1 00:00:08,020 --> 00:00:09,190 Now, before I conclude, 2 00:00:09,190 --> 00:00:19,110 I want to provide a few more examples of people of small businesses and individuals that are using the power of community and particularly on social, 3 00:00:19,630 --> 00:00:25,510 to convert into sales. Because I thought this might be interesting. We'll go back to Instagram because Instagram is a particular I mean, Instagram. 4 00:00:25,900 --> 00:00:29,830 A lot of companies use in small business use it for fun highlighting the office, blah, blah, blah. 5 00:00:30,070 --> 00:00:36,010 But there are ver there are some brands and some small businesses that are using it in interesting ways. 6 00:00:36,010 --> 00:00:39,610 It works best for artistic brands or epicurean brands. 7 00:00:39,820 --> 00:00:48,340 An example of this. Three blocks away from my flat in the Lower East Side in New York City is my favourite restaurant in the whole wide world. 8 00:00:48,850 --> 00:00:55,960 It's called Sauce, and the head chef and owner of this restaurant is a dude named Frank Pacino. 9 00:00:56,320 --> 00:00:59,440 Frank is a prolific Instagram user, prolific. 10 00:01:00,010 --> 00:01:04,360 What is he posted out? He posts about new recipes that he's trying when he can't go to sleep. 11 00:01:04,360 --> 00:01:11,500 At 3 a.m. in the morning, he posts about his Italian grandmother and her influence on his life and his cooking, 12 00:01:11,800 --> 00:01:16,390 and the fact that her chairs and her pots still adorn the halls of sauce to this day. 13 00:01:17,470 --> 00:01:22,360 He talks about his ethos, his trips, his family. He basically tells stories. 14 00:01:23,050 --> 00:01:27,400 And a few months ago, he took his customary annual trip to Italy. 15 00:01:29,770 --> 00:01:33,350 And on this trip and on these trips, he takes them about every year. 16 00:01:33,670 --> 00:01:41,219 He publishes. Posts about and photos about inspiration that he's garnering, food that he's tasting, chefs that he's meeting, 17 00:01:41,220 --> 00:01:49,170 things that he's going to bring back to us in the Lower East Side, a source for us to enjoy straight from the motherland as Motherland, Italy. 18 00:01:49,980 --> 00:01:59,460 And on this trip, he also posts about bringing back some fresh white truffles back to sauce for what he called a special menu. 19 00:02:00,360 --> 00:02:07,680 And he told stories about going truffle foraging with that's Rocco right there, who is the truffle hunter dog. 20 00:02:08,310 --> 00:02:14,280 And farmers will go out. Truffle farmers will go out with Rocco and [INAUDIBLE] go and sniff up a storm and find these truffles. 21 00:02:14,280 --> 00:02:18,450 And Frank went out into the forest and he found truffles in the Alba region. 22 00:02:18,990 --> 00:02:26,730 And then he posted about paying 30 €200 to this farmer to bring back all the truffles that he brought back. 23 00:02:27,920 --> 00:02:34,159 To the Lower East Side. And he mentioned on Instagram that the truffles would be served on dishes the 24 00:02:34,160 --> 00:02:40,160 following week at sauce by request only on a private menu by request only. 25 00:02:40,430 --> 00:02:44,480 In other words, none of the of the truffle dishes would appear on the menu. 26 00:02:44,630 --> 00:02:48,770 You kind of had to be part of the community, part of the in crowd to even know about it. 27 00:02:49,580 --> 00:02:59,570 The following week is interesting. Instagram community obviously flocked to source and started posting, you know, an enormous amount of photos. 28 00:03:00,670 --> 00:03:03,700 About the secret menu that they were a part of. 29 00:03:04,210 --> 00:03:07,960 Now, what happened to sausage? What happened to Frank and Sausage? 30 00:03:07,960 --> 00:03:11,980 And his truffles? He sold out in four days. In four days. 31 00:03:12,100 --> 00:03:21,010 He sold out of his truffles. And when I spoke to Frank about this at the bar, he said, A.J., Instagram ain't just about fun for me in my world. 32 00:03:21,160 --> 00:03:29,830 Instagram converts. Now, another great example is world renowned street artist Shepard Fairey of Obama fame, whom I'm sure most of us know. 33 00:03:29,830 --> 00:03:37,120 And he uses Instagram to sell out of his prints every 2 to 3 days on by publishing every 2 to 3 days. 34 00:03:37,120 --> 00:03:45,470 And you can see them right there. Now Tumblr is also a very interesting social content channel. 