We have been uploading photos to Flickr since 2005. Our very first set is the 2005 Indy 500, which includes this photo of Chuck interviewing the late Paul Dana, who made it his mission in life to see the Indy Car Series run on ethanol and who was killed in a crash during practice for the Homestead race in 2006, the first Indy race to use 10 percent ethanol. There are 35 photos in the entire set, taken with just a regular point and shoot digital camera – before we went professional – and they have been viewed over 700 times. That’s when Chuck found out that he needed a better camera with a bigger lens to capture Indy in action!

We have a total of nearly 66,000 photos in our photostream, in more than 300 sets. All together, they have been viewed over 2.1 million times! I wish we had the time to go through categorize them all but all of the sets have tags and they are pretty easy to search. We have an open source policy for all of our content and encourage people to utilize any of our photos and audio. It’s nice when we get credit, of course, but not required! Browse through our photos next time you get a chance – you might be surprised at what you find!

For starters, let’s look at a statement in chapter one, “. . . forming groups has gotten a lot easier. To put it in economic terms, the costs incurred by creating a new group or joining an existing one have fallen in recent years, and not just by a little bit. They have collapsed.”

Clay’s talking about groups. Any kind of group. Could be farmers. Could be farmers who love green tractors. Could be any group of people you can imagine. Until recently it wasn’t easy or inexpensive to belong to groups much less create and manage them. I suppose you could think of the listeners to a local radio station as a group. But how much does it cost to buy an FCC license and transmit your signal? More than you and I have. Been there, done that.

Today though, using new media tools like blogging or podcasting, which includes social networks like Facebook, I dare say most people can afford to create their own group and have global reach. This is allowing many more groups to exist. It also means companies are having to re-think how they get their message out since there are many new and different channels to do so. It also means they can’t apply the same measurement standards to the tactics they’re using. If they do then they’ll find themselves stuck in the same old, same old and wonder why others are getting ahead of them.

There was a great AP story out last week that focused on how food companies are targeting the writers of niche blogs. It helps illustrate how important this new proliferation of “groups” is becoming. Here’s an excerpt with my own highlighting added:

One blog with a couple of thousand daily readers may not have a huge impact, but marketers can easily reach several such blogs with little effort, said Debbie Weil, a corporate blogging consultant based in Washington. “Companies are paying attention to the concept of lots and lots of tiny little markets. Added up, it’s significant,” Weil said.

Food blogs “may not have the mass reach, but it’s a more engaged, specific audience,” said Greg Zimprich, a spokesman for General Mills Inc. “Their readers are going to care a lot more about a product of ours.”

I know it’s not easy shifting the paradigm of the mass audience to one of multiple niche audiences but think about the value of your investment. I suggest that investing fewer dollars to reach the most motivated or engaged customers may have a greater return that spending huge amounts of money, most of which is reaching people who aren’t interested in your product or message.

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