Now, before I conclude,
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,
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.
A lot of companies use in small business use it for fun highlighting the office, blah, blah, blah.
But there are ver there are some brands and some small businesses that are using it in interesting ways.
It works best for artistic brands or epicurean brands.
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.
It's called Sauce, and the head chef and owner of this restaurant is a dude named Frank Pacino.
Frank is a prolific Instagram user, prolific.
What is he posted out? He posts about new recipes that he's trying when he can't go to sleep.
At 3 a.m. in the morning, he posts about his Italian grandmother and her influence on his life and his cooking,
and the fact that her chairs and her pots still adorn the halls of sauce to this day.
He talks about his ethos, his trips, his family. He basically tells stories.
And a few months ago, he took his customary annual trip to Italy.
And on this trip and on these trips, he takes them about every year.
He publishes. Posts about and photos about inspiration that he's garnering, food that he's tasting, chefs that he's meeting,
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.
And on this trip, he also posts about bringing back some fresh white truffles back to sauce for what he called a special menu.
And he told stories about going truffle foraging with that's Rocco right there, who is the truffle hunter dog.
And farmers will go out. Truffle farmers will go out with Rocco and [INAUDIBLE] go and sniff up a storm and find these truffles.
And Frank went out into the forest and he found truffles in the Alba region.
And then he posted about paying 30 €200 to this farmer to bring back all the truffles that he brought back.
To the Lower East Side. And he mentioned on Instagram that the truffles would be served on dishes the
following week at sauce by request only on a private menu by request only.
In other words, none of the of the truffle dishes would appear on the menu.
You kind of had to be part of the community, part of the in crowd to even know about it.
The following week is interesting. Instagram community obviously flocked to source and started posting, you know, an enormous amount of photos.
About the secret menu that they were a part of.
Now, what happened to sausage? What happened to Frank and Sausage?
And his truffles? He sold out in four days. In four days.
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.
Instagram converts. Now, another great example is world renowned street artist Shepard Fairey of Obama fame, whom I'm sure most of us know.
And he uses Instagram to sell out of his prints every 2 to 3 days on by publishing every 2 to 3 days.
And you can see them right there. Now Tumblr is also a very interesting social content channel.
Four years ago, a friend of mine, Josh Davis, who I used to when I was in New York City a lot more often,
we were sitting there at our favourite coffee shop the beginning, and Josh came up to me.
He would always show me on his iPhone four as his new iPhone four,
as he showed me all these beautiful photos that he took of the East Village documenting life in the East Village.
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.
There's all this weirdness and graffiti going. It's a lovely it's a lovely place.
And Josh took it upon himself to document this for no other reason than he just loved it.
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.
And after a few days, I'm like, you know, Josh?
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.
I think people would dig this man.
I think people would really dig the idea of, you know, an East Village ethnographer, a documentary photographer for our neighbourhood now.
Today. Josh has over 20,000 followers on Tumblr.
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.
He still to this day, it's all iPhone. All of the edit is on the iPhone.
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.
And last week he was even invited for his first international exhibition in Tokyo.
And this is all through content, content that he created, which was freely available on one platform.
And of course, there's Facebook. Now I know dozens, dozens of examples of entrepreneurs.
I don't have the time to share them all, but I will share one, like my friend Chelsea, who is in North Dakota.
She's a limited edition and jewellery maker in North Dakota.
So she makes these beautiful pieces, typically out of cement and other upcycled good goods, wood, things like that.
Beautiful stuff, right. This is just last week. You see the date right there?
Just last week, she posted one photo on her wall of new products that she was trying or that she that she had produced.
And she associated them with letters, and all she did was ask for her community to comment,
and the first one's providing the letter of the product that they wanted.
She would sell them to them. I mean, they could they could purchase them. And she would do that until they were sold out.
Less than 24 hours later, she was sold out.
As you can see, my wife Melissa was a little bit too late.
24 hours later, she did it again. Now, Chelsea didn't use this, but I did.
And I don't have the time to go into this in detail, but I did want to share this with you.
Remember I was saying you live and die by your email list now.
Facebook provides something additional to us as a new marketing effort that they've launched for anyone.
Any of us can use it. Any small business, large organisation, whatever can use this called lookalike marketing,
where you basically upload an email list and Facebook finds users who are similar to your community or customer list.
This makes it ridiculously, absurdly easy and inexpensive to market to prospects that are even outside of your community on Facebook.
So in other words,
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
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.
For pennies. Now the last channel I'll talk about is Kickstarter.
I know somebody talked about this last week, so I'm not going to go into a deep dive about what Kickstarter is.
However, I will say this there is a massive, massive misconception about Kickstarter.
Many people around the world still think Kickstarter is a donation platform, some type of donation, like it's a charity platform.
Kickstarter founders abhor charity. They don't even allow five one seater.
They don't allow charities on the platform. It's not at all.
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.
That allows you to validate your your product before it exists.
And it gives these early, early customers a discount for being involved.
My friend Clay Bear, who is one of the world's leading experts on crowdfunding theory,
he says Kickstarter is just a simple shopping cart within earliest adopter discount baked in.
Now I've had many, many friends who have launched new businesses on Kickstarter applications, films, water filtration systems.
I have had friends do all to launch real businesses on Kickstarter and they used it to
acquire their prosumers or their earliest adopters and to start garnering community a misfit.
We launched an entire new line of business, Mr. Press, which I've mentioned before on Kickstarter.
I had a publishing deal for my first book from a large publisher.
I was about a quarter of the way into this deal. About a quarter of the way into the deal I'm writing.
I'm sending back drafts. And then I started to realise, well, your second I signed up to write somebody else's book,
This isn't me, it's this book that I'm writing is actually not mine.
So I pulled out of the deal. I said, You know what? I can't do this.
Why don't we put this on Kickstarter? Right. The publisher offered me a $10,000 advance.
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.
And I can do that profitably. I can publish and print profitably as a business.
Why don't we do it ourselves and see how it goes? So I put it on. We put it on Kickstarter.
With $10,000, we thought we'd just maybe scrape, scrape out enough customers to buy a book before it's even alive.
Right before it's even published to 10,000. In 4 hours.
In 4 hours. We raised $10,000.
And by the end of the campaign, I was able to raise $40,000, taking the overage that we had raised.
And I leveraged that and decided to invest it into publishing,
into the publishing industry and to invest it into actually becoming an artisan publisher ourselves.
So not just one off book, but why don't we build some more out of this?
And now we're on our fifth publication.