MAIN AND ME VIDEO STORYBOARD (DRAFT)

(Look and feel similar to the following video made by illustrator Christoph Niemann to honor Maurice Sendak:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH2OaaktJrw&feature=player_embedded#!

The internet changes the way we shop.

It delivers a world of infinite convenience and selection to our fingertips,

…but it doesn’t deliver the whole world. In fact, there is a world of remarkable products and services that still remains invisible to online shoppers: Main Street!

That’s right, despite all our advances in technology, online shoppers still can’t see most of what’s for sale in the brick and mortar stores around them…

…so even online shoppers who want to support local often shop online and

indirectly add to the problems of Main Street?!

Or at least they did until now. Introducing Main and Me,

the free-to-use mobile and web app that solves the problem of getting Main Street online by making it as simple as snap…

caption…

and “check in”…

for resource-challenged merchants and downtown directors to begin putting their stores–and their entire downtowns–online in a day.

Once a Main Street store is online, the Main and Me shopper experience consists of three kinds of pages:

Store Pages, featuring galleries of the products and services uploaded from each business…

2) Community Pages, featuring all the store pages uploaded from your city, town or neighborhood…

and Shopper Pages, featuring the favorite local goods and services that shoppers share in the galleries and wishlists they exchange with friends.

That’s Main and Me in a nutshell. The basic service is free for life, so shopkeepers and their employees can check in as many photos of their inventory as they wish, and keep updating their inventory for free…forever. Or you can subscribe for a modest monthly fee and add powerful features to your free page, like a customizable feature panel you can use to announce sales and events…

…or ecommerce capability, so you can accept credit cards and make online sales.

But the main thing is, now online shoppers can discover what’s for sale in your store–and in your neighborhood or town–without having to default to the the usual non-local sites.

(Again, we really appreciate any comments and suggestions you may have.)

Q: Is this an app or a website or both?

A: Main and Me is a web app (up and running right now) and a mobile app (coming in September, Woot!). The website displays shopper- and merchant-generated photos of local products and services.

The mobile app will display what’s for sale in the local businesses immediately around you (whether you’re in your own town, or visiting new places across the country), and serve as the ever-ready “uptake” device for when shoppers (and shop owners) want to add photos to their wish lists (and Store Pages).

Q: How will it work? Who does what? Do shoppers take photos, or do businesses, or both?

A: The revolutionary thing about Main and Me is that either merchants or shoppers can start creating store pages for their community, simply by snapping a photo, captioning it (optional) and “checking it in” (the check in feature having been borrowed from Foursquare and other location-based services). Main and Me employs this “user-generated content” strategy so that a single (!) shopper or merchant can kick start the process of building a Main and Me network in any given location. When shoppers upload photos of their favorite local goods and services, merchants can claim pages created on their behalf (or not) and add even more items to them. The Main and Me “ecosystem” consists of free Store Pages (pages dedicated to the offerings of a single business), Community pages (where we collect all the offerings of all the businesses in a town or neighborhood) and shoppers’ 100% local-supportive wish lists and registries (created from the products and services uploaded to the site).

Q: What about businesses who already have a website or Facebook page?

Main and Me is designed to complement–not compete with–your existing web assets. However, it’s still every person for themselves on the web and Facebook, meaning you pay for your own site, you manage your own SEO, you spend endless hours building traffic. Main and Me is different. Our automatically-generated Community Pages leverage the traffic generated by all the stores in your town and deliver the benefit to every individual business. Think of it as your town’s “virtual Main Street” online, making it possible for online shoppers to windowshop, browse, or search by keyword for local sources for the things they might otherwise buy from malls, big box stores and Big Internet Retail. And because it’s free for discovery, there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain. (Psst: because anyone can kick start the network, it doesn’t even require agreement among store owners to use it.)

A: Do shoppers buy stuff online?

Online purchasing will be possible by the 2012 holiday shopping season, but our initial focus will be to facilitate local discovery (and help you fight Amazon) as quickly as possible. Once ecommerce capability arrives, merchants who worry they will have to maintain inventories or ship items may rest easy. Ecommerce won’t be right for many of you. Participation will be opt-in, and those who opt may choose to either sell actual items, or store credit in the name of items.

Q: What’s the customer’s incentive to use Main and Me? Do they get a deal? Do they find something unique that they couldn’t get elsewhere? What do they get (beyond helping their community)?

