Week 12 Part A: Using Business Specific Online Tools

    Business specific online tools are a way to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the process of a business. For my own business, I had to find how my specific niche could best utilize tools such as livestreaming, short form videos, social networking for professionals, and online collaboration tools. It's fairly difficult to integrate some of these tools as a single person run business so I put some thought into future projects where the business expanded to have more workers within it.

    Livestreaming would be a great online tool to use for myself because the products directly relate to the art that I produce and connections that I have with my own audience. Using a platform such as Twitch ,which has a fairly poplar category devoted to art, would allow myself to work on projects while also interacting with my audience. This could also help generate some revenue through streaming if this platform was popular enough as well; this would be pretty beneficial because most of my time is devoted to drawing which can take hours that are not directly related to selling. Interacting with my audience is good to keep building up my relationship with the audience as well as the art community interacting with other artists on the platform. Another benefit that comes with using Twitch is that it can enable crowd sourcing from the audience by seeing what they would like to see made, taking requests, and getting a feel of what people are looking into at the moment.

    TikTok is another platform that I've talked about joining to make quick short form videos of my process, displaying products, and making packaging videos of. It's a great way of interacting with the audience to gauge what interests them based on which videos are popular; with the packaging videos, I had talked about how this could give an added incentive to customers to buy products to see their order being fulfilled on video. Like Twitch, this platform is also a good way to pickup on trends and interests that my audience and customer base want to see more of. At the moment, TikTok is the front runner for where trends will start and then commute to other platforms so it would be a good way to see what people are interested in as far as subject matter goes and what kinds of content they want to see before the market gets overpopulated. Highlights from Twitch (or YouTube) and from my screen recordings could also be commuted onto this platform to create easy content to keep active on the platform and promote my other platforms as well. Virality is another benefit that could come from TikTok to further grow my audience by capitalizing on trending sounds or video formats which could help push more business by growing a larger audience quicker.

    Growing the business to the point where I no longer am able to keep up with production or am unable to produce certain items (mass amounts of prints, pins, apparel, décor, and other goods like skate decks) would push me to look into platforms like LinkedIn to be able to work on the artwork for products. LinkedIn would be a useful tool to find other businesses, groups, and individuals that work in the manufacturing of these things that could lend to giving advice in finding a good manufacturer, how to handle finances better, or employ the right people to grow my operations to keep my business running smoothly. I think that this could be the best way for me to find project managers to keep projects and collections of more items on schedule for releases. Accounting clerks would be good to maintain funds for multiple projects are being paid correctly and fulfilled for the different distributors and manufactures that would have to be worked with. Customer service agents would also have to expand to meet with customer demands and satisfaction.

    With a larger operation with multiple people or departments it would be smart to use collaboration tools to create and maintain communication throughout the business as well as with other businesses. From the SnackStation article, I found that Monday.com would be a good platform to use for my own business because it had a lot of capabilities from messaging, to scheduling, to delegating, and overall project management. This would be very beneficial to keep on track with many projects so that production for new collections would run smoothly. The only downside to this platform that I found is that it has limits to file sharing which could prove to be problematic for very large files for art, mockups, or project files; I'm not too worried about this because the limit is 500MB and larger file packets can be zipped to reduce file size that won't degrade the quality of the contents inside of them. Overall, it would be a good move to look into a collaboration tool like Monday.com to make sure all parts of projects are moving along smoothly and keep communication on project progress and problems to ensure that everything is completed in time for deadlines.