Doing your Do Diligence

Back in the PI (pre-internet) era if you wanted to learn how your mar­ket thought, how they made their buy­ing deci­sions and what they bought you really had lit­tle in the way of accu­rate research tools to draw on. You could set up a focus group and have folks tell you what you wanted to hear, you could crunch num­bers based on sales of dif­fer­ent things you sold, you could guess. There were also the usual math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­las that could tell you the prob­a­bil­ity that some­one would by one thing over another thing of yours. And then again you could guess or not and just decide you’ll con­vince your mar­ket they need your stuff.

Enter CIE 2.0

Now that we are in the CIE 2.0 (Com­mon Inter­net Era 2.0) we can pretty much elim­i­nate  guess work because now we have the tools to seed our ques­tions to our very own peeps and sit back and lis­ten to what they have to tell us. We can basi­cally ask our peeps what they want and lis­ten to their answers all the time fine tun­ing our stuff so that it really, really gives our peeps what they want and of course in turn gives us money to con­tinue to give them more and improved stuff.

While the fine art of lis­ten­ing has always been a much cov­eted skill by sales folks most of the time that fine art ended at the sale. All those clues about what we wanted well… never made it to those cigar smokin’ hon­chos in the upper lev­els of the cor­po­rate high rise, the cur­rent state of our auto indus­try is a good example.

Now though, we have tools that not only allow us to lis­ten to our peeps but also are con­tribut­ing to a greater decen­tral­iz­ing force in the biz world. So those biz­nesses that don’t lis­ten and don’ t decen­tral­ize by lis­ten­ing to their buy­ers will soon be going bye-bye and I doubt you want to be one of those.

Now that we are in the CIE 2.0 we as solo-business folks have the tools to engage with our peeps at much more inti­mate level .

But, but, but.….

So does this mean that artists must sur­ren­der to the whims and taste of the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor? Are you think­ing I don’t need some stinkin buyer to tell me how to make my art!! Well…not really! You can still make your own art stuff, that reflects your inner vision and  now you have to guess a lit­tle less and in cases a lot less and that my friend will help you really focus on what works so you can sell a lot of what works so that that spe­cial cre­ation you’ve been work­ing on can wait for it’s per­fect buyer.

And no I’m not talk­ing about pro­duc­ing 50 bazil­lion trin­kets of the same thing with minor changes just to sell one cool thing. I’m talk­ing about mak­ing and sell­ing lots of dif­fer­ent things that still fit your vision, still reflect who you are and what you have to say because you have taken the time to lis­ten to what your folks are telling you. They aren’t dic­tat­ing your cre­ativ­ity they’re just say­ing “I love your stuff, but what you have shown me won’t work where I need it”  and they may go on to say ” if you had more of this or more of that, or this in more col­ors etc. I would be more than will­ing to fill that empty pur­ple wall with your stuff”

You could learn all this stuff by just set­ting up a few lis­ten­ing posts to hear con­ver­sa­tions about the kind of stuff you do. Here are a few ways to do it:

Social Men­tion

This site is kind of a search­able aggre­ga­tion of feeds float­ing around the inter-tubes. Enter a search term like “tin glazed pot­tery” and you can find out the who, where and what that was spo­ken in blogs, microblogs,social book­marks, comments,video and audio.

Google alerts

This free  ser­vice by google allows you to set up cus­tom search terms so that any­time google runs across one of those terms you get an e-mail alert­ing you. So if you wanted know how fre­quently folks men­tioned your par­tic­u­lar style of metal sculp­ture all you have to do is enter the terms related to it and sit back and wait. This is really a good thing to find out who talks about you and where your name shows up.

Tweetbeep.com

Works a lot like Google Alert but is set up for twit­ter, and just as sim­ple to set up as Google alerts.

Search.twitter

This tool really lets you hone in on your mar­ket by giv­ing the abil­ity to set up very spe­cific search terms and  include geo­graphic details as well. So if our metal lady wants to know who is talk­ing about plasma cut­ting, 3/4″ steel and using riv­ets to join pieces in east tim­buktu she can enter those terms with the loca­tion and receive e-mails every time some­one from east Tim­buktu men­tions her process.

Backtype.com

This ser­vice drills down to a whole new level..blog com­ments. After set­ing up your pro­file you can see who is talk­ing about you in com­ments on other blogs and what they are say­ing. Pretty cool.…!

Boardtracker.com

This lit­tle ditty opens a whole new search avenue that of on-line dis­cus­sion boards. Enter your search terms like before and click “search” besides search­ing forum threads you can also search tags…pretty cool in a geeky sort of way.

So there ya have it.

Remem­ber.….

these are tools for intel gath­er­ing and they aren’t by any means secret sauces. They will give some indi­ca­tion as to whether that quad sided, riv­eted and welded two tone oxi­dized thing-a-ma-bob will have a snow balls chance in hell of selling…and that’s good because you can then not waste your pre­cious gift on some­thing that won’t get a chance to live in some­one else’s house.

Instead you can fig­ure out if a triple sided unox­i­dized thing might be in demand. Maybe some­one, some­where has talked about always want­ing one of those things and sud­denly more and more peeps are won­der­ing if some­body has ever made one. You may find out that in East Tim­buktu folks are rum­bling about a lack of that thing you want to make so now you can make it and head off to East Tim­buktu to mar­ket it or if E.Timbuktu has an art fair you can set about get­ting in and then using your con­ver­sa­tion chan­nels start to buzz-up the fact that you and only you will be bring­ing that much cov­eted and very valu­able thing-ama-jig.