The other day I had a coaching session with one of my clients during which we both had a major light bulb moment. she was fretting about how all this new stuff would take up her time and keep her from doing what she loves…making art. The light bulb switched on when I said .…our uses of social media/networking are different, because we have different visions. In fact I would say that each of us have different visions and those visions drive our strategies. ..we will each have the right level of emersion that will work for us and that level will match our visions.
As a blogger my vision is to find and help as many artists as I can in whatever way I can. To do that I need to approach networking in a way that reinforces my vision. So I need to obsess over Search Engine Optimization (SEO), trends of page views etc. And I also need to find and emerse myself in social networks that might hold potential readers…artists needing help negotiating the constantly changing business environment. So I spend a lot of time on-line finding and following trends to see if they could be helpful to my readers.
On the other hand you as an artist have a very different strategy, while mine is to sniff out information, yours is to find, build and nurture connections. If your strategy matches your vision the time needed to implement and follow your strategy will become less and less. In fact the time needed can be very little once you have your networks in place. You won’t have to “tweet” all day, you won’t have to spend hours on Facebook, and you won’t have to write multiple blog posts everyday. Remember, the point of social networking for working artists is to use it as your very own communications channel, to be an artist first and web/social media maven… only if it fits your vision.