A: We love the deal idea, but not the scorched-earth way that Groupon does it. We like the model of merchants quietly offering deals in a “feature panel” at the top of their Store Page and even at the top of their Community Page, so it’s the first thing an online shopper sees. We’re investigating the right way to do this, but agreed: deals should be in there. Just not the way Groupon does it.

Q: Will you highlight the uniqueness of local businesses and their products and services?

A: We are all about celebrating uniqueness and indie spirit (national chains need not apply). We think user-generated photos of products and stores (as opposed to professional catalog shots) will capture the unique flavor of every local shop. Additionally, free Store Pages and Community Pages may be customized by their owners  once claimed.

Q: Do the shops have a sticker and/or sign letting people know their stuff is on Main and Me?

A: It isn’t necessary, but we plan to provide any local merchant who wants to promote the first “Amazon-slaying” shop local tool with all the shop window stickers (and funny posters) they could ever ask for.

Q: Will you place some sort of infographic to describe why local, indie businesses benefit their communities?

A: Yes. Our mission is to level the playing on field on which local independent merchants compete with Amazon. We’ll use every arrow in the quiver to accomplish that.

Main and Me is the free-to-use website that let’s you put your town online in a day, so you can begin to shift a significant portion of online shopping back to local independent business.

It’s a year-round marketplace that excludes national chains while allowing online shoppers to discover what’s for sale in the brick and mortar businesses around them.

Main and Me is as easy to use as uploading a photo to Facebook; it’s free to upload as many goods and services as you wish, and; it’s pro-active in that a single person or “photo mob” can start putting your town or organization online today–no permission or member consensus required–just in time for the holidays.

The Main and Me shopper’s experience is composed of three kinds of pages:

1) Store Pages: galleries of products and services business owners upload from their stores;

2) Community Pages: galleries of the store pages uploaded from your town;

3) Personal Pages: galleries shoppers create for themselves as they like, comment on, follow and add goods and services to the wish lists and registries they share with friends and family–whether for holidays, weddings, and other gift-giving occasions, or for the fun of curating the best in local.

That’s Main and Me in a nutshell. We’ve kept it simple so you can use it in ways we haven’t even thought of yet, but we would like to share two examples:

1. Main and Me can be used to turn cash mobs into photo mobs. If 20 mobbers bring digital cameras and smartphones along and take 20 photos each in 10 different stores, they will have added 4,000 items to your holiday shopping network!;
2. Tupelo, MS just completed a contest that awarded $500 in downtown Tupelo dollars to the person who uploaded the most photos to the Downtown Tupelo community page. The winner uploaded 689 photos of local goods and services to their Downtown Tupelo shopping page!

Main and Me. Start shifting shopping today. (New iPhone an Android app on their way!) Questions? Call 413-250-8800 or email james@mainandme.com.

Until recently, the problem of local business competing with the internet has been framed in terms of every man to himself, with each store left to build its own website, engage with its own audience, and drive traffic to its own storefront. But what if there was a way to leverage the efforts of individuals acting in their own interest to shift a significant portion of online shopping back to local sources?

Put another way:

…What if resource-challenged business owners could use their iPhones to create instant online store galleries?

…What if local-loving shoppers could use their iPhones to create instant online wish lists?

…What if shoppers photographing items for their own wish lists also automatically kick started galleries for the stores where they were shopping–store pages that could later be claimed or taken down if the owners didn’t want them?

…What if every store gallery created in the same town was automatically added to a community gallery for that town, so future shoppers could literally windowshop that town from their computers and smartphones?

..What if grandparents in Boston could buy gifts for their grandchildren in Seattle from the local Seattle toy store where the grandchildren wish listed the items?

..What if wedding guests in Portland could buy gifts for a newly-married couple in Austin from the local Austin stores where the couple registered?

…What if people could like, comment on and follow products and stores in their town, the same way they interact with those things on Facebook and Pinterest now?

…What if all that liking and commenting and wish listing generated “Google juice” that made the local shops in that town appear more prominently in search?

…What if store owners shared links to their galleries in their monthly newsletter, inviting an ever-widening audience of online shoppers to visit their store page and their town’s community page?

..What if store owners promoted the fact that their customers could create local-only wish lists and registries, so that friends and family always knew what to get each other on special occasions, and the gifts they exchanged always came from local sources…without last-minute shipping costs?

