Respected Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson often talks about the action taking place in the comments of his blog.
So I’m surprised more people haven’t picked up and reposted his comment from a post at the end of January.
If it’s a bit too small – Fred is revealing Twitter is the 3rd biggest referrer of transactional visits to handmade marketplace Etsy, with Flickr at number 2, and Facebook at number 4.
And Etsy is generating over $1 million a month in revenue, with $100 million worth of goods sold in 2008.
Now this might not convince everyone – after all, Etsy sales are by a large number of individual and small retailers who will be promoting their items individuals through Flickr, Twitter and Facebook – and the scale is the aggregate of those referrals – the ‘Long Tail‘, if you will!
So essentially there are 100s, if not 1000s of people handling social media marketing and customer service for their products, which doesn’t tackle the scale issue of large companies changing the way they do business, and utlising social media.
But there were 300,000 people in the California Gold Rush, and noone continued to deny there was gold in those hills.