Dawn Douglass is one of my favorite entrepreneurs. She has been working hard on projects based around the idea that the web can be a force for good for creative professionals, looking to make money off of their talents. For me, she has been a lesson in how perseverance and hard one came help to bring projects to their fruition. Today she is talking about her latest project, Swig.

What makes Swig different from Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and all others is that Swig will be a social-economic network. While providing tools for conversation and discovery is fundamental to any social network, I believe it’s just as essential to allow members the means to increase their economic well being and to simultaneously help the products, companies and people we each care about survive the economic collapse and all its reverberations that will likely be felt for years.

I’ve designed Swig to be a more efficient, more useful and more encompassing social network than anything else available, but it’s also a bottom-up solution to the economic crisis. Swig will generate demand and boost product and service excellence as quality and social goodwill are rewarded.

I’ll give you an example…

Say you’ve lost your job and desperately need to earn money. You’ve always loved dogs and they naturally take to you, so you decide to start a dog walking and dog sitting service. You sign up for Swig to start getting the word out about your service. You create a feed filled with funny pet stories and practical information about dog care. You share the ads of dog-related products and services you use and are willing to endorse. As your friends, family and followers click on these ads, you make money.

Soon you have a number of followers. You decide to start buying a daily cartoon about dogs, created by another Swig member. Even though the cartoon costs you a bit of money each day (taken from the ad money you’re accumulating, so no direct outlay of cash is needed), it’s more than worth it. You’ve optionally chosen for each cartoon installment to have an ad you’ve approved attached, and the click-through rate on these is high, so you’re earning a lot more than you spend on the feature. And if somebody else “swigs” a gag from you to place in their own feed or conversation group, you’ll get some of that income, too. Plus, the daily cartoons spark good conversation, increase your visibility, and allow you to make less frequent posts without worrying about losing readers.

As time goes by, you become a recognized “expert” in the dog care space. One of your essays about what to look for and lookout for when choosing a doggie daycare center has proven to be very popular, so you decide to make it more easily searchable and to charge for it. After all, other Swig members are also earning ad revenue and thereby have money to spend for “copper content” like essays, cartoons, entertaining videos and animations, games and utility apps, music, and so on. It costs only 15 cents to access the essay, but with tens of thousands of hits a year, it adds up and gives you yet another revenue stream.

Between getting new clients from your Swig network, sales of more and more essays, and the ad revenue, you’re making some decent money. So you decide to invest some of it in creating a
new dog toy you’ve designed. You use Swig to find a local seamstress who commits to making ten toys a day, which you easily sell to your followers.

In the meantime, an artist who creates pet portraits from photos has come to you asking to piggyback on your popularity. You negotiate to promote her work in exchange for 15% of her sales.
You’ve accumulated many funny animal photos that you’ve taken on dog walks. You’re surprised when people start buying licenses for some of the best ones to illustrate their own essays, to post within their conversation groups, to use in PowerPoint presentations, and so on. Each photo’s license is just pennies (hence the “copper” in “copper content”) but again, it adds up. And when another creator uses a few of your photos in a video mashup that likewise becomes copper content, you get a fair share of that income, too.

Then Iams Company contacts you. They’re hurting as dog and cat owners switch to cheaper pet food brands because of the recession. They know you are an influencer in the dog space, and they would like to secure your attention and goodwill. They offer to fly you to their corporate office where you’ll participate in focus groups and get behind-the-scenes tours of their manufacturing process. Of course, you let your readers know what’s happening, so they can decide if this corporate schmoozing is affecting your credibility. Mostly, your readers just want to hear what you’re doing and learning on the trip, so you take lots of video, which you can attach to any IAMs ads you decide to distribute later on. This will likely increase their ranking in the Swig Search area, and should increase your ad revenue.

Okay, that’s enough, but I could go on. And on. There will be countless ways to enhance your economic well being using Swig as a platform. All it takes is desire, talent, creativity and passion. Especially passion. Passion is attractive. Whatever you have true passion for – be it a love for dogs or blacksmithing or arranging flowers – rest assured that people with similar or compatible interests will find you, and you can leverage that shared interest into creative ways to have fun, gain skill, and make money.

The most important thing to note here is how success breeds success. Somebody who just loves to walk dogs can ultimately make money for a cartoonist, a portrait artist, a seamstress and even a big corporation like Iams. Passion begets passion. Demand creates demand. That’s why pulling together via a demand-creating social-economic network is such a winnable strategy for these depressed times. The more that the Swig network helps talented companies and individuals make money, the more that demand for all kinds of talents will grow, and the better off all Swig members will become. In fact, the better off the entire economy will be. Economic growth from the bottom up will restore trust, help stabilize markets and assist in keeping top-down disaster from ever happening again.
Remember, “Share the Wealth, Increase the Good.” That’s SWIG.

Being An Entrepreneur

There’s a saying in the comic strip world that “good writing can carry poor art, but the best art can’t carry poor writing.” If you’ve read my blog you’ll know I have a similar idea about the social web: good anthropology can carry poor technology, but the best technology can’t carry poor anthropology. What do I mean by that? Take a look at Twitter. When Twitter took off, it was down as much as it was up, but people still loved it because it has good anthropology. During the same years Twitter has existed, how many Web 2.0 companies with more impressive, rock solid technology have joined the Dead Pool?
In a nutshell, technology is machines talking to machines. Anthropology is about humans talking to humans. The “social” in “social web” demands that entrepreneurs understand human beings as well as they understand technology if they want to be successful.

So if you don’t appreciate anthropology, my advice is to find somebody who does, or you’ll likely waste a lot of time and money, or at the very least not realize all the success you otherwise could.

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