I KNOW this is really late, but hey, it’s been summer.
I went to New York in August for a wedding party and stopped in at Etsy Labs in Brooklyn to do a talk. If you don’t know it, Etsy is a site for people who want to sell hand-made items. The labs are a physical co-working space where people can congregate, use equipment and learn stuff. The whole thing’s just brilliant. After two years of opening they now have over 50,000 shops set up.
The talk was based on Hugh McLeod’s Global Microbrand concept and, being the techies and artists they are, they recorded the whole thing and put it up online (complete with bluegrass soundtrack – that’s got to be a first).
If anyone’s an artist or indy creative you might find it useful. It’s all about social media and how to use it to build a worldwide customer-base whilst staying small.
One great thing was having 50 or so people watching from all over the world using Etsy’s amazing broadcasting system. We did a live, interactive web makeover at the end of the session and it was lovely to see that Xiane (our online guinea pig) actually went ahead and changed her site based on our suggestions.
It was a great evening and good fun meeting all the guys. They have some very interesting plans afoot and it’ll be interesting to see what they get up to over the next year.
I spent an enjoyable afternoon last week attempting to “Set up a Digital Content Business in Three Hours” with a group of students from the MA Media Enterprise course at UCE. The workshop came from an idea that course director Annette Naudin and I had been talking about for some time and it was great to finally have a chance to put it into action.
It’s coming to the end of the year-long course and the idea was to have a fun session which tied together many of the other parts of the course as well as demonstrating some new ideas around web-based, long tail business models.
We asked everyone to bring along an idea for a video series which could be sold on the web to a niche market.
After some discussion round a varied set of ideas, we settled on a series of videos which demonstrate “How to Haggle”.
The first video was scripted, filmed, uploaded and was ready for sale on Brightcove by the end of the session. In the meantime we developed a marketing strategy and worked through basic financials on the product, leaving us with a business plan and first product ready for sale after three hours.
Here’s the video if you’re interested (you should be if you ever spend time at flea markets!). Apologies for the visual / sound quality.
The idea was to demonstrate at every stage the differences between traditional broadcast models (high costs, high break even point, large target market) as opposed to new, long tail models (low costs, low break evens, niche markets).
It was great fun and I think some of the ideas generated in the session were very interesting. Thanks to everyone for being such good sports!
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