“We also, by the way, need family, friends, colleagues, customers, clients, everyone around us to help us understand what it is that we do better than anybody else because we can’t really get there by yourself. You can’t do thinkism, you can’t figure your way there, you have to try and live it out.”
“We can’t really get there by yourself. You can’t do thinkism, you can’t figure your way there, you have to try and live it out.”
Maybe some folks can figure it out on their own, but holy moly I’m pushing 48 and I’m finally starting to feel like I’m getting close to what it is I really seek to do.
And how did I get there? Like Kevin Kelly said, “friends, colleagues, customers, clients…”
Social media rotted our brains on the instant gratification racket.
“I accept defeat,” I repeat after HINDZ from a recent video, “I accept that billion-dollar corporations have invested millions and millions of millions into the psychology and understanding how to keep me on these devices on their platforms, and it works.”
It’s not enough that social media gobbles up our attention – it tricks us into thinking we’re nothing without them.
We are isolated, working on projects alone in our studios and rooms. We are so in our own heads that when we get together to discuss these things, we can cry.
We’re trying to figure this out on our own, thinking we’ll beat the tech bros with better-crafted hashtags, disguising our “link in bio” text, or churning out vertical videos to appease the social media overlords.
If we just read one more social media strategy guide, or watch more one more YouTube video then we’ll crack the code.
No, thanks.
I’d rather spend my time in deeper connection with good people.
Cody Cook-Parrott hosts FLEXIBLE OFFICE, where amazing creative people gather on a video call to work on their projects together.
Carolyn Yoo made a zine called ‘How to keep your hobby from becoming a job’, and it’s brought a bunch of people together in the comment section and in real life – I handed a copy to my creative friend, and she loved it!
Start reaching out to fellow zine writers, artists, photographers, and designers – get on a phone call, plan a meetup, gather in secret in remote parks, commandeer several tables at the local Denny’s, plan your own hyper-niche flea market, write a short skit.
These are things made outside of isolation.
Spending more time around creative people will do us more good than if we just sit on our hands and wait to be saved by the next tech-bro platform to deliver us a new magical marketing machine.
Are we so powerless to change the current situation that we sit back and hope somebody else fixes everything?
And then what? That person will sell the company to a Nabisco+Tide hedge fund subsidiary, and we’ll be back where we started.
The answer is other people, community, and the exchange of ideas away from the supposed champions of our “creator economy,” which was here long before the silicon valley dorks showed up.
You can wait for things to change, but reaching your fans on social media will never get any easier. NEVER. I’ve been saying this since 2021.
Find some other weirdos, form your own band of misfits and start having the conversation about living in a post-social media world, ‘cuz baby it’s coming.
Here at CREEM, we’re not building the biggest audience of digital tourists. Creem.com doesn’t have ads; we don’t publish free content. If you want SEO-friendly music news like dozens of other sites do, don’t waste your time, CREEM isn’t for you.
If I click on your band’s LinkTree / Link In Bio and I can’t tell in 1.2 seconds how to LISTEN to your music, you’re fucked.
Tour dates. Great. Press kit. No thanks. Website.
Hmmmm… think about that last one.
While I’m stoked a band even has a website in 2024, what has our experience been with band websites for the last 20 years?
They’re usually not updated, maybe it’s just a bunch of tour dates from a BandsInTown embed, maybe some old photos…
DON’T. MAKE. ME. THINK.
Make one of the buttons “LISTEN” or “HEAR OUR LATEST SINGLE” and link it DIRECTLY to a place where I can listen to your actual music, or click play on a YouTube embed.
This might sound like I’m being old and curmudgeonly, but patience for this stuff wears thin after two decades of doing this 10 times a day.
“For each edition, all participants share their artworks via Instagram by uploading their typographic interpretations of each letter and number to their profiles, while using the project’s hashtags plus the daily hashtags to submit their work and enter the challenge.”
See, IG removed the “Recent” tag for hashtags, so now it’s just TOP POSTS.
This means that if you were to tag your entry to enter a giveaway or contest, you wouldn’t be able to see all the entries, just the TOP entries, according to however IG determines what “top” really is.
Because of this, the next round is canceled for now (via their IG):
Instagram’s never-ending updates have brought many significant challenges and changes since we started, leaving us with the feeling that the platform isn’t the same as it once was.
In particular, the recent updates to hashtags, one of the core parts of the project, have made them almost useless (with no way to browse all entries and no chronological order), making it almost impossible to manage a new edition as we used to.
This is just another reason why you should always be using social media to drive traffic to your own properties, where you own the content, the system, and the relationship with your readers.
And for fucks sake, it’s mullet marketing, all the way down.
Look how cool and vibrant their Instagram page looks! Party in the back!
If I had Instagram I’d want to check out every single one of those types! So much color, life, magic!
The website is all business. It reflects barely any of the magical energy of their Instagram page, which is such a bummer.
