When I was down in Austin for SXSW back in March, I got to meet Carrie Atkinson, the woman behind “Sock It to Me“. I was pretty excited, I LOVE her socks. I remember buying them from her years ago at Saturday Market and buy them all the time at Sock Dreams. Socks are a present my husband knows I will always love!

Carrie’s done an amazing job growing her business based around socks! For over 6 years she’s built her business, one pair of socks at a time and you can now find her socks all over the globe in stores and online. I had a chance to interview Carrie about her business and her secrets to marketing her online store!

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• The passion behind the bread, Dave’s Killer style

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• The passion behind the bread, Dave’s Killer style

Being a native Portlander, David Strom knows his way around PDX. Over the last year, he’s become an important online source for Portland events and festivals.  Starting off slowly and building an audience, Dave started a blog called “Dave Knows: Portland‘ and has developed a great formula of providing the right content and keeping people coming back for more. Learn how he got started and where he’s headed with “Dave Knows: Portland“.

What inspired you to start your blog?

In Portland during the summer there’s something going on every weekend
- street fairs, beer fests, cultural festivals, etc. These are the
kinds of things that interest me. A few years ago I found myself
keeping track of upcoming events and coordinating my friends’
weekends, via email. Basic information about these kinds of events,
date and time maybe, could be culled from newspapers and other
websites, but other than for the bigger beer fests, it was really hard
to find information about them. I’ve noticed that if it doesn’t have a
corporate sponsor, most mainstream media will relegate an event to
some obscure, usually reader submitted, “community happenings”
section, or not mention it at all.

One day in Spring 2007, I was hanging out with friends when someone
asked “Hey, when’s the Polish Festival?” Another friend, a long time
recipient of my weekend coordinating emails, immediately answered
“Dave knows!” That was the Eureka moment. I was working in web
development at the time, and knew setting up a blog was fairly simple.
I already had the basic infrastructure for the blog already, in the
form of bookmarked webpages and my email archive. In addition to my
interest in festivals, street fairs, and beer, I have an insatiable
curiosity about Portland, pinball, soccer, accordion music, poutine,
and other esoteric things that, by mainstream media standards, are too
obscure for them to waste much time on. I knew there was a niche in
Portland for these sorts of things.

What’s been the best/most effective way to promote it?

Definitely, the best and most effective way to promote the blog has
been to understand and embrace blog culture. I always credit and link
to other bloggers’ work if it in anyway influences my post (something
traditional journalists are loathe to do – they don’t want to miss the
appearance of having a scoop!). It’s the polite thing to do, it builds
up camaraderie in the blogging community, and frankly, it helps us all
get better google rankings.

I’ve experimented with reddit and stumbleupon, and some other local
and topical aggregators, but self promotion is usually discouraged on
these sorts of sites, and ultimately I’m happier with steady, somewhat
predictable, growth than occasional weird spikes in traffic.

Right now the blog has some bus ads running (a fabulous birthday gift
from my awesome girlfriend!
http://portland.daveknows.org/2009/12/18/dave-knows-on-the-back-of-the-bus/),
but it’s hard to identify visitors to the blog who visit because
they’ve seen a bus ad. Traffic has been up the past few months; I
like to think some of that is due to the ads.

How has your experience been being a blogger in the Twitter community,
what have you learned?

Twitter has proven to be a great boon to my blog. It’s not entirely
frowned upon to self promote – if you’re measured about it.
Ultimately people can just stop following you if your Twitter habits
irritate them. But of course, you don’t want to irritate them. When
I have a new post I announce it on Twitter, but that’s about the only
self promotion I do. Lots of the folks I follow on Twitter have blogs
or other creative projects, so I get updates on those in real time,
and I can retweet the things that interest me; similar to blogging,
there’s a Twitter ethic of retweeting with credit.

What’s the future of Dave Knows Portland, where do you want to be in a year?

The blog has opened some doors for me that I would never had expected.
I’ve been a guest on Portland Sucks and Savor
Portland. I’ve been asked for interviews [by
you!]. It’s been somewhat disconcerting for me, as an introvert, to
find that in some circles my alter ego, “Dave Knows”, is a
“personality”, and considered a source of “news”.

My girlfriend and I are constantly brainstorming for ways to maybe
possibly someday make a living from our blogs (Heather blogs at
http://mile73.com and we share the blogging duties at
http://portlandpoutine.com), and we have a few long term ideas I’m not
at liberty to discuss I just started offering advertising space
on my blog (http://portland.daveknows.org/advertise/), but so far the
blog barely makes about $1/day from Google Adsense. Over the next
year the staples of my blog will remain events, beer, and soccer news.
But my blog posts on fellow Portlanders’ creative projects have been
fun to work on, and are well received. I plan to do a lot more posts
like them in the future.

