Category: Social Media

Embrace Whimsical Links

This from a recent Twitter exchange, in response to the wonderful “Algorithm is Gonna’ Get You” article, written by Danielle Evans.

“Been thinking of dropping off IG for awhile. I gotta build up my own art sites and creator spaces. Just wish there was a positive online pool of people that congregate outside of algorithms and ads. That fosters connection and drives people to my art and projects. Maybe ello?”

@shootbydaylight

I just feel like leaving everything up to that “community pool” is a rough these days. It’s too centralized. Remember DIGG? StumbleUpon? Is the answer sites like Dribble, or Vimeo, or Flickr?

My dream is we get back to our websites, and letting the whimsy and awe of links do their thing. That happened for me recently with one of my daily loops. I noticed one video got a few more plays than the others, and discovered it was linked from another website – neato!

There was a time when we didn’t drink from the “content firehose” for hours everyday, bombarding our eyeballs with fear and dread mixed in with “oooh, a pretty picture of a sunset!” I think for our own health and sanity we need to back away from cramming everything into one site, one network, one silo.

Stop Handing Out Flyers

There was a time when we didn’t spray a firehose of images, videos, and words into our eyeballs for multiple hours, every day. Around the clock.

During that time we still made albums, published magazines, made videos, and everything else.

The thing I hear a lot, if we abandon social media, is how will we be found? How will our music get heard? How will our videos get watched?

Look, they will.

Back in the day you’d hand out flyers for the show you were playing that night. Put the flyers in the local music shop. Hand them to anyone wearing Chuck Taylors or a nose ring.

Social media is where you hand out flyers, but at a certain point you gotta head back to the venue and play a show.

We’ve all bought into the 24/7 social media marketing life style, heading both directions; both as the consumer and the advertiser.

But there comes a time when you gotta put the phone down and work. You’re going to have to miss that meme, or that person who did the thing, or that random video.

Trust that the wonderful people in your life will send you some of the highlights. Also be okay with missing shit.

Like, how many memes have you missed when they first came out? Then you discovered it three months later. Still funny, right? Great. What’d you lose? Nothing.

Get into your studio, your space, put on your headphones and make your art. That’s the thing that people will discover three months from now. That clever Tweet or funny IG story is nice and all, but it’s gone in a day. Poof.

Put your top stuff on a site. Your writing, your photos, your music, your whatever. Give it a home where people can find it. And keeping filling it up. Keep adding. Make it your home.

People will find you when they find you, and it’ll probably be for your art, the magic you bring to the world.

Photo by Mick Haupt from Pexels

Delight Your Current Fans

The fantastic Andy J Pizza gives some solid, practical advice in this podcast, talking all about using social media for your benefit while being mindful of the cost.

One of the biggest take-aways – stop focusing on new followers and instead put effort into engagement. People who follow you are the fans at your show, the friends at your gallery show, the people who bought a print.

Keep putting out killer work so you’re top of mind for the people who already raised their hand and said, “I want more of this.”

Let Your Work Cook

During a recent Instagram Stories doom-swipe session, I noticed Kendriana post about one of her posts being removed because IG thought it broke some rule. A physical trainer I follow had their entire account wiped out because of some unknown one-and-done rule breaking (thankfully they got their account back).

With each day that passes, it’s never been more important to move your followers to your website. To your email list. Get your biggest fans to follow you to a platform you own.

Social media is so enticing for artists, photographers, musicians, etc because of the instant feedback. The interaction. The release of endorphins that come from instant validation.

The entire system is built on that, but it’s a system to benefit them, not you.

You feed their system day and night with content, with engagement, with interaction. In turn, they harvest your user data, habits, track what you look at and like, and sell it to advertisers.

So long as you keep feeding social media your time and effort, they will make lots of money.

The alternative is update your own website. Send an email to your newsletter subscribers.

Neither give you the instant feedback, but stop and consider that instant isn’t alway better.

Sometimes you need to let your work cook.

Make your site something that’s so rad that people would miss it if it were gone (via Seth Godin). Make it something that is a part of people’s lives. Something worth typing into an address bar (or even bookmarking).

