A social media network formula for artists

By now you should have an under­stand­ing of the pur­pose of hav­ing vis­i­bil­ity ele­ment in your over­all art mar­ket­ing strat­egy and the impor­tance of vis­i­bil­ity to artists in particular.

Because we don’t own store fronts and most of us are the only peo­ple employed in our busi­ness ‚we need to have some way that brings peo­ple to what­ever venue we sell our stuff  out of. More­over, we really don’t want just any per­son, we want those who get what our work is all about, because they are the ones who will ulti­mately return to own more of our stuff and bring other liked minded buyers.

The last two install­ments of this series addressed the impor­tance of hav­ing a vir­tual Hub and that its’ pur­pose and func­tions were to serve as:

• Com­mu­ni­ca­tions center
• Net­work­ing center
• Activ­ity center
• Nav­i­ga­tion center

Each func­tion pro­vides ways to find, iden­tify, help and guide poten­tial buy­ers to the work that best meets their needs. How­ever, those buy­ers need to come from some­where, and the pri­mary pur­pose of our blog/hub is to gen­er­ate mes­sages that, get the atten­tion of buy­ers look­ing for what we have to offer. How­ever, just send­ing out mes­sages with no strat­egy just repeats the old “hope mar­ket­ing”.  Social media/networks offer the best way to fine tune our efforts  to spread the word about our work. While there are many to chose from,  the net­works offer­ing the best poten­tial for find­ing and guid­ing poten­tial buy­ers back to our hub, are Face­book and Twit­ter. Both of these net­works offer the great­est reach poten­tial avail­able, because they over­lap with many other net­works in the same man­ner as the rip­ples of our skip­ping rock. The pre­vi­ous chap­ter illus­trated the mul­ti­tude of con­nec­tions pos­si­ble the two videos show­ing the con­nec­tions gen­er­ated by my use of Face­book and Twit­ter, by dynam­i­cally graph­ing the over­lap­ping nature of these net­works and their almost infi­nite com­bi­na­tions and possibilities.

There are a few other social net­works/media that can pro­vide assis­tance in both sup­port­ing your Face­book and Twit­ter net­works, serv­ing as tools for reach­ing other net­works as well as work­ing quite well from within your hub. Let’s take a look at them…

Flickr

Flickr, although, ini­tially a photo shar­ing net­work which now includes many other visual artists is also a social net­work of its’ own. Like most net­works, flickr also can  link your feed to Face­book and Twit­ter networks.

Because of its’ func­tion as visual art site, it has also become a highly favored source for art direc­tors and buy­ers seek­ing visual art of all lev­els. Upgrad­ing to a Pro account ( a  whop­ping $25.00/year) will put you closer to the art director/art buyer cir­cle and give you more tools to con­nect to other networks.

Finally, Flickr can also serve as an addi­tional sell­ing venue focused on a dif­fer­ent niche of buy­ers than your other venues.

YouTube

With­out a doubt one of the best tools to sup­port your hub, and con­nect with dif­fer­ent niche net­works you might not be able to other wise reach. YouTube also con­nects very well with Face­book and can con­nect to Twit­ter rather seam­lessly, video is per­haps one of the best ways to make an impact with your mes­sage whether it is demon­strat­ing a tech­nique or just describ­ing a gallery show or sales venue.

Because YouTube can con­nect to a wide vari­ety of net­works and can be embed­ded in not only your blog but also a wide range of other media, it is an excel­lent tool to expand your reach and ulti­mately increase the poten­tial of your mes­sage becom­ing viral. How­ever, its’ suc­cess really depends on how you feel about talk­ing to a video cam­era, if you’re like me, you want to prac­tice some to see if it suites you.

Deviant Art

This net­work is pri­mar­ily a place for visual artists and design­ers, like Flickr it is also a place vis­ited by art direc­tors and art buy­ers. Also like Flickr it plays well with other social net­works espe­cially Face­book and Twitter.

Because of the cre­ative com­mu­nity  of “Deviants”, as they call them­selves, an account will get you a gallery, non-branded web site along with a group of very cre­ative and fun artists to net­work with.

Linked in

I gen­er­ally don’t rec­om­mend Linked in as a social net­work plat­form for artists because it is designed to be used pri­mar­ily as a cor­po­rate busi­ness net­work­ing plat­form. It offers lim­ited abil­ity to serve visual artists with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of mak­ing poten­tial con­nec­tions with cor­po­rate execs respon­si­ble for buy­ing and plac­ing art within their cor­po­rate offices.

