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“Viral growth” is an overused buzzword.
It implies, rightfully, the spread of an idea through a sort of mental virus, led typically by people, as opposed to typical marketing.
Today I’m going to change the definition to one more consistent with nature: The spread of an virus through feeding, growth, and it’s natural abilities in it’s natural environment.
Symbiostock is extremely unique in a very significant way – it models the more sinister “Bot nets” which are typically spammer co-ops. Symbiostock is like one of those example’s in nature where something generally very bad is altered slightly to have a good purposes. In fact, its so un-obvious what Symbiostock really is, that the thought has never really occurred to anyone that Symbiostock is a “Bot Net”.
PLrang had some fun at our expense one day, when he found a weakness in the Symbiocard system (fixed since then) and implanted some Javascript to have an effect on every site it was connected to. It was funny and threatening, but his remark was “Yeah, Symbiostock would make a great bot net!”
SYMBIOSTOCK’S VIRAL GROWTH:
I’m going to be finishing up the analytics system which will be a part of every site, leveraged mostly by people like Cascoly and AJT. Every Symbiostock site can become, in effect, like a creature in a colony — in this case having several highly-tuned senses to aware the colony of what is happening. Intelligence and analytics is everything, when you know how to measure and utilize it.
While this was in the plan, I’ve been stuck as a slave of Symbiostock for so long, I’ve almost forgotten my original plans.
Symbiostock sites are going to aggregate and share (with the network, privately) lots of information. They are also going to utilize Twitter in highly productive ways to grow both in customer awareness as well as contributors.
Your first thought is “Your not going to spam are you?” and of course the answer is no. Thats not a good way to become popular. But as of today I have several methods fully worked out where the network can start to really utilize its strengths in growth.
My intention with Symbiostock was to “never need money” as a whole, but each unit (animal) would do enough work to sustain itself (ie, you guys carry your own burden) but the colonly as a whole would compliment itself much in the way a bee colony does.
You’ve probably noticed the main site is down — I’m taking a good amount of time to finally take care of the central parts of Symbiostock — these websites, and create another search engine, and give AJT and Cascoly many more analytics and resources to use from the sites.
Symbiostock as a whole is constantly interacting with the web. Whereas most websites are passive, displaying information on demand, Symbiostock sites are always carrying out actions, interacting with the external web in a robotic way. Its amazing really, and yet its easy to take for granted just what we have.
Long story short: I’m back 😀 Once I’m done being a bug slave I can start doing the meangingful work again! I have a definite way to promote Symbiostock by it’s natural strengths as a network, a sort of bot net, or bee hive.
In the meantime, there is one thing I would ask of people: Please spread some positive words on Symbiostock. Generally “Bugs” are the main thing that gets mention, and not the 95% of things that are going very, very right. Its human. Still, it reflects badly and hardly shows what we are really about. I wish Symbiostock had more positive publicity…if people can help contribute to the colony in that way, you’ll find the good comes back around quickly.
I’m not sure what carrot to dangle to get this to happen. Even asking people to write a short blurb about their *own* sites or offer their favorite image to be promoted on FB: Only a few people have taken me up on it.
I plan on doing an email blast when I’ve made more progress on things as a whole — the email list I had developed since Symbio’s early conception. I’m also going to be using some special alternative methods to getting attention toward Symbiostock. Its a done deal 😀
To add a little momentum, though, I’ll add the facebook link to the theme itself in various places.
Hey
I spoke to a food blogger who complained that she didn’t want to go to the big agencies to get an expensive subscription when she needed just a few images now and then, and said it was very hard finding ways. Hopefully one of you with food images got a sale or two because I gave her the link to Symbiostock. The only food I have is a beer and a bowl of olives…
After that I have been thinking of the WHY of Symbiostock and began writing some text to use on my own website below.
From a marketing perspective, I think the main thing needs to be how we HELP the buyers.
I am sure it needs polishing though – it’s a draft.Symbiostock Fair Trade Network
Symbiostock was founded in 2013 as a kind of Fair Trade stock image association, for the purpose of making it easier for image buyers to get an image on the spot without having to pay for extended subscription plans, and of course also for photographers to cut the middleman and keep 100% of the price for an image, compared to between 20-60% with the large agencies, as they spiral towards zero in price.
What is special with Symbiostock is that independent member photographers, illustrators and artists license royalty-free and rights managed images directly from their own websites to the customer. We think it can be a win-win situation for both buyers and sellers in certain situations.
There are almost 235 000 images to this date at Symbiostock and more are added each day. Here is a link to the search engine: http://www.symbiostock.info. Click on the link, find an image, click and go directly to the artist’s site, and buy a license.
How’s that?
I should of course mention that I built the text on what I found on Cascoly’s website.@artesiawells wrote:
Hey
I spoke to a food blogger who complained that she didn’t want to go to the big agencies to get an expensive subscription when she needed just a few images now and then, and said it was very hard finding ways. Hopefully one of you with food images got a sale or two because I gave her the link to Symbiostock. The only food I have is a beer and a bowl of olives…….[/i]
just a note — 141 sites have a total of 21308 food images http://cascoly.com/symbio/list.asp?list=401
(beer has a respectable 877)
@cascoly wrote:
@artesiawells wrote:
(beer has a respectable 877)
Actually incorporating “beer” into promotion might actually help immensely. Open source is really “free beer” to many, but I think we could be a little less metaphorical…
@leo wrote:
@cascoly wrote:
@artesiawells wrote:
(beer has a respectable 877)
Actually incorporating “beer” into promotion might actually help immensely. Open source is really “free beer” to many, but I think we could be a little less metaphorical…
Or alternatively, what would it cost to give them free beer? I’ll give them my share as I don’t like beer 😀
Jo
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