we go any further…

I want to point out that what I am describ­ing here is a process, a way of look­ing at how we cre­ate whether it involves groups of peo­ple or indi­vid­u­als and what we need in the way of tools and envi­ron­ments to sup­port us along the way. The con­cepts and processes are not lin­ear or pretty and admit­tedly leave lots of room for fur­ther explo­ration and devel­op­ment.
Let’s get going..

Now that we have the cre­ative spec­trum some­what sketched out let’s see how it can work with the social media. The pri­mary ele­ment of social media, in fact its’ key­stone is con­nec­tiv­ity at lev­els that far exceed what we could have imag­ined even a year ago. And… this con­nec­tiv­ity has dif­fer­ent lev­els of applic­a­bil­ity depend­ing on the users intent and goals. Before we look in detail at spe­cific social media let’s try to find what Cre­ators, Mak­ers and Pro­duc­ers need to suc­ceed, what tools are most use­ful to them. The brief list below sum­ma­rizes com­mon tools and meth­ods, some have been avail­able but lim­ited in their usefulness.

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Check Your Brand Wellness

Marketing by Bill

Just as you reg­u­larly go to your Doc for well­ness checks you should also be doing the same thing with your brand. The pulse of your brand’s heart and sub­se­quent abil­ity to cir­cu­late your mes­sage through out you tribe is extremely impor­tant to your suc­cess. You should make it a habit to check its’ health sev­eral times a year. The best way to do this is to ask your tribe through a sur­vey.
In addi­tion to a sur­vey of your tribe it is impor­tant to reg­u­larly review the health of your brand by look­ing at the fol­low­ing areas:

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It’s not about the lipstick it’s the hog that matters!

Marketing by Bill

Every­where I look lately I see another Guru offer­ing up another ver­sion of “how to suc­ceed in tough time”, usu­ally in form of sim­ple check lists. Today I received a cou­ple of them in my e-mail and I was struck by their sim­i­lar­ity and real­ized that what is going on is every­one is say­ing that their lip­stick works best for chang­ing the look of the pig of our cur­rent cul­tural shift. In doing so for the most part they ask us to have “faith” in their lip­stick with­out address­ing the nature of the pig, they want us to assume that all pigs are alike and we all see pigs in the same way. Thus mak­ing their par­tic­u­lar solu­tion to the prob­lem the only one or the best, or the most magical.

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The Power of the Few

ArtWorks by Bill

In his book The Tip­ping Point: How Lit­tle Things Can Make a Big Dif­fer­ence Mal­com Glad­well notes that one of the key fac­tors impor­tant in mov­ing some­thing (in our lan­guage that =art) is the Power of the The Few. Over and over prod­ucts, peo­ple, actions, and move­ments move from obscu­rity to pop­u­lar­ity, from low par­rtic­i­pa­tion to celebrity sta­tus as a result of the actions of a few key play­ers. He calls these people…CONNECTORS. Through their net­work of friends, aquain­tances and inate love of col­lect­ing peo­ple the con­nec­tors bring the right peo­ple together. They are the ones who say ” I know Bob who knows Sarah, let me give Bob a call”. In most cases these con­nec­tors main goal is not to be seen as “the go-to” per­son but rather they delight in col­lect­ing people.

As we have talked ear­lier, we are in the early stages of the birth of a new way of doing things and for artists that means being able to build and rely on your net­work or tribe of sup­port­ers and fol­low­ers. The first thing that should be on list in build­ing your net­work is iden­ti­fy­ing the con­nec­tors because they are the ones who cary the most water for you and do so gladly. They are the ones who eas­ily say “I know some­one who would really like your work” and pro­ceed to send not one but sev­eral peo­ple to you at your next show.

Do you know who your con­nec­tors are? What do they look like? Where do they hang out?

Leave a com­ment to let us know.

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Three key questions that can effect your business success.

Marketing by Bill

What is the value of the busi­ness you are deliv­er­ing to clients?

* Know­ing the value of your work to your buy­ers is a key ele­ment in being able to suc­cess­fully com­mu­ni­cate that value. If you don’t see a value in what you do or you don’t know that value how can your buy­ers see it? In the art world your art is inti­mately linked to you so the per­ceived value of your work is also linked to your iden­tity as an artist. So in order for your iden­tity to shine you need to value your­self and your work.

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authentic or AUTHENTIC?

Marketing by Bill

If you have been into Star­bucks in the last few months yo may have noticed a sud­den change in focus by the barristas..suddenly they want to be your friend. I noticed back in April I think, sud­denly a new guy serv­ing up my cof­fee wanted to know about my day, […]

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