Professional Blog 2 BSB
For Business Storytelling and Brand Development at Full Sail University
From Prompt
“For this blog assignment, it will be necessary for you to research, review and select one professional association that you are interested in that relates to your specific industry. You will analyze the industry and discuss one or more of their major programs that influence your industry. In your analysis, you could comment on the association’s programs/services, marketing, legislative policy, research and task force or committee objectives.”
My Response:
Webcomics.com can be considered a trade association by definition, but not in a traditional sense. It does not try to call itself a trade association and avoids the extra legal steps in doing so. It does not attempt to raise funds for political reasons or hire extra staff to tackle key industry objectives. It seems run by one man, Brad Guigar, who is connected to various working web cartoonists.
Around the beginning of 2010, Brad Guigar made a case to turn the site into a paid annual subscription model with a free portal for the public: the case being wife, kids, and the ability to provide a better service. The service at $30 a year extends the conversations and tips from Half Pixel’s “How to Make Webcomics”. It also creates a social hub where creators can collaborate on individual projects. It is the closest thing to a web-comics trade association.
Guigar manages a bridge between experts like Robert Khoo of Penny Arcade to give a direct connection to novice, mid-range, and expert web cartoonists. The discourse around marketing and productivity is invaluable.
How to use the site for extending your network?
Easy answer, just post on the forums. Don’t post BS attempts to get attention. Either answer someone’s question or respond to someone’s comment. Try and reach out to other creators working on similar projects and see if they want to team up to finish a project. Networking with other creators is so easy if a person is polite and are going through the same creative endeavors with artists at conferences and at webcomics.com.
However, finding fans and making a living purely on creative endeavors is still the tuff part. Webcomics.com just gives you all the tools to make web-comics. Recently, the tech questions and development of new media has been the focus of web-cartoonist and can cause the medium to change.
Webcomics.com is Part of an Industry Change Agent
With other related Half Pixel Projects such as Webcomics Weekly and the success of each member in the content driven industry, webcomics.com creates industry trends and standards. For example, “Project Wonderful”, a similar service to Google AdSense, is a industry staple for web-comics because it was mentioned many times on web-comics weekly and on Webcomics.com. Currently, the service is shaping the conversation about how tech affects the content driven markets related to web-comics.
This service could lead to a trade association because I believe it has the ability to create committees, awards, and political movements related to protecting the freedom for independent creators to post their content on the web. However, that would mean a completely different service and headache for Guigar to deal with. If something like “Net Neutrality” started to affect the webcomics.com community, I believe it would become a political trade association overnight.
Anyone up for the challenge?
Re: Trade associations?
ReplyDelete@ Brad and Tyson
@All, and thanks all for exploring the idea.
This had a lot to do with my assignment of what a trade association could do?
Here's a long article from 2006 that explains how trade association become conduits for large political legislative campaigns by simply collecting massive funds through the associations.
http://www.politicalaccountability.net/index.php?ht=display/ArticleDetails/i/1191/pid/188
Bottom line, we’re against money, lots and lots of money; however, a trade association can act to draw a lot of money to counter campaigning against political movements.
Web-comics may be small in the content driven markets where large corporations can already impact search engines like Google; however, there are many people out there that see Net Neutrality as a hinderers to independent entrepreneurs’. Senator Al Franklin cites YouTube beating GoogleTV because of Net Neutrality.
There needs to be a Content Independent Trade Association to raise funds for counter political action. If tomorrow’s decision is unfavorable, then a trade association can create political campaign to pass legislation to create a reform to bring back aspects of Net Neutrality (Like an appeal process).
I know I'm asking for a lot, but the fear the wild west of content on the web being over saddens me.
Cheers to X mas Miracles