Writer, musician, wizardly guide to platform independence
I love this bit from Seth Godin, riffing on his 2009 post, ‘First, ten.’ There is no sense trying to win 1,000 fans if you can’t see the 10 right in front of you.
“Do your first 10 see your thing and thank you and move on,” asks Seth, “or do they go tell more people?”
If they don’t tell anyone, you need to work on that. Back the drawing board. No amount of tactics or tricks is gonna make it spread, you need to bake that into what you’re selling.
This is amazing (via CNBC):
Our findings strongly suggest that limiting social media use to approximately 30 minutes per day may lead to significant improvement in well-being.
Read More: https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751
How many of us hit 30 minutes by 9am?
I’ve been trying to put two things in my way of checking social media in the morning – do some pushups, then make my bed.
When I do those two things, then I allow myself time to scroll through my social media feeds. Funny thing is, though, after pounding out a few pushups and making my bed, I actually don’t want to open Twitter.
It was about 2013-2016 when I found a wonderful community of people on Twitter. I had joined Twitter back in 2006, one of the first 2,500 users to sign up for the service.
But then things changed, as my pal Jasper nails:
“I used to tweet about great music but now that Twitter is for Nazis I just write about it here instead.” – Jasper
Years ago I stopped reading blog comments, and then Twitter turned into the blog comments. Sea-lioning. And yeah, Nazis.
Catching up with some blog posts, or swapping some emails, the occasional message – all replace social media wonderfully for me. And you know what? Apple News works wonderfully for me for keeping up without the fire hose of click bait headlines and unending chaos (read ‘Apple News’s Radical Approach: Humans Over Machines‘ over at the NYTimes).
I think my new favorite app on iOS is Screen Time. It reminds me that I spend way too much time looking at social media, and I’ve been actively trying to look at it less. Lately I don’t use my phone when making and eating breakfast. Or an hour or so later when I make my french press coffee. Each of these moments might amount to 10 minutes per day, but over seven days that’s.. 70 minutes. Instead, I’ve been slowing replacing the every-so-often dopamine rush of anger / sorrow / terror with nice things:
The minutes, the time is still the same. I can’t make the water boil any faster. But I can choose how I spend those moments. Am I feeding my body and mind with good things? Or am I giving away my time and energy to a company overrun with trolls and nazis under the guise of “staying current?”
Ten hours is too much.
Before the internet, before social media, things that were important to us still got in front of us. New music still made its way to us because we went to the local record shop, listened to the local radio DJ, or went to a show and picked up fliers.
We didn’t need to “follow” magazines we liked because we subscribed to them, then they showed up in the mail once a month.
The same can be done today, but it’s going to be a bit painful.
See, everyone is sending out multiple updates per day. EVERYONE. When everyone is employing a certain type of marketing it becomes invisible because there’s so much of it. Now mix in news, turmoil, sports, and harassment! Weeee, how depressing!
Less is going to be more. We can no longer out-hustle everyone in the attention economy. Serious, what’s a coffee shop to do? Post more latte art? What’s a band supposed to do? Post 18 more times about their next show which is irrelevant to 98% of their audience?
If I have to throw a pebble at your bedroom window every time I do something new, reminding you that I exist, then I’m not doing my best to even give you a reason to visit my website.
Of course it’s scary. Going first usually is.
Starting a music blog in 2001 was an okay move. Starting one in 2011? Maybe not.
Publishing lots of content to social media in 2007 was an okay move. But in 2018? Eh.
Everything comes down to relationships, which are built on positive feelings (I don’t know what sort of lasting relationships you want to maintain around negative feelings). Make someone happy, make them smile.
That feeling when the barista remembers your order? That’s a good feeling.
That feeling when BestBuy fucks up something for me again? That’s a bad feeling.
And if you can build good feelings, those vibes travel. So when you announce you’re leaving Facebook, your true fans will join your email list. When you ramp down your Tweeting, they’ll follow you to your podcast.
Not everyone will join, or follow, and that’s okay. Do what sits well in your own heart, and the fear won’t hold you back.
I wrote this back in January 2014.
Mobile is Surging
I love this. If even Google is struggling to make a dollar from mobile, where’s that going to leave the bloggers?“Just three years ago, in 2009, (Global mobile traffic) was at a measly 1%. It edged up to 4% in 2010, and it hit 13% in November 2012, according to StatCounter Global Stats.”
It’s coming and you can’t stop it. As Napster did to the music biz, mobile will do the same to traditional web media. If you rely on four banner ad placements on your blog page x your daily traffic, everyday, the surge towards mobile will be devastating.
Yeah, I’d say mobile surged a bit.
Lots of people start email newsletters.
Starting is the easy part.
Running an email newsletter, well, that’s serious work. But really it’s not.
Everyday we read, consume, have thoughts, conversations, take photos – there is never a reason to sit down at our computers and not have anything to write about.
It’s just that sitting at computer can be paralyzing.
I’m telling you – if we took half of our flippant Tweets and just threw them into a draft folder (text file, Bear, WordPress), we’d never run out of material.
The allure of tossing these ideas and pondering to Twitter is strong, I get it. You’ll get four likes, and you’ll recognize some of the faces, and maybe one or two people will reply. But four hours later that Tweet is gone, pretty much forever.
But if you put that on a blog, or in your newsletter, it has a home. It can have a life now.
The fun part? You can do both.
You can Tweet it, than flesh out your thought even more in a bigger piece. The people that don’t use Twitter (which is a lot of people), they can read it now, too. And three years from now, your blog post or newsletter has more of a chance of coming back to life that that Tweet.
Support the work of people you admire. If you’re broke, just tell some friends about them – they could probably use the promotion! Hate the “garbage” out there, getting all the press?
BE YOUR OWN PRESS.
You’ve got social media followers. Tell them about awesome things.
You’ve got friends in your inbox. Email them.
You’ve got friends you message. Send them a link.
Your heartfelt posts and whimsical prose may only be seen by 10% of your actual audience. It’s not your fault, it’s just the way the system is rigged.
If Twitter shut down tomorrow, could you re-connect with the people you interact with everyday? That friend in another country that posts great photos from coffee shops? Or that friend two states away that’s always recommending great music?
Get an email. Get a phone number. No, you can’t keep in touch with everyone. That’s a full statement. You can’t keep in touch with everyone. Just as you can’t really be friends with 542 people on Twitter.
Then when you have phone numbers and email addresses you can speak directly. No one else is butting into your conversations. There are no ads. Your conversations are not being mined, a profile is not being built, your interactions are not being mapped by AI.
Yes, it’s a bit jarring at first. Your interactions with friends, no longer appearing next to explosive news reports, and tragic school shootings, but you’ll adjust. And you’ll get work done. And you’ll still have strong connections with friends.
It can happen, without a social media algorithm coming into play because you’re the one choosing, intentionally seeking who you want to reach. You are the algorithm.