Founder of the Social Media Escape Club
We talk a lot about not letting algorithms and AI take creative jobs – yet somehow we let robots curate “best of” lists and become tastemakers of music and media and art.
We subscribe to cool / smart / interesting people, right?
Then go to their Substack profile and dig through their subscriptions.
Dig around and find some blogs, click on the links in their posts – discover something new, fresh, and interesting from an actual human instead of a computer.
More mullet marketing, this time from Procreate.
Business up front (static website, text, one image, tiny button), party in the back (posting a compelling video on Twitter).
https://socialmediaescapeclub.substack.com/p/make-sure-youre-not-mullet-marketing
I still have a Twitter account on my desktop so I can watch videos like this, and that’s a good thing because, of course, it’s not on their website.
So if I want to share this video with a friend, I have to send them a link to Twitter, instead of Procreate’s actual website.
Rather than driving traffic to their own website – a place where they control the branding, the story, the message – they settle for this:
“But Seth, if someone wants to know more they can just click the link!”
That post on Twitter has basically 3 MILLION VIEWS, and if they’re lucky 1% clicked that link, which is 30,000 people.
On the internet you get ONE SHOT to pull someone. Making them click a link to somewhere else might sound like it’s not a big deal, but you can’t be clicking links all day either – there’s just not enough hours in the day.
I’d like if I could just send the link to the Procreate page, so a friend could check out that video, or at least skim the text to see their stance on AI.
I bet Procreate would like to have 3 MILLION PAGE VIEWS, too.
But Procreate will fine. They have lot of smart people working on this stuff, I get it.
So, let this be a lesson for you as a smaller business or artist—your video probably isn’t getting 3 million views, which means you won’t get 30,000 clicks to your website either.
I’m not saying don’t post it on Twitter, but put the video on your website, too!
P.S. my god, the video isn’t even on the Procreate YouTube channel (they haven’t uploaded a video in almost a year), which is only the second largest social network on the planet.
Jon Gruber, on the recent news that Apple is demanding a 30% cut of fan payments in the Patreon app (read about it here):
“How do you put a price on the number of Patreon iOS users — who are all, by definition, Apple customers — whose view of Apple will shift from “Apple is a company that supports small indie creators and artists” to “Apple is a company that uses its position of power to extract exorbitant rent from small indie creators and artists” because of this change?
I’ve been a Mac user since 2003, so that’s 20 years. I had an iBook laptop, and marveled that I could take it to a Borders book store and surf the web.
I had a U2 iPod, and bought songs via iTunes.
If I remember correctly, I stood in line for a 3G iPhone at the Apple Store on 5th Ave.
I bought several more Apple laptops – at least five or six, and now own a M3 MacBook Pro which I love.
Apple’s “services” category (stuff like Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Care) reached $24.2 billion last quarter. Not year, but it took just three months for Apple to make just over $24,000,000,000 on digital goods.
And now, well, they need more. Like I said, growth is cancer. There must always be more money to squeeze, and now they’re going after the somewhat beloved Patreon.
This only applies to new subscriptions in the iOS app, so at least for now, direct your fans to sign up on the web.
As Derek Sivers wrote in ‘Use the Internet, Not Companies,’
“It’s so important and easy to have your own website. Instead of sending your fans to some company’s site, send them to yours. Get everyone’s direct contact information, so you don’t have to go through any one company to reach them.”
It was true seven years ago, it’s even more true today.
We always need more here in America:
“For some reason, the American mindset is endless growth. Everything must get bigger, everything must get better, and more, more, more, how do you like it, how do you like it. But the truth of the matter is, nothing natural undergoes infinite growth, other than some cancers.”
Like I started thinking about in 2008 and 2009, when running a music blog for AOL Music, “it’s like driving full speed up a mountain that doesn’t end, with two bosses in the back seat telling you to go faster.”
Growth or else. Cut writers, cut budget, but keep growing at 10% month after month. Be it traffic, or subscribers, or units sold, if you’re not growing, you’re dying.
Most people would just rather log into one app and be spoon-fed “content” every day than be responsible for searching for, finding, and discovering new things to read and enjoy on the internet.
Social media made everyone think that there needs to be one channel, one source for everything. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are like the big three channels our parents had growing up. Like, “Welp, that’s it! That’s all the choices we have!”
But it’s not.
All this talk about discovery. Are you kidding? If you’re on social media, go find that one fascinating character. Now, see who they follow.
There – you now have 600-2000 people to dig through and find some interesting people doing cool things.
Yes, I subscribe to 322 newsletters via Substack. You can find a list of them here.
Discovery? It’ll take you days to sift through all those.
We used to discover bands from the thanks lists on cassettes and CDs, from the shirts that artists wore in their music videos, or from the ones they brought with them on tour.
There is a whole world of discovery out there that we’re missing because we’re letting social media algorithms dictate what’s most interesting.