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What’s so special about bread? Dave’s Killer Bread has managed to make a great product and have a fascinating, compelling story behind the business. If you’d like to learn the story, check out this video. Relaying stories can be a challenge, but the marketing team at Dave’s have made quite an impact. Here’s what they’ve done right:

• DKB has an active Twitter account, where they share upcoming events and bread specials they are running at their store.. I noticed a lot of cross over between Facebook and Twitter accounts, which great since most folks use one or the other to communicate. Using both to share info can be really powerful.

• Using the power of video – they set up their own YouTube account where they are storing different interviews and video about the making the bread and Dave’s story.

• Teaming up with the Goodbyn Lunchbox for a sandwich contest. The content was based on people posting their favorite sandwich using Dave’s Killer Bread on the DKB Facebook page and the top 3 creative ones would be selected as the winners. The Goodbyn Lunchbox Facebook page lists all of the winners and points to Dave’s site for the recipes.

• Also, they are getting direct feedback from customers about the bread daily. One customer wrote in that they noticed that the “Good Seed” bread was undercooked in the middle lately and Dave’s team responded within the hour saying “thanks for letting us know and they will be fixing it soon”. That’s impressive.

Do you know of similar companies that are paving the road with passion about their product? Can’t wait to see what Dave’s Killer Bread will do next!

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• Sock it to Marketing: Interview with Carrie Atkinson

Bridget Benton is a super busy lady. She’s a mixed-media artist, art teacher/facilitator and creativity trainer – supporting people in the care and feeding of their own creative spark. If you need inspiration or instructions for numerous art projects, check out her website: Eyes Aflame. Bridget and I crossed paths when I attended a mentoring session offered by a local business education program. Thanks to Bridget’s mentorship and encouragement, I took charge of my passion for social communication for businesses and educated myself about social media by attending classes, etc.

What’s your business?

I’m an artist and an art teacher – I work in a wide range of media, so my
teaching isn’t very media-centric; it’s much more about process.  I really
believe that everyone is creative, and I love to help people find that spark
in themselves during my workshops.  I work with adults – there are a lot of
great folks out there working with kids.  I feel like my job is to help
those grown-ups who did have a bad art experience as kids rediscover their
joy in making stuff!

When do you start using social media and why?

I first joined Facebook with some reluctance because I had classmates in
grad school who were using it to stay in touch; and I signed up on Twitter
because a lot of the people whose blogs I followed where also tweeting, so
it seemed like a good way to stay in touch and find out what was going on!
What I discovered was that Facebook connected me to a lot of my friends and
family, and that Twitter kept me in touch with a lot of resources and events
in the arts, crafts, and creative community.

Has social media changed your business?

The way that I market my classes and my artwork is constantly shifting; I
used to rely a lot more on flyers and list serves. At the heart of it,
though, I believe that marketing is about building relationships.

Social media, especially Facebook and Twitter are a new way for me to build
relationships – and it makes keeping my friends and family up to date on the
classes I’m offering and the shows I’m in a lot easier.  My friends and
family are on my e-mail newsletter list, but a lot of them don’t really read
it.  This gives us an easy and low-key way to talk about our mutual creative
endeavors.

When I tweet and post on Facebook, I try to consider whether the information
I’m sharing has some interest or entertainment factor – I ask myself, “Will
this be of interest to or entertain my potential clients, my friends and
family?” My clients are like friends who are looking to get something very
specific out of our relationship – creative inspiration for their personal
and professional lives.  One of the things I discovered by engaging more
fully in social media is that my friends and family often look to me for the
same thing – they get curious about my new artwork, or the new classes I’m
offering. They’re just as interested in the resources I pass on about the
entrepreneurial climate or a great craft project I found on-line. Now I
don’t feel so embarrassed about “marketing” to my friends and family,
because it’s just one one more component of my life that I share, and it’s
one more component of our relationship.  And frankly, that makes it a lot
easier to “market” to my clients, too, when I consider that much of why
they’ll choose to take a class from me is because they feel comfortable with
me or identify with me in some way.

What are you looking forward to social media changing in the future?

I almost have to laugh at this one – I’m not much of an early adopter when
it comes to new technologies, and have no idea how things might shift in the
future.  I do know that blogging and engaging in social media is keeping me
in touch with people all over the country – so one of the big questions for
me now is how to offer courses, services, and creative inspiration to those
people outside of my immediate geographic area.  There are lots of ways to
do it – e-books, on-line classes, etc.  I just have to figure out the way to
do it that fits best with my personality, style, and mission.

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