Ease of site navigation
Emphasis on expansion of multimedia content
Focus on connecting collectors based on geography with the addition of mapping details / features
Add incentives to increase user base (freebies, etc)
Partnerships with established brands (GoAntiques+)
At present, the homepage seems to be showing the same images day after day. Other than searching, it’s difficult to figure out what’s actually on the site / what users can get out of the site. To this point, it wasn’t until I had been looking at the site for several days that I found the link to Gemr’s youtube page.
There's a great misconception that original video content, whether it be for television or online, is cost prohibitive. The reality is that it's talent prohibitive. With the right team, high quality HD video content can be produced remarkably fast at a price point where the benefits exponentially outweigh the costs. I would look toward the two remaining Brimfield shows of 2015, Comic Cons, Sneaker Shows and other places where you can get the most bang for your buck with the goal of producing at least an hour of original content from each day of shooting, made up of taped / edited segments (as with ‘The Antique Show’) as well as LIVE segments, streaming online.
Whilst at Brimfield and beyond I’d place a special emphasis on connecting with dealers. They are the heart of the antiques and collecting business. If dealers sign up, they’ll encourage their customers to sign up.
Rather than tackling 50 states and hundreds of millions of collectors, I’d suggest visiting collecting hubs and trying to build a strong user base and community within those zones and then work out from there. To that point, geography / mapping is one of the most underutilized tools in social media. It’s great to know that collectors share interests, but wouldn’t you want to know who is 25 miles away and who is 2500 miles away? Building local collector bases leads to connecting offline, which leads to more sharing online. And for dealers, this is of the utmost importance. Most antiques and collectible dealers cannot be found in the yellow pages and few will even show up on a google search, so wouldn’t it be great if you were visiting a city on vacation to be able to see every shop within a certain radius, with photos of their items for sale, collections, etc.
With so much competition in the collecting space and so many potential users in their teens and 20s,
a modern approach needs to be taken to draw in users, and more importantly retain users.
When dealing with sneakers and toy collectors something as simple as a giving away a $3 t-shirt with a witty saying, pertinent to their hobby, could lead to their joining the site and spreading the word to all of their friends. I happen to have both a sneaker t-shirt line, Kicks Collector, as well as a toy / pop culture line, Cape & Cowl.
Multimidia can also be used as an incentive, which it looks like you’ve already started to take advantage of my producing pieces on Gemr user’s collections.
As has proven succesful for decades, attaching one’s name / brand to exisiting succesful companies will draw more attention to one’s brand. The acquisition of GoAntiques will certainly be a great headstart toward building a succesful marketplace. I also believe Gemr has the capabilities to develop and create original video content with the goal of pitching and producing for television. In doing so, you’d be doing something that few other sites have tried (LXTV being the one example I can think of). Partnerships with television networks can build a user base that few other realms can.