35 00:03:45,740 --> 00:03:51,290 Four years ago, a friend of mine, Josh Davis, who I used to when I was in New York City a lot more often, 36 00:03:51,980 --> 00:03:54,820 we were sitting there at our favourite coffee shop the beginning, and Josh came up to me. 37 00:03:54,830 --> 00:03:57,950 He would always show me on his iPhone four as his new iPhone four, 38 00:03:57,950 --> 00:04:02,510 as he showed me all these beautiful photos that he took of the East Village documenting life in the East Village. 39 00:04:02,750 --> 00:04:09,410 Got to understand where I come from. It's a crazy place. Now you have all these big buildings and money pouring in and all that. 40 00:04:09,500 --> 00:04:13,070 There's all this weirdness and graffiti going. It's a lovely it's a lovely place. 41 00:04:13,490 --> 00:04:18,320 And Josh took it upon himself to document this for no other reason than he just loved it. 42 00:04:18,470 --> 00:04:23,780 And he used his iPhone. He did all the editing on his iPhone. We'd sit there at the bar, at the being, and every day he'd showed me this. 43 00:04:23,960 --> 00:04:25,730 And after a few days, I'm like, you know, Josh? 44 00:04:27,060 --> 00:04:35,360 Not that I want you to extend from this audience of one that you have here, but with two extra clicks, you can start sharing that with people online. 45 00:04:35,370 --> 00:04:36,719 I think people would dig this man. 46 00:04:36,720 --> 00:04:45,540 I think people would really dig the idea of, you know, an East Village ethnographer, a documentary photographer for our neighbourhood now. 47 00:04:46,550 --> 00:04:50,620 Today. Josh has over 20,000 followers on Tumblr. 48 00:04:50,630 --> 00:05:02,160 He's Jackson on Tumblr. You want to check him out? He's prince with every shot, every photo that he publishes to Tumblr from his phone, phone. 49 00:05:02,180 --> 00:05:05,790 He still to this day, it's all iPhone. All of the edit is on the iPhone. 50 00:05:05,810 --> 00:05:15,860 Everything publishes directly to his Tumblr log. He only prints three copies of each photo and sells them at an average of $1,000 per piece. 51 00:05:17,490 --> 00:05:24,860 And last week he was even invited for his first international exhibition in Tokyo. 52 00:05:26,800 --> 00:05:33,610 And this is all through content, content that he created, which was freely available on one platform. 53 00:05:35,210 --> 00:05:42,240 And of course, there's Facebook. Now I know dozens, dozens of examples of entrepreneurs. 54 00:05:42,240 --> 00:05:48,750 I don't have the time to share them all, but I will share one, like my friend Chelsea, who is in North Dakota. 55 00:05:48,750 --> 00:05:52,530 She's a limited edition and jewellery maker in North Dakota. 56 00:05:52,770 --> 00:05:59,790 So she makes these beautiful pieces, typically out of cement and other upcycled good goods, wood, things like that. 57 00:05:59,940 --> 00:06:04,260 Beautiful stuff, right. This is just last week. You see the date right there? 58 00:06:04,650 --> 00:06:13,320 Just last week, she posted one photo on her wall of new products that she was trying or that she that she had produced. 59 00:06:14,310 --> 00:06:20,580 And she associated them with letters, and all she did was ask for her community to comment, 60 00:06:20,850 --> 00:06:25,020 and the first one's providing the letter of the product that they wanted. 61 00:06:25,050 --> 00:06:29,850 She would sell them to them. I mean, they could they could purchase them. And she would do that until they were sold out. 62 00:06:32,420 --> 00:06:36,300 Less than 24 hours later, she was sold out. 63 00:06:36,320 --> 00:06:39,470 As you can see, my wife Melissa was a little bit too late. 64 00:06:40,130 --> 00:06:47,550 24 hours later, she did it again. Now, Chelsea didn't use this, but I did. 65 00:06:48,150 --> 00:06:51,330 And I don't have the time to go into this in detail, but I did want to share this with you. 66 00:06:51,690 --> 00:06:54,420 Remember I was saying you live and die by your email list now. 67 00:06:54,450 --> 00:07:01,169 Facebook provides something additional to us as a new marketing effort that they've launched for anyone. 68 00:07:01,170 --> 00:07:05,910 Any of us can use it. Any small business, large organisation, whatever can use this called lookalike marketing, 69 00:07:06,270 --> 00:07:13,050 where you basically upload an email list and Facebook finds users who are similar to your community or customer list. 70 00:07:13,860 --> 00:07:24,150 This makes it ridiculously, absurdly easy and inexpensive to market to prospects that are even outside of your community on Facebook. 