Founder of the Social Media Escape Club
Collin Brooke from ‘You gotta be in it to win it’
“There’s an extent to which the influencer industry is basically a machine that generates confirmation bias at scale. That is, every influencer is, at the very least, a walking advertisement for the idea of becoming an influencer.”
Sometimes you just wake up at 4am and can’t get back to sleep so you start planing out a podcast series that you’d announce and launch on the day you host a big online event. What if?
Chelsea Bradley from ‘Your Content is Killing Your Brand‘
“When should it be posted? If the event is tomorrow, the answer is not tonight. Most people won’t see it until two days from now – it’s too late. Like when restaurants post their daily specials at 6 pm – great, hope your dinner service was wonderful. I saw it at noon the next day, and it means nothing to me now, I wish I had known about it sooner so I could plan.”
We’ve all seen it – people waiting for their drinks at Starbucks. Arms crossed, sighing loudly while scrolling on their phones. Waiting, waiting, waiting for their drinks.
Then someone walks in, no wait, and walks out with their drink.
I get it; get people to order on the app. Less interaction, no friction, no need for someone to take the order.
In and out, money in the bank.
But I just looked and there’s like a dozen people here in this space, none of them having a pleasant experience.
How does that bode well for a business? A brand?
People in and out, and on their way.
And a business place filled with people rolling their eyes and getting the wrong order (like me) and just walking away.
The holdiday downtime has given me some breathing room to get this project done, moving 500 or so posts from Substack to my WordPress blog at Social Media Escape Club.
I did this 100% manually, too. I think I tried exporting awhile back and it crapped out somewhere along the line, and I just said fuck it, I’ll do it one at a time, which really wasn’t so bad because some stuff I wanted to reformat, re-do, or remove 100% anyways.
Why move all my posts from Substack to WordPress? Because someday the Substack platform will cease to exist, and I’ll have no record of my work otherwise.
Because Substack makes it too easy to accidentally delete your entire publication, just like how I deleted multiple posts when I thought I was deleting a podcast feed.
I don’t trust the Substack platform anymore.
My first music blog from 2001 is gone because we were young and dumb and moved onto other things, and we didn’t pay the hosting bill, and oops the domain name lapsed.
The 2000+ metal trivia questions I posted on Twitter as @skulltoaster from 2011-2018 are all gone, along with the 1000+ email newsletters via Mailchimp.
If I get locked out of my account, or Substack goes away, five years of writing goes away with it, and I don’t want that to happen.
Each Substack post is getting moved, and in its place I write “this post has moved…” along with a link to its new home on WordPress. This removes any duplicate work which might affect my SEO or domain health… but that’s secondary to me owning my work, my writing, my ideas.
I will keep sending my newsletter via Substack (for now), but it will not be my base of operations. Everything gets written on my blog first, then it goes from there.
Each newsletter post will include just enough meat and bones to make it a worthy open and read, and they’ll be links throughout for anyone who wants to go deeper.
As I wrote earlier this year, “my newsletter isn’t my permanent address, it’s a delivery truck.”
I know Gary Vee gets a lot of flack, but man, he’s inspiring people right where they’re at, so what else is there? I mean, look at that scene. Evening time, probably on his way to like 30 different things, took the time to encourage someone.
Sure, there’s a camera there. But man, he’s been doing this for YEARS, and I think it’s great.
The LG enV VX9900 was the most notable phone I owned before the iPhone in 2007 or 2008.
The Qwerty keyboard was great for texting, but my goodness, can you believe we used screens that small? The resolution was pretty good, but still, the screen was so small, yet the phone was so bulky.
Given the chance I definitely wouldn’t go back to using this phone.
Got this old rotary phone at a local antique market for $10.
50 years old.
25 years since I started Buzzgrinder (music blog).
20 years since I had a full time job.
18 years since I started Noisecreep (for AOL Music).
15 years since I started Skull Toaster (metal trivia).
10 years of Metal Bandcamp Gift Club (buying albums for strangers).
10 years since I started running.
8 years since I started working with MNRK Music Group.
5 years of Social Media Escape Club.
Tom Williams from the band Stray From The Path:
No-one gives a fuck about first-week numbers anymore, anyway. People care more about finding the record at your merch desk for the first time and buying it right then. I clearly remember asking (our label, SharpTone Records), ‘Why do people pre-order records?’ and being met with a minute of silence.