This is an extract from the draft John Grant’s new book Co-opportunity, contracted for publication with John Wiley & Sons Limited, January 2010. This extract is section 4 of the book – Economic Resilience.

As any small business owner knows by now, an effective and consistent social media strategy is a low-cost way to build a broad and loyal customer base.
The problem that can arise is the time-consuming, redundant activity of staying on top of the multitudes of platforms available. For some people, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to mind both the physical and digital aspects of a business.
Postling is a simple solution to this problem. Created by two of the minds behind Etsy, it’s a start-up that was devised with small business owners in mind. One post puts your [...]

PSFK is proud to announce news that we will host a Good Ideas Salon with YouTube next month. On 6th August 2009, PSFK and YouTube will host a Good Ideas Salon in the Bay Area. For the event, Mia Quagliarello (Product Marketing Manager – Community YouTube) will moderate a panel of community experts — Jen Burton (Senior Community Manager, Digg), Heather Champ (Director of Community, Flickr) and Matthew Stinchcomb (VP – Community, Etsy) — to discuss what can be learned from the passionate people who visit these sites, how relationships are fostered at scale, ways to engage with users, and [...]

The boutique retailer movement has been steadily gaining in popularity – and sales – thanks to online marketplaces like Etsy that have built themselves around producers of handcrafted and bespoke goods so it was only a matter of time before we started to see these communities pop up around the idea of artisanal food. Two such sites, Foodoro and Foodzie, have launched with a similar goal of connecting small scale producers, growers and bakers with people that are passionate about the food they eat.
In essence, both companies are attempting to take the appeal of the local food movement and broaden [...]

Craft marketplace Etsy have released their latest sales and stats figures which includes an impressive figure for growth at the site. In March, $12 million of goods were sold – almost 18% higher than February’s $10.2 million. March saw 788, 253 sold and 1,321,317 listed. We guess that makes the average price of a good on Etsy $15.22.
More details on Etsy sales can be found here.

A new law scheduled to go in effect February 10th may limit or prohibit many hand crafted toy makers to continue selling their products. The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act will mandate intensive and expensive testing procedures for toys and clothing designed for children under the age of 12. The law is designed to look out for lead and other harmful substances in kids items, but the expense may be too much for small scale operations to bear. Its reported that such third party tests can run as high $50,000 which puts it out of reach for all but the [...]