71 00:07:24,180 --> 00:07:25,020 So in other words, 72 00:07:25,020 --> 00:07:31,290 Chelsea could have been marketing to her own community and at the same time she could have uploaded the list of emails that she's collected 73 00:07:31,290 --> 00:07:37,380 from her community of customers that she has and marketed to people whom she's never met and got her product in front of them for pennies. 74 00:07:37,620 --> 00:07:42,560 For pennies. Now the last channel I'll talk about is Kickstarter. 75 00:07:42,570 --> 00:07:46,980 I know somebody talked about this last week, so I'm not going to go into a deep dive about what Kickstarter is. 76 00:07:47,010 --> 00:07:51,750 However, I will say this there is a massive, massive misconception about Kickstarter. 77 00:07:52,020 --> 00:08:00,060 Many people around the world still think Kickstarter is a donation platform, some type of donation, like it's a charity platform. 78 00:08:01,110 --> 00:08:04,139 Kickstarter founders abhor charity. They don't even allow five one seater. 79 00:08:04,140 --> 00:08:07,410 They don't allow charities on the platform. It's not at all. 80 00:08:08,070 --> 00:08:18,760 Kickstarter represents the rise of a movement called Free Summer ISM, where customers buy into the idea of a product before that product ever exists. 81 00:08:18,760 --> 00:08:22,290 That allows you to validate your your product before it exists. 82 00:08:22,290 --> 00:08:28,110 And it gives these early, early customers a discount for being involved. 83 00:08:28,710 --> 00:08:33,780 My friend Clay Bear, who is one of the world's leading experts on crowdfunding theory, 84 00:08:34,080 --> 00:08:40,110 he says Kickstarter is just a simple shopping cart within earliest adopter discount baked in. 85 00:08:41,540 --> 00:08:50,300 Now I've had many, many friends who have launched new businesses on Kickstarter applications, films, water filtration systems. 86 00:08:50,570 --> 00:08:56,780 I have had friends do all to launch real businesses on Kickstarter and they used it to 87 00:08:56,780 --> 00:09:02,660 acquire their prosumers or their earliest adopters and to start garnering community a misfit. 88 00:09:03,260 --> 00:09:08,720 We launched an entire new line of business, Mr. Press, which I've mentioned before on Kickstarter. 89 00:09:08,930 --> 00:09:12,050 I had a publishing deal for my first book from a large publisher. 90 00:09:12,200 --> 00:09:17,089 I was about a quarter of the way into this deal. About a quarter of the way into the deal I'm writing. 91 00:09:17,090 --> 00:09:23,030 I'm sending back drafts. And then I started to realise, well, your second I signed up to write somebody else's book, 92 00:09:23,030 --> 00:09:26,250 This isn't me, it's this book that I'm writing is actually not mine. 93 00:09:26,270 --> 00:09:29,450 So I pulled out of the deal. I said, You know what? I can't do this. 94 00:09:29,690 --> 00:09:34,100 Why don't we put this on Kickstarter? Right. The publisher offered me a $10,000 advance. 95 00:09:34,400 --> 00:09:41,750 If I can get $10,000 from my community, if I have $10,000 worth of business that would want to see me publish this book. 96 00:09:42,230 --> 00:09:45,920 And I can do that profitably. I can publish and print profitably as a business. 97 00:09:46,160 --> 00:09:50,270 Why don't we do it ourselves and see how it goes? So I put it on. We put it on Kickstarter. 98 00:09:51,170 --> 00:09:58,579 With $10,000, we thought we'd just maybe scrape, scrape out enough customers to buy a book before it's even alive. 99 00:09:58,580 --> 00:10:03,110 Right before it's even published to 10,000. In 4 hours. 100 00:10:03,110 --> 00:10:06,560 In 4 hours. We raised $10,000. 101 00:10:06,860 --> 00:10:12,380 And by the end of the campaign, I was able to raise $40,000, taking the overage that we had raised. 102 00:10:12,530 --> 00:10:16,009 And I leveraged that and decided to invest it into publishing, 103 00:10:16,010 --> 00:10:20,360 into the publishing industry and to invest it into actually becoming an artisan publisher ourselves. 104 00:10:20,360 --> 00:10:24,470 So not just one off book, but why don't we build some more out of this? 105 00:10:25,980 --> 00:10:28,440 And now we're on our fifth publication.