Curation
One of the new buzzwords in the social media circles is curation. To a great extent, that is what I do. I read upwards of 50 blog posts every day and then comment on what is relevant to the business success of entrepreneurs and small business owners like you.
And from time to time I have done a different kind of curation with my Small Business Marketing Talk series. I have interviewed dozens of small businesses and probed for that one thing that has been their most notable success with respect to social media marketing (the focus of this blog).
What I have found most fascinating is that we are all finding our own way – and virtually every application of social media is as unique as each of us and our businesses. Simple math tells us that if I talk to a sample of 100 small business owners that are all unique. And they run 100 businesses that are equally unique. The possible number of permutations for using social media is 100 x 100 or 10,000 possible scenarios.
Now you begin to get a grasp for how much we can learn from each other!
Crowdsourcing
In that spirit, I am now reaching out to ask you to share just one tip about what is working for you with respect to your small business marketing. It doesn't even have to involve social media or Internet marketing. Because we all can draw lessons from virtually any example.
If you don't have one of those, share a challenge that I can help you with. If I don't have the answer I'll do the research and consult with my industry peers to find a solution to share with you and the community of this blog.
And if you are bold enough and care to be interviewed by me for a future edition, please step up to the plate. I can't promise that I'll make you famous, but at the very least you'll be introduced to a community that will embrace your wisdom!
Community
As you can see, people like you are the real drivers of what happens on this blog. I could blog about other things that interest me that are totally off topic for small businesses. And come to think about it, I may just do that when I blog about something that has been vital to my success: meditation.
Yep, there are all kinds of ways to succeed in business. And given the long hours and stress that we all endure, something like meditation can be a blessing.
Does this give you any more ideas for responding to any of those inquiries above? I hope so.
See ya tomorrow, Jeff
Photo Credit: DBKing
The three Manhattan flea markets of Alan Boss, who started NYC’s amazing flea market craze back in the 1970s–a craze that was at its most robust in the late 1980s and early 1990s–recently started using Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr have to reach out to a new generation of shoppers whose tastes are not always for “old school” antiques, but instead vintage clothing and vintage/retro decoration and goods from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s.
These social media tools allow us to highlight vendors or their unique merchandise at the market in a timely and visually-intensive way…and for little cost. Development in urban spaces has made the cost of running an urban flea market, or participating in one as a vendor, extremely expensive (insurance, parking, rent!). Print advertising simply isn’t an option anymore.
While social media has allowed us to promote our market to younger shoppers, our challenge has been to convince our more “old school”-type vendors that they should adopt social media themselves. As a general rule, traditional flea market vendors lag far behind in adopting technology to market themselves, and we simply can’t do all the marketing for them! Their adoption of technology is complicated by the fact that many of them are on the road a lot, moving from estate sale to estate sale, antiques fair to antiques fair.
Regardless, it has been gratifying to attempt to make some of these vendors online stars for a day or a week by using Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr to showcase photographs of vendor items for sale, and to sometimes highlight a vendor’s personal story, advice about restoring antiques, or design and decor ideas.