Instead of dreaming about having millions of fans, nurture one thousand ‘true fans’. That’s the advice for creative individuals from guru Kevin Kelly. He writes: “A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 …
Category: Recent Posts
Selling stories (“We don’t sell beer…”)
The Duvel Cafe in Stockholm is a bar which sells a range of Belgian beers. They are tasty, strong and expensive (compared to England). I was fascinated by the beer glasses as much as the beer itself, so I took a couple of photos. Part of what I was buying and enjoying was the packaging …
Madonna – creative businesswoman
Madonna has recently terminated her contract with Warner Music after 25 years and signed a new contract with tour company Live Nation. Now that digital music is so cheap, not to mention illegal downloads, Madonna recognises that her main income in future will be from performances and related products, not music sales. So she has …
Managing Cash Flow and Fixed Costs
One of the biggest challenges for creative businesses, especially fast-growing enterprises, is the management of cash flow. When businesses fail, it’s frequently because of a cash flow crisis rather than lack of profitability. The gap between cash outflows and cash inflows becomes too big and they run out of cash. An unprofitable business will inevitably …
Selling cheese: an error of marketing strategy
An incident in the the BBC TV programme ‘The Apprentice’ provided an excellent example of a marketing error. It also demonstrated how the term ‘marketing’ is often misunderstood and used simply to mean ‘advertising’ or ‘selling’. In fact the marketing process goes much deeper than selling. In one episode, Sir Alan Sugar sent his teams …
Artistic Passion – combined with Business Focus
Rob Kinsey is an artist with a passion for the sport of motocross, defining himself on his website as ‘motocross racer, fan and award-winning artist’. Art and sport have been important to Rob for many years. He qualified as a technical illustrator in the 1970’s and his artwork has developed in parallel with his participation …
Telling Africa’s Story to the World
Telling Africa’s story from Africans’ point of view is the mission of Africa Media Online, the agency representing African media professionals to the global market. “In the ‘information society’, if we are to create some semblance of global information democracy, it is important that Africans are heard from their perspective,” says Africa Media Online’s David …
Creative Times – The Message Must be right for the Medium
The Message must be right for the medium – and vice versa. Continue to full article
Whose photos are on your website?
A friend of a friend of mine has just received an invoice for £7,000 from Getty Images for the unlicensed use of one of their photographs on his website. Ouch! For a while now, the bigger picture agencies such as Getty, Jupiter Media and Corbis have been marking their copyright material with code numbers which …
Online Social Networking – for Business
How can creative entrepreneurs benefit from using social networking systems such as MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, del.icio.us, Second Life – and others? Leanda Ryan is the director of Leanda Ryan Graphic Design, in Manchester, UK. Her story is an interesting one: “Flickr was the first service I signed up for 2005. I posted a …