Friends – Instagram is still just a webpage.
You can make your website look cool, I promise.
And then as a brand (37 Days of Type has over 400,000 followers on IG) you simply tell your audience, “hey, we’re fucking moving. Don’t like it? Well, too bad.”
“Yeah but, Instagram makes it so easy to follow and keep up!”
Does it? What the fuck just happened here?
When you post do you reach more than 10% of your followers?
If 90% of your fans miss everything you post, maybe Instagram or Twitter are not great platforms for communicating with people who enjoy your work.
Drive people to your fucking website. Companies like Instagram and Twitter do not give a shit about your art, your music, nothing – if you ain’t dancing and singing and pointing at words, you’re dead to them.
Tell me you don’t care about people with mobility issues without telling me you don’t care about people with mobility issues.
I just don’t get how businesses and municipalities are okay with this. Forcing anyone with a mobility issue to have to leave the side walk and go into the road.
Oh, and what if there are cars parked there? Then what?
The video above was in response to this wonderful quote I found via Substack notes from Elissa Altman:
If you’re not gonna talk publicly about your work, plenty of other folks will. People can’t fall in love with your work if they don’t know about it.
Tell people about your work in only the way that you can, because if an unpaid intern (or an AI prompt) could write your self-promo copy, you’re toast.
🚫 Hey, new song! [LINK] 🚫 I just posted some new art. [LINK] 🚫 New items added to the store. [LINK] 🚫 New interview – we talked about art stuff! [LINK]
Those can work if you’re Radiohead or Beyonce or Rolling Stone or Best Buy.
Which you are not.
Let’s learn from Austin Kleon, who says to learn to steal like an artist (buy that book right now, dammit).
“It’s Super Bowl Sunday, that’s what I’m told. I have tallied the results of all your requests, and opted to do an acoustic version of “King of You” from the album Star Wars. Which was an unlikely favorite. Or at least it got two votes. It’s from an album that’s meant to be full of nonsense, because I think nonsense is good for us.”
No way an AI bot or record label intern could write that. And a lot more interesting than “new song, click here.”
✅ If you interviewed someone, get out of the way and put them front and center, the way Sari Botton of Oldster Magazine does here:
In this instance above, Todd Boss is the focus, the center of attention. Get the heck out of the way and let their words champion the piece.
✅ Artist Marie Enger opens her recent newsletter like this:
“Friends, this week? It fucking sucked.
But my buddy Ray Nadine (who you might know from the 2024 GLAAD nominated comic LIGHT CARRIES ON, Raise Hell (with our good friend and yours too, Jordan Alsaqa), and SOMETHING HAS CHANGED) reminded me yesterday as I was spinning out–
“I don’t know what it is about my brain, but as long as I can find the right image to put at the top of the newsletter, the rest just flows out. (I started this letter last week but didn’t finish it — remembering Kate’s image helped everything snap into place)”
Not one of these asks for a click, a signup, or a “buy now.”
They all attempt to draw you in with story, delight, oddities, weirdness – you know, art. Magic!
The newsletter or the song is the vehicle, but the creative spirit behind the work must provide the energy to move it forward.
We need to get away from thinking of our offerings as commodities.
We are not promoting just a new song, a new thing to read, or another piece of content.
You’ve already done the hard part; you’re an artist, photographer, teacher, musician – you know how hard it is to play the piano?! IT’S IMPOSSIBLE, I TRIED, OKAY?
But promoting your work? That’s much easier than trying to sight-read sheet music, which is another impossibility – how does anyone do it?!
Let your creative wisdom inform how you talk about and share your work. Literally spend more than 12 seconds on it, instead of banging out “hey click here” and expecting anyone to give a fuck about it.
✅ BONUS: You can also go in the opposite direction.
Think about how you’d start a comedy show. What’s the expectation?
Even if you’re not a comedian, we’re all so familiar with the process that if we had to, we could at least do the introduction part, right?
“Hey everyone, I’m Seth. So great to be here!”
But it takes an artist to spend the first three minutes wrestling with the mic stand, dropping the microphone, and yelling at the production crew to turn the music off.
But note when the music stops, and Tim Heidecker abruptly says, “Thank you, okay, all right.”
That took some work. That was magic.
Those first three moments are rough. I got a little bit of anxiety from watching it, but it was like a car wreck; I couldn’t look away.
Like – why go through all that?
Because it sets the stage for what’s to come.
Why did I pack up my camera gear and use a wired microphone and go into the woods to make a video about hyping your work?
Because this is my art, my project, my work.
Some people will get that video. Some people will be like, “That guy is weird, and I’m not subscribing.”
Great. This is what I do, this is how I work. thank u, next.
Make people feel something. Stress, tension, release. The hero’s journey.
These are all things you can learn and study and steal ideas from (and a much better use of your time, instead of spending 2+ hours a day scrolling social media).