As you may have already guessed, http://www.mainandme.com already does all these things, and you can start using it right now (iPhone and Android apps on the way in time for 2012 holiday shopping season).

Once upon a time there was a town, and in that town there were many independent shopkeepers, and in a little office in that town there was a Downtown Director who’s job it was to promote all the independent shops–a job made more difficult for lack of resources, and because the merchants didn’t always agree on what should be done.

One of the problems the shopkeepers had was that the internet was stealing away their shoppers the same way the regional malls and the Big Box Stores had stolen away their shoppers in an earlier time. To add insult to injury, the internet didn’t live in their town, so it didn’t pay local taxes, and it was never asked to support the community services that made the town a safe and beautiful place to live,

so even though the shoppers went away, the downtown shopkeepers still did their share to support the local hospital, and the local library, and the local high school sports teams, and so on and so forth.

There seemed to be nothing they could do about their internet problem, until one day a distraught man appeared at the door of a downtown shop. He approached the shopkeeper and showed her a photo taken by his wife of a pair of earrings she had discovered in that shop. He explained that it was the afternoon of his anniversary, that his wife was a big supporter of all things local, and that she had taken the photo so that he would know exactly what she wanted for the occasion–and where to buy it locally.

As he held out his credit card to buy them, a lightbulb turned on above the shopkeeper’s head. She thought to herself, “Self, what if I made it possible for every shopper who comes in my store to take a photo of their favorite things, then share those photos online with friends and family so everyone always knew what to get everyone else, and where to get it locally??!! Why, it could be like having a personal fly on the wall at all your favorite local shops, and having that cute little fly being able to whisper in the ear of anyone who was wondering what you’d like for a gift.”

The shopkeeper turned back to the man, gave him a huge kiss on the cheek, then bounded out of her shop and onto Main Street, leaving the man surprised (but happy). Without looking back, she ran to the local men’s clothing store, and then to the cigar shop, and then to the insurance company, and then to the burger joint, then to the bakery, until she had gathered a crowd of  fellow shopkeepers in the center of Main Street, whereupon she threw Mary Tyler Moore’s hat in the air and shouted: “I’ve got it!!!!”

She then explained the whole idea to them. “What if we all take photos of what we sell, and upload them to create online galleries or Store Pages for each of our shops…

“…and then what if we made a Community Page for the whole town that featured all of our individual Store Pages, so online and mobile shoppers could browse and windowshop our town online…

“…and what if we made an iPhone and Android app so that new shoppers could take photos of their favorite things in our stores,

and when they uploaded those photos to their personal wish lists and registries, they would also be automatically added to what’s already on our store pages, so any online shopper from this day forward could search for–and see–the newest things for sale in our brick and mortar stores, and find local sources for the things they might otherwise buy from Amazon…”

She took a deep breath.

“…and what if we made it possible for individual shoppers to like, comment on, and add the things in our store galleries to their own personal online wish lists and registries, then share those wish lists and registries with friends and family so…well…so a grandmother in Seattle could buy a grandson who lives here a toy he wish-listed from our local toy store…or so a wedding guest coming from Boston could buy a bride who lives here the set of china she registered from our local china shop, and so…well…so everyone from anywhere could always know what their friend who lives here wants, and where to buy it LOCALLY??!!…

She paused to study the shopkeepers’ faces. “Well, wouldn’t that be a good idea?”

As you can imagine, that was a lot for a crowd of busy shopkeepers to take in. There were some skeptics. “Tooth Fairy!” cried one. “We already use Pinterest, why do we need this?” shouted another (for which there was a handy answer in the form of a blog link.) “Who’s gonna pay for this?” asked another.

“No one’s gonna pay, ” came a steady voice from the sidewalk. It belonged to the Downtown Director. “All of this already exists. It’s called http://www.mainandme.com. It’s based on the idea of mobile photo sharing, and it’s FREE. Grownups and kids already love mobile photo sharing, but Main and Me turns all that energy into something good for the whole community, not just one person. It’s sort of like the whole town forming a cashmob, only we’d be a photo mob, and the photos we upload would benefit ALL the shops in town, not just one. It’s like Instagram, Pinterest and Etsy all got together and had a baby, only it’s a giant, adorable, 100% local-supportive baby…meaning malls, big box stores and Big Internet Retail are NOT welcome to participate,  and can Never. Steal. Our. Shoppers. Away. Again.