Loca­tion based ser­vices (LBS)

This is a cat­e­gory of social net­work that has emerged with the growth of smart phones enhanced with GPS. Cur­rently, the pri­mary ones are Yelp, Foursquare, Brightkite and Gowalla. Orig­i­nally designed as games sim­i­lar to scav­enger hunts, these ser­vices offer work­ing artists won­der­ful tools for bring­ing poten­tial buy­ers to their gallery show, art crawls and art fairs.

The use of these ser­vices is still much in the early adap­tor phase and a recent exper­i­ment I con­ducted in con­junc­tion with an  art fair yielded small but great results for the artists using them. As more and more users switch to smart phones expect to see more ways these ser­vices can be adopted by artists.

All of these ser­vices offer options for con­nec­tion to both Face­book and Twit­ter giv­ing you the artists, the abil­ity to check in at a gallery or fair and remind friends of your show by loca­tion. I’ll be address­ing these ser­vices in more detail as I test their applic­a­bil­ity for artists.

Mak­ing the connections

The next step is con­nect­ing your hub to social net­works, a good way to think of how these con­nec­tions work is to remem­ber the last time you skipped a stone across the water. Often, the stone doesn’t take a straight path as it bounces over the water  send­ing out rip­ples of con­cen­tric cir­cles each time it splashes the water’s sur­face even­tu­ally dis­si­pat­ing once the stone losses its momen­tum.  Imag­ine sev­eral hun­dred peo­ple around the water’s edge, each skip­ping their own stone. If they all skip their stones simul­ta­ne­ously many of the rip­ples will over lap some­times more some time less.

Now con­sider your self and all the other stone skip­pers,  hubs and the stone as your mes­sage, the place each stone lands rep­re­sents an entry point into a net­work. Each con­cen­tric rip­ple is your mes­sage mov­ing through that net­work with the diam­e­ter rep­re­sent­ing your mes­sages reach. Over­lap­ping rip­ples rep­re­sent a com­mon point of con­nec­tion with other rock skip­pers. In this case Face­book and Twit­ter are the first land­ing spots of your skip­ping rock .

In order to achieve the best reach and overlap,we need to have a good skip­ping stone, a good strong throw that includes good tech­nique and the best posi­tion rel­a­tive to the other stone skip­pers. Since the spread of rip­ples shrinks as the stone losses momen­tum we want to make the first skips gen­er­ate the largest num­ber of rings to increase our over­lap with those pro­duced by other stone skippers.

The mechan­ics of it all

Remem­ber our goal here is to cre­ate a sys­tem that will spread our mes­sage and allow us the max­i­mum reach pos­si­ble. Using a blog as our hub our next step is to find a way to con­nect our blog posts (our mes­sage) to Face­book and Twit­ter and any other net­works we dis­cover. Because we are using a Blog as our hub, we have a ready made “pipeline” to carry our mes­sages to other net­works, that pipeline is our RSS feed.

The actual mechan­ics of con­nec­tion between our hub and Face­book and Twit­ter is going to depend on our blog­ging plat­form. This is where Face­book works well, because it allows us to add our RSS feed to our pro­file and fan pages. Using the Notes tab in our pro­file we can send our feed directly to Face­book, so each time we pub­lish on our blog, that post/message goes to Face­book via RSS, and shows up both in the Notes tab and our Wall. As a result the mes­sage is vis­i­ble to our Face­book net­work and any­one else depend­ing on how we have set up our account.

I’ll be address­ing Face­book strate­gies in a later series, so for the sake of this series I’m only con­sid­er­ing the con­nec­tion between our hub and our net­works. Another way to get our mes­sage to Face­book is by using Twit­ter, this avenue how­ever, is depen­dent on our blog­ging platform’s abil­ity to con­nect to Twit­ter. If you use Word­Press there are any num­ber of plug-ins that work to con­nect your posts to Twit­ter, and it is this flex­i­bil­ity that makes Word­Press a more work­able plat­form than many others.

Now that we have your hub hooked up with Face­book and Twit­ter as well as other smaller net­works the next adven­ture is explor­ing the world of search engines and dis­cov­er­ing how to opti­mize all your Inter­net pres­ence to bring spe­cific niche’s of peo­ple to your hub’s front door.

Stay up to date with this series fol­low the links below:

• The Sum­mer of Love and the hippie-dippy busi­ness model

• The Age of Confusion

• What I learned from Alice, a Cru­civer­bal­ist and Sputnik

• Your vis­i­bil­ity Tool Kit

• The Heart of Your Business

• A social graph for artists