Iâve been a content creator my whole adult life. While this started with studying several instruments, it eventually changed to photography, programming video games, studying painting - and finally writing a PhD thesis: today, my professional life consists of producing paintings, as well as curating exhibitions (also Iâm doing a videography project that Iâm in love with).
More specifically though, I need to introduce myself as idealistic content creator: over the years, my focus has always been on understanding a craftâs quality, in order to then implement it as best as I could. My mission was craft, and time not spent on advancing that mission felt wrong - as a result, business topics (branding, marketing, business development etc.) were never on my mind. My thinking was that any focus on PR would manifest my own disbelief in my workâs quality: once I started to get my head into PR space, wouldnât that be the final nail in the coffin of self-disbelief, in my own work?
I never saw the arrogance in this.
I didnât used social media to proactively push my content (or myself) as a brand. It felt wrong to even read PR material: I understood social media as distraction, as todayâs television: a neverending stream of garbage and pushed egos - why would I subject my work to that? As a side effect, this let me stick to my comfort zone: my craft, and the believe that if Iâd be good in it, middlemen would eventually take care of the rest. Ultimately, I subscribed to the romantic notation of quality guaranteeing success.
Social Media Today: A Currency
With social media having been around for over a decade, I want to recap the situation that todayâs content creators find themselves in: Â there are more of us than ever, with more potential visibility than ever. Social media hosts an endless amount of individuals too, whose lives could be enrichened by our creations - if only theyâd know about it: potential customers, 99% of whom have never heard of you or seen your work (letâs quickly recap the numbers too: Facebook 2 billion. Instagram 800 million. LinkedIn 467 million. VKontakte 447 million. Tumblr 345 million. Twitter 330 million. Pinterest 200 million).
While we thought that having websites would result in our work being discovered, we now know that they offer zero discoverability: they mostly make sense today as digital homes and archives, for those who already know us. While special-interest forums can be used for personal networking purposes, they donât easily offer audience growth. Ultimately, neither websites nor forums offer what seems to be the most important aspect of todayâs content creation reality: social media as currency.
While some of us ignored social media as distraction (âItâs virtual! A bubble! Youâre wasting your time!â), others embraced it to gain visibility. They did so by showing their work, their processes, their lives - and accumulated followers over the years. In retrospect, itâs obvious that many of us idealists missed the real-life consequence of social media: it being a currency. Those that worked for years to gain followers arenât just âmore visibleâ today, on their specific social media platforms: If Harding Meyer has 29k followers on Instagram, if Emma Hopkins has 84k followers on Instagram, if Katie Mack has 211k followers on Twitter (WHAT! It was 180k just three months ago!), this changes how the world sees their works, and listens to them - itâs an impact thatâs not limited to the âvirtualâ world at all. It changes our relation to them in the real world: Â if youâre a professional, thereâs nothing virtual about social media. Social media isnât just âa currencyâ: itâs a real-life currency.
With whom will middlemen (galleries, publishers, labels; universities, employers etc) want to collaborate: with me, a painter with less than 500 followers - or Emma Hopkins? The situation today is very straight-forward: social media makes our marketing efforts transparent. If you donât put the hours into it, you will appear sloppy to those who do: you risk being seen as hobbyist, independently of your workâs qualities.
As a professional, ignoring social media is like not brushing your teeth: while this doesnât create problems today, it has consequences when disregarded for years. If you want to operate autonomously, if you want your work to be visible, then you need to embrace social media. Social media changed the landscape not only for its users, but for everyone else too. If you ignore it, your visibility and relevance will implicitly fade: itâs a visibility-tide that keeps rising, with you being able to chose whether to work with it - or have your visibility drown.
My words make it sound futile to resist, while ultimately participation is still a personal choice; my goal is not to have you start posting erratically, but to slowly get aware of a situation: donât be the frog who didnât know about the rising temperature. Itâs your choice how to proceed. But I do want to tell you that nearly all established professionals, in nearly any field, use social media to strengthen their voices, to speak to their followers, to spread their mission.
If you disregard social media as marketing, and marketing as wrong, I have a very basic question for you: do you pursue your craft as a profession, or as a hobby? Because if it is the former, than thereâs simply no excuse but to work towards your customers - because you need customers, and you want customers.
I realized only recently that most peopleâs aversion to marketing is based on their understanding of it as a cheap way to sell crap: to sell a broken care to a blind person that canât drive. This is not what Iâm talking about. Iâm talking about bringing quality to a world that drowns in superficiality. Iâm talking about a world that needs both aesthetics and ethics. Iâm talking about accepting your workâs uniqueness and accepting that there are people out there whose lives will benefit from experiencing it - whether thatâs a video game, a painting, a theater production, a massage, a repaired car, an exhibition you curated, or a statement against misogyny.Â
Iâm talking about your responsibility, as idealistic content creator, to embrace your work as a product, and embrace your customers as individuals who want to experience and embrace your world: but who canât, if you stay silent about it.
Only by believing in your work (and yourself!) will you be able to start marketing it appropriately: not by exaggerating, but by working ethically towards making people see it - people whose lives will benefit from it. Also, think about the alternative: if us idealists donât enter social media for real (Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, VKontakte, ReddIt, Behance, LinkedIn, Tumblr etc), the level of quality on each of these platforms will strongly be influenced by others whose aesthetics and craftsmanship arenât anywhere close to âoursâ. By people who, in the worst case, arenât in it for idealistic reasons. By disregarding all these platforms, arenât we guilty of ivory-tower-ism? What about gamergate: if weâd all have been on Twitter, couldnât we have made a difference? I donât know a single painter whoâs on Twitter. Why?
Iâll start posting specific steps on how to start your journey - how to embrace an ethical way of accepting marketing for your craft, so you and your work will gradually be seen. How to engage with an international audience, leading to your work becoming better, your motivation to rise, and your sales to increase: by having made the world a better place, in the small way that you can influence the world.
Stay tuned, and subscribe to my mailing list if youâre interested in staying in touch!
