How to use social media

Ran­dom acts of commerce

As a work­ing clay artist for 15 years one of the most frus­trat­ing and chal­leng­ing aspects of being a work­ing artist was the ran­dom nature of the pub­lic buy­ing cycle, the huge lack of under­stand­ing of the buy­ing pub­lic about the value of art, and the rel­a­tive lack of tools avail­able to effect my des­tiny, and hence my abil­ity to con­tinue mak­ing my art. All of this cou­pled with the unpre­dictable and rather arbi­trary nature of jury­ing into a show had the mak­ings of seri­ous feel­ings of not know­ing how to take some level of control.

Dur­ing those days  artists had lit­tle in the way of avenues or chan­nels to con­nect to their buy­ers and for their buy­ers to con­nect to them. What engage­ment there was basi­cally con­sisted of money chang­ing hands rein­forc­ing the com­modi­ti­za­tion of art. Sales for the most part  were the result of ran­dom con­sumer behav­ior inten­si­fied by the fail­ure of tra­di­tional mar­ket research tools avail­able to retail out­lets  that could use them to iden­tify and mar­ket to a par­tic­u­lar niche of buyers.

The poten­tial of the Inter­net as we know it now was not yet yet avail­able. Instead it was  seen as lit­tle more than an elec­tronic ver­sion of tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing. E-mail as a communication/stay– in-touch tool was yet to be real­ized. To fur­ther com­pli­cate mat­ters the nomadic nature of work­ing artists fol­low­ing the art fair cir­cuit had few tools to iden­tify and  reli­ably stay in touch with their tribe of fol­low­ers wher­ever they went.

Inter­ac­tiv­ity is elevated

In a pre­vi­ous post I described how the emer­gence of more and more inter­ac­tive pos­si­bil­i­ties on the web led to inevitable death for tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing. That death opened the way for an entirely new model of sell­ing our work…a model that is multi-dimensional and multi-directional. An organic sys­tem of feed­back loops that bring mak­ers and buy­ers together in a hybridized col­lab­o­ra­tion held together by multi-level con­nec­tions. This organ­i­cally dynamic model has steadily erased  the need to “sell”  replaced instead by a more refined buy­ing model that brings buy­ers closer to mak­ers giv­ing them an abil­ity to know of and antic­i­pate  work that seems to be made just for them. The result…focus is taken off the actual “prod­uct” and placed instead on the maker and the maker’s rep­u­ta­tion, val­ues and abil­ity to con­nect with their “tribe”  or com­mu­nity of followers.

Remem­ber when…

Cor­ner store in Savannah

The con­cept of tribes as a com­mu­nity of like mind­ed­ness is just emerg­ing in impor­tance in the busi­ness and mar­ket­ing world. It is in many ways reflec­tive of neigh­bor­hoods so com­mon in pre-suburban Amer­ica where eth­nic, eco­nomic and social sim­i­lar­i­ties brought peo­ple together in phys­i­cal prox­im­ity. Neigh­bor­hoods became social and eco­nomic cen­ters where the cor­ner gro­cer knew who walked in the door or the bar­ber a cou­ple of blocks away kept his patrons up to date on “the news”, were mer­chants freely kept run­ning tabs trust­ing that they would be paid. Mer­chants had fol­low­ers that often over­lapped depend­ing on what was being offered, social cir­cles over­lapped depend­ing on their focus. In short…the suc­cess or fail­ure of the cor­ner drug store was closely linked to  the abil­ity of the owner and employ­ees  to develop and main­tain con­nec­tions based on inter­ac­tion.  This sense of con­nec­tion and com­mu­nity rein­forced by phys­i­cal prox­im­ity van­ished with the rise of sub­ur­ban devel­op­ment and its inher­ent reduc­tion of social interaction.

A nat­ural evo­lu­tion
What we are see­ing and expe­ri­enc­ing today is the nat­ural return to our social roots, but on a dif­fer­ent level spurred on by an ever increas­ing num­ber of tools whose pri­mary pur­pose is to encour­age, increase and sim­plify inter­ac­tion. Now, we don’t have to limit our­selves to one way com­mu­ni­ca­tion we can sup­ple­ment it with other choices. By com­bin­ing old ways with new ways we can use the right tool for the right job. As artists, we can now build our tribes by using both dig­i­tal and ana­log media, snail mail can be used to sup­ple­ment e-mail and visa versa. We can both send out post cards to our fol­low­ers and con­nect reg­u­larly via e-mail and social media. One-way web sites, which were noth­ing more than elec­tronic brochures have been replaced with reg­u­larly updated blogs that can pro­vide a run­ning view into our work and our cre­ativ­ity. RSS feeds cou­pled with e-mail brings our fol­low­ers even closer by elim­i­nat­ing the need to open a browser.

Mak­ing space for con­ver­sa­tion.…
So…how do we start? Among other things we need to start mak­ing room for con­nec­tion we need to let go of our fears of inti­macy, judge­ment and open our­selves up to the world. We need to start tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for our own path and let go of seek­ing ful­fill­ment out­side of our­selves. Let­ting go of fear opens our hearts to new pos­si­bil­i­ties that are free of expec­ta­tions which in turn can make us attrac­tive to receiv­ing con­nec­tions. To delve even deeper by open­ing our­selves we are giv­ing our art, our voices and our­selves a chance to be seen and rec­og­nized by whom ever is seek­ing what we have. By tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for our­selves and our des­tiny we no longer need to blame out­side sources for our fail­ures which turns us into glow­ing bea­cons of our value light­ing the way for those wish­ing to con­nect with us.

Mak­ing space for conversation

When all of this hap­pens we are then able to wel­come all con­ver­sa­tion that enables us to use our gifts to help every­one in our community/tribe  real­ize their visions as well. It may come in the form of a com­mis­sion, or the legacy of teach­ing oth­ers, or being an inspi­ra­tion. Regard­less of how it man­i­fests make no mis­take it will have an impact on all those it touches and in the process open us up to an entirely new way of being in the world.

A holis­tic approach
While the focus of this dis­cus­sion has been on Vir­tual social net­works under­ly­ing this focus is the more holis­tic notion of net­works regard­less of what form they take. In the end net­works are tools and in con­cep­tual nature a web of nodes con­nected to each other by com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels. The evo­lu­tions and use­ful­ness of this web of chan­nels has evolved with human devel­op­ment from grunts to the tap­ping of key­board keys. How we use these net­works depends on what we hope to accom­plish and what we want to say. So hav­ing a deep tool bag with a vari­ety of tools helps us adapt and in the process serve each other better.

Final Note…

Joseph Jaffe in his ground­break­ing book Join the Con­ver­sa­tion says about  con­ver­sa­tion and connection..

“Brands have to know their role and place in con­ver­sa­tion. Truth­fully, it is an extremely loose , amor­phous, and sit­u­a­tional role that not only changes from case to case but indeed may evolve and shift within a sin­gle con­ver­sa­tion. The art of con­ver­sa­tion is absolutely an art, and the abil­ity deftly nav­i­gate the thin ice of tol­er­ance, patience, emo­tion, and sub­mis­sion may very well mean the dif­fer­ence between con­nec­tion and disconnection.”

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