Make your thing so great that people will trade you their email address and the sacred access to their inbox just to keep up with you.

When you spend four hours a day on social media, you helped sell a lot of ads.

When you fill your site with two years worth of content, you had a body of work. Anyone with a web-browser can see your talent.

Your magic.

Do Your Thing For Your People

This post inspired by a lovely Tweet storm by Vince Edwards:

He’s talking about this live-streams that Marc Rebillet did today, on his way to one million subscribers on YouTube.

It’s easy to be a band and figure, okay, we want to do a live stream, so we have to just do a live performance and set up lots of cameras, and…

Well, yes, you CAN do that, but that’s a huge undertaking!

You can also just open up a live stream and talk about horror movies, or sports, or whatever.

Like, now is the time to connect and interact. Bands are competing with the The Madalorian and freaking COVID-19, like… do something.

I always think about all the shows I’ve gone to over the past 30 (?!?!) years – it’s the people. The people you meet at the show, in between sets, after the show in the parking lot, all that… that’s a part of the live show experience.

You can re-create that from your fucking porch with a decent WIFI signal and an iPhone.

Do you have to become a Loop Daddy? Nope. Do you have play guitar and videos games at the same time?

Nope.

Just do your thing, whatever that might be.

About Little Things

What’s striking about Twitter at this moment in time is that you are a minute away from being national news. Literally. You could reply to a movie star, sports figure, or politician and a simple RT could change your life.

I mean, somehow we know of a person that calls themselves Dog Face from the internet because they paired a great song with some Cranberry juice. I love that guy (his real name Nathan Apodaca).

We also know that people counting votes in PA are getting death threats because of conspiracy theories amplified over social media channels.

Tonight I picked up my phone to check Twitter for the 1000th time, but I hit my time limit. Logging into Twitter via the web was my next move, but I thought better of it, instead logging into my silly WordPress site instead.

Who needs my voice? Who reads this?

But I remember the advice I give to friends about starting YouTube channels, or podcasts – we have enough Joe Rogans. We need more podcasts with soft spoken hosts talking about science. We certainly don’t need anymore websites that load up 48 trackers and post every 12 minutes – we need more regular people, talking about regular things, on a regular basis.

What started out as 10 posts a day became 20 because that meant more excuses to post to social media to come read all the 20 posts on our sites. You knew you could come to a website and expect to read something new after lunch.

And that’s social media – you can come back every minute and find something new. It never lets you down, except it’s horrible for your brain.

So let’s write for no one, do a podcast and never aspire to do ad reads. Let’s move slow, read slower, and pay attention to a handful of things (and people) that matter.

Build That Email List

My buddy Bill Meis on Twitter:

Friendly PSA for young bands and artists.

Start your email list now and don’t stop.

No, seriously. The fact that even big bands don’t have landing pages feeding a general info mailing list is BONKERS.

Facebook and Twitter aren’t in the business of sending you traffic and clicks for free. And you can’t export those connections (hello, MySpace) when they go belly up.

Build. That. Email. List.

And Instagram is OWNED by Facebook. More algorithms. More noise. They’re 1000% gonna fuck it all up. But an email from a fan, someone who bought your album on Bandcamp? That is gold.

Your email doesn’t have to be ALL BUSINESS either. Remember – some people have left Facebook and Twttr. You can use the stuff you write on social media, repackage it, and send it to your list!

Hell, this post is just from a handful of Tweets, and can be found three years from now from a Google search, or linked to from another website.

Have you stuff somewhere, and not just sitting on social media sites.

Screen Time

I meant to start this blog post an hour ago, but of course got distracted by my phone. A click here, a scroll there, and before I knew it, the time just rushed along without me.

Got me thinking of this whole idea of “returning to blogs.” A friend mentioned in an email (hi, Jay), about how we wouldn’t spend too much time reading long form posts and ideas from a ton of people, which I get.