“It’s like…”

“Allright, allright,” said the busy shopkeepers. “We get it. But why is it called Main and Me?”

“Because the name underscores the fact that we all have a role in supporting the local businesses who support our communities.”

“But why didn’t you tell us about it before this?” asked the crowd.

“Because it’s new and I didn’t hear about it until I got to this part of the story, just like you.”

Well, the shopkeepers got busy that very day taking photos, adding search categories to them and uploading them to their free store pages, and the shoppers who had stopped on the sidewalk to listen pulled out their digital cameras and smartphones, formed a photo mob on the spot, and started walking up and down Main Street taking photos of their favorite local goods and services.

In a word, the whole town got busy putting itself online. And do you know what?

By evening, about 100 people had snapped, categorized and uploaded about 50 photos each, creating an online gallery of 5,000 (!) beautiful, wondrous things that online shoppers could search for, windowshop for, and wish list…just in time for the holiday shopping season. Just think of how many photos they could have uploaded if they’d started before lunch?! And all because of that one woman who had taken that one photo of that one pair of earrings to help that one husband remember their anniversary.

Thank you, clever woman. Sleep tight, smart husband. Call us at 413-250-8800, shopkeepers and downtown directors, and let’s start getting your town online today:)

Your cashmob is a precious resource. Why not leverage it to bring lasting benefit to ALL the stores in your town? It’s simple, fun and it feels good to do it. Just ask your volunteers to bring their smartphones and digital cameras along to snap, caption and check in photos of storefronts and favorite merchandise as they go.

(Full disclosure: Main and Me is the fastest, easiest and FREE-est way to put your town online in a day so online shoppers will know what’s for sale in the brick and mortar stores around them–and stop defaulting to Amazon every time they buy a pair of shoes.)

To leverage the precious resource of your cashmob to double as a photo mob, proceed as follows:

If you are a downtown executive director:

• Notify your merchant members in advance that on such-and-such a morning, a cash mob doubling as a photo mob will be coming around to “put your town online in a day.”
• Explain that Main and Me is free and there is nothing to lose and everything to gain by allowing respectful volunteers to snap photos of storefronts and approximately 20 photos of merchandise in each business

If you are a cashmob volunteer doubling as a photo mob volunteer, “snap, caption and check in” your photos as follows:

• Snap flattering photos of each store’s facade, and up to 20 individual items inside that store.
• Click here to see examples of both storefront and item photos
• Return to your home base (or photo mob headquarters) & download your photos to your laptop computer (for the tech-inclined: make uploading faster by using Photoshop to compress photos to 800 pixels wide/high)
• log in to mainandme.com, click the ADD button, then caption and check-in photos (i.e. name them, price them, describe them, and tag them with relevant search terms) then select the store from where the photo was taken
• at the end of the day, invite merchants to visit and claim the FREE store pages you and your fellow mobsters have just made for them. (Better yet, throw a town-wide party, show off your newly-minted Community Page and Store Pages, and explain how online shoppers can now windowshop and wishlist your town online! Better watch your back, Amazon)

If you are a merchant:

• follow the link to your page (provided by the cashmob/photomob organizer) then claim your newly-minted page to edit, describe and tag photos and add more of your own. Afterall, weren’t you looking to give that sweet high school employee of yours more to do in the afternoons?
• share links to your page with your customer email list so customers can begin liking, commenting on, following and adding things from your store to their seasonal wish lists and registries.

Well that’s about it for the lasting power of photomobs. Call us at 413-250-8800 if you’d like to learn more (or be spoiled by us walking you through it).

To learn about the power of “tag” parties, click here.

To learn about the top 10 reasons why Main and Me supports local better than Pinterest, click here.

For more things you can do to leverage the power of Main and Me, click here.

…or it might go away.

Won’t you come join us? Check out the amazing example of Tupelo, MS (kick-started by Tupelo’s Mainstreet.org heroes Debbie Brangenburg and Jessica Reed) as they prepare for the upcoming holiday shopping season. Then help us complete our new design, scheduled for release by October 2012. We are soliciting your good ideas, those of you who are in the trenches:)

If you’d like to read more, start here with Top 10 Reasons Why Main and Me supports local better than Pinterest.

Or try this one on Why We Love The 3/50 Project.org

See you at the holidays!

New Main and Me Web Design for Supporting Local Shopping