We’re all anti-A.I. but we sure seem fine with computers influencing our taste.
Photo by Seth Werkheiser
If an unpaid intern could write it, start over.
There are things can could be written by someone else on your behalf – announcing a new product, an upcoming tour, a fancy new something or other.
Lay out the facts. The dates. The logistics. “I’m really excited about this,” you say – gee, really?! Tell me more 😕
There’s enough safe, boring, dry text out there. Throwing chatGPT into the mix makes it even less spicy.
Your creativity is your magic. But please, don’t stop using it when it’s time to talk about the things you’re doing.
I wrote about this in ‘Find social media success by occasionally riding a horse,’ where I say:
“If all you can muster is “I updated my site,” lower your expectations. The algorithms are cruel, but it’s nothing personal. Is this fair or kind? No. But playing this game is a choice, and hardly anybody wins.”
That nice user experience you’ve got on Instagram Threads will end right on schedule, of course.
“Threads is still a loss leader for Meta financially, though it can certainly afford to fund it indefinitely. Internally, I’m told execs are thinking about turning on ads in Threads sometime next year, though the exact plan is still up in the air.”
Yeah yeah yea, they’re thinking about it. Of course they are, and will. That’s how companies make money.
It’s remarkable how Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” playbook is followed like a road map by these shit companies.
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Via The Verge
Photo by Seth Werkheiser
The more I think about the marketing machine, and the how and the why and the strategies involved, the more it all seems impossible.
Like, everyone who wants to “get the word out” about their thing is competing with a million other people doing the same thing. Some of it rises to the top because it’s what everyone is talking about – tech reviews, AI, sports, Star Wars, etc.
Other folks who do stuff that’s not quite as “big,” well, they’re lost in the fray, unless we’re talking about BookTok, of course.
But like, do “we” need to be in all these popular online places to make it? Is it required?
I think about the tiny Chinese restaurant I visit in Palmerton, PA. They’re not on social media, nor do they need to be. People in that town (or people passing through, like me) want Chinese food.
They have it. That’s a simple and direct choice.
And I feel like when you have that immediate want, say, for Chinese food, you’re going to look locally.
And if the grass is getting too high in your yard, you have to get someone to cut it.
But a lot of other things – how to draw, people who talk about email newsletters with creative people (that’s me!), how to write better… there are a zillion options for everything out there, and no real guarantee that any of them are going to help in the end.
Chinese food? That’s simple. You can solve that problem in an hour.
All the other creative / strategy / marketing stuff? Endless variations of possible solutions, directions, and options.
Photograph by Seth Werkheiser
Thinking a lot about the old web, and world building. Our blogs used to be an extension of who we were, and how we operated. Then we gave everything over to “social media profiles,” where we uploaded the perfect photo for our avatar, wrote a cute / informative / snarky bio, and then fed the machine one or two sentences at a time.
Now we’re writing 400 words again, or more. Sometimes on Substack, or uploading a video to YouTube. We’re going offline, spending less time on our phones, craving a little more that consuming 10 hours of video every day in 15 second clips.
I say this, and try to live it, and yet I keep thinking of the “yeah, but” people. The folks who will say, “well that’s good for you, but what about…” and then list 100 different reasons why we need a new platform to inhabit. That somehow we’ll all agree on the next website to set up shop, and we’ll hand ourselves over again, like a cult.
I know some people will say that’s Substack, and that I’ve really drank the Kool-Aid, but my friends, the work I’ve put in there since October 2021 is an email list that I can export and use elsewhere. The investment had a payoff, unlike so many other social media platforms that have popped up (and gone away in short order).
All that to say, I can’t worry too much about people who want to say on an app, who want to consume and subsist on what an algorithm deems worthy of their attention.
This blog is on a magazine rack the size of Nebraska, and if you’ve found it, rad. If you’ve come back, or every typed my name into a search engine, I appreciate it.
But I think that’s it.
I don’t want an algorithm to determine my listening habits. I’m gonna trust my gut and my intuition and listen to what I want to listen to.
Oh, but Seth, how will you find new music?
Have you heard of… friends? They have great taste in music, and they know me much better than any computer algorithm, so when they suggest something, it’s worth something.
I’m an adult. I can find the things I want to find, and read the things I want to read.
But it’s all made better when it’s on the free and open web.
Photograph by Seth Werkheiser
Social media sold us on the idea that we can just post and lots of people would see it.
This was true for a moment, but it was a house of cards. As more and more people post more often 24/7, there are only so many people who can see everything that is posted.
The “reach” was a lie. It helped lots of people, yes, until it didn’t. So now, as we enter a post-social media world, we’re left searching for NEW apps and algorithms, but it’s just more of the same, and it will likely end the same way.
Resist the quick fix, the shortcut. One subscriber to your email list is worth the work, the struggle, the grind.