I just remember way back when… early 2000s. Websites weren’t updated regularly, but MESSAGE BOARDS WERE. A lot of those music-based message boards were almost the frame work for social media; a main idea is post, and then below are the replies.

Just like… social media is today.

That’s why I started my first music blog. I figured why not put the message board on the front page? Along came some BLOG SOFTWARE like Blogger, and Moveable Type, and WordPress, and whammo. A post, then comments below it.

But now we follow 1000s of “blogs” (people, brands, news outlets) who all post something every four minutes, and there’s a never ending stream of content to consume. Always something to miss, and always something to catch up on after an hour away from our phone.

So no – I don’t think those posts from all those people and brands and news outlets will spread out again. I don’t think we’ll bookmark a bunch of blogs form our friends to see photos of their dinner, or what they’re watching on TV.

But… maybe that’s an okay thing? Maybe we don’t need to keep up, and know everything all the time? Like the friend I mentioned in the beginning of this post… we keep current via email, but current isn’t what he’s having for dinner, or what movie he’s watching on a particular night, and that seems okay.

Growing Things

Last year I rebooted Metal Bandcamp Gift Club. Started in 2016, it fizzled quite a bit, and by 2019, it was running on fumes.

In October, I shook the dust off, kicked the tires, and got things rolling again. While the initial idea was formed and grew quite well on Twitter, I chose to move things to an email list.

Sure, the Metal Bandcamp Gift Club Twitter account has over 500 followers, but I know every time I send out a Tweet, not everyone sees it.

My last birthday Tweet had 712 impressions and 7 link clicks. That’s a 0.9% click rate.
My last email went out to 67 subscribers and got 6 clicks. That’s a 8.9% click rate.

Think of the work I have to put into growing my audience on Twitter. If I have 1,000 followers then what? Maybe 14 clicks?

But I’ve grown the Metal Bandcamp Gift Club email list from nothing to 71 subscribers in just three months.

It’s the Seth Godin idea; people like us sign up for newsletters like this.

Not everyone wants to get an email with a link to an absolute stranger’s wishlist when it’s their birthday, and that’s okay. This isn’t for “everyone,” this is for a handful of people who understand the power of surprising and delighting people they don’t know with music on their birthday.

And right now, and into 2020 and beyond, I believe that the audience who gets what you do, who knows what you’re about, they’re going to subscribe to your thing because not subscribing is missing out, so yes, you are that special, and you absolutely matter.

While you can continue to build on social media, make sure you’re building your email list along the way. When (not if) those sites shut down, you won’t be able to export any of those fans, followers, or subscribers.

Free Williamsburg Closing Up Shop

Founded in the late 90s on Geocities, Free Williamsburg has been through a lot. The internet, and this whole “BLOG THING” held lots of promise, but it’s hard to compete when so many eyeballs are diverted to the slot-machine allure of social media.

 A good chunk of this happened before a little old thing called social media even existed. Before Instagram, you’d go to photo sites like The Cobrasnake or Last Night’s Party, or to countless blogs like ours, to see what the cool kids were up to. Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok just weren’t a thing. Today, they’re definitely a thing. And as FREE Williamsburg has turned fifteen… eighteen… twenty… we persisted (we’re stubborn) while the cultural currency that used to be defined by websites like this one shifted to social media and corporate-backed publications.

We Had a Good Run…

I wouldn’t say my music blog of the 2000s (Buzzgrinder) had a tenth of the pull and cool vibes that Free Williamsburg held, but we were sort of in the same zip code for awhile. Literally. I lived in Brooklyn from 2005-2010, and got to my share of shows in the area, and met up with people in Williamsburg because of my music blog thing.

A shame, too. Most all of content we talk about, link to, and share on social media is from a website. The interviews, the music videos, the big articles – they all sit on a .com somewhere, which you access via a URL.

The problem is sites like Free Williamsburg compete with a zillion other sites who are publishing 80 articles a day, and have cash on hand (or rather, funding…) to promote their posts.

Hard to cut through the noise when the noise of promoted posts and harrowing click bait articles rule the social-world, but Free Williamsburg had a spectacular run.