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There has been a fairly lively conversation on the American Craft Forum about MySpace and if it’s a good idea for artists and crafters for attracting business. The thread was started by artist Luann Udell who was trying to find some examples of artists using MySpace for the purpose of promoting their businesses. The thread morphed into a conversation about the merits of MySpace, myths, misconceptions, and the merits of it being a legitimate channel for business. Yesterday, Luann weighed in again and pointed out that the real question is not just “Is MySpace good for my business?”, but…

“How is internet-based social software changing the way we connect, interact, and influece each other? And how will that impact the way I choose to do business?”

I agree…that is the real question. For the past couple of months, I’ve been researching and experimenting with what is being called by insiders and the press “Social Media”. What is social media? It can be defined as a group of online media, software, and technology that encourages participation, conversation, community, and connectedness. Social media includes things like blogs, social networks like MySpace, podcasts, and content communities like Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube that allows people to share photos, web site links, and video, and places like Second Life where you can build your own virtual world and interact with others in that world. The web is quickly transforming from a place made of static content, to an interconnected series of networks that want to be active participants, not passive readers. And after experimenting and researching “social media”, I’ll have to say that it’s not a matter of if and how social media can effect your business, but how you use social media to effect your business. Because social media is here to stay, you’ll be affected by it whether you want to or not, and the current and future art and craft buyers will be using it.

For those of use are just getting the hang of using forums and reading blogs, this whole avalanche of technologies and web sites may be a bit overwhelming. But just like we learned how to use the web, how to send email, and how to use instant messaging, we’ll master this too.

If you want to check out the thread on MySpace at the American Craft Forum, the link to the whole thread is below. You need to have a profile set up to read it, but if you don’t, it’s a fairly painless process to get set up, and you’ll meet some great artists there too.
http://www.americancraftforum.com/cgi-bin/iB/ikonboard.cgi?s=
1d10be3f97b1a3553cbf5bff491a5e51;act=ST;f=1;t=2170

The Crafts Report recently published an article on how artists can use MySpace to promote themselves. The author of the article, Jim Calder, graciously provided a link to it:
http://www.craftsreport.com/august06/rp_myspace.html

The search engine marketing company, Spannerworks has released an ebook that provides an overview of what social media is all about. You can get a copy for free here. It’s in PDF format, so you’ll need Adobe Acrobat to download the ebook. The link to this resource came by way of Steve Rubel’s blog, Micro Persuasion.