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Social Media

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Robin Pedrero lessons & advice

2009 by Bill

What are the most impor­tant lessons you have learned about being an artist and sell­ing your work?

I have learned to value my art and time. To not let neg­a­tive talk infect my work or atti­tude. I weed toxic peo­ple, places and ele­ments out of my life. Stay pos­i­tive. Build a good com­fort­able rela­tion­ship with how money is exchanged for your art. Know how to han­dle a busi­ness trans­ac­tion, han­dle it pro­fes­sion­ally and keep accu­rate records con­sis­tently. I know that it is ok that not every­one will like my art or want my art.

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Interview with Robin Pedrero-on marketing

2009 by Bill

Tell us about your mar­ket­ing journey…how did you start?

I learned a few things from my mother who did PR for our the­ater group, when I danced and sang in musi­cals. Her exam­ple taught me to be fear­less about just ask­ing or send­ing some­thing in to the press, radio or TV sta­tions.
When did you dis­cover that you needed to market?

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Another Dose of Twitter Tips

ArtWorks by Bill

A retweet is when some­one you are fol­low­ing adds RT to the front your tweet…big whoop!! Right? Well actu­ally it is because those two let­ters send your tweet off to the retweeter’s net­work and is one of the ways infor­ma­tion goes viral ( spreads fast).There’s a catch tho’ just because you tweet or ask for a RT doesn’t mean that your pre­cious tweet will be spread around. So there are some sim­ple points to keep in mind when you tweet:

* Show lots of tweet luv– tweet about some­thing inter­est­ing or use­ful some­thing that oth­ers may like to know. In other words give value when you tweet.
* Keep your tweets short enough to allow retweet­ing. When peo­ple RT you their user name gets added to your tweet…it doesn’t take long before your pre­cious tweet starts get­ting sliced and diced leav­ing only a series of user names fol­lowed by gib­ber­ish.
* Always Ask for a retweet by pref­ac­ing your tweet with Please, stud­ies have shown the fre­quency of RTs is directly related tothe use of Please.
* Be real, be human when you tweet the same way you would be if met this per­son at the old net­work­ing meet­ings.
* RT other’s tweets when they have value espe­cially to your network.

Build your twitcred

fountain_server

* It is not about the numbers…it is about con­nec­tion. Don’t worry about num­bers, focus on find­ing the right fol­low­ers and giv­ing them value…your fol­low­ers will increase organ­i­cally as your value increases.
* Your value is directly related to your human­ity your heart­ness which is your authen­tic­ity
* Have strat­egy for select­ing and fol­low­ing and stick to it. If you want to build a net­work of buy­ers then seek them out and fol­low them.
* Just because some­one fol­lows you doesn’t mean you have to fol­low them. If you want to serve a par­tic­u­lar group of buy­ers and poten­tial buy­ers don’t be afraid to not fol­low or even block fol­low­ers who are obvi­ously not appro­pri­ate for you and your fol­low­ers. You will get some leak­age of high rollers, inter­net mar­keters and political/religious cra­zies …you have the power to block or not fol­low them.

unfol­low­ers

* Think about your followers…why should they fol­low you? Because you are inter­est­ing,
* Your infor­ma­tive, your interactive,you’r not con­stantly promoting,You use Direct Mes­sages (DM) for con­ver­sa­tions,
* Have a com­mu­nity build­ing con­test for your fol­low­ers. Base your con­test on retweets, or the num­ber of their own fol­low­ers they can bring to an event.

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Social Proof in Real Time

Featured Articles by Bill

Found on Chris Brogan’s feed this morning…an excel­lent exam­ple of how social media and Twit­ter specif­i­cally can be used by busi­nesses in the LA Times. Watch the video and read the arti­cle it is social proof that the opt-in/permission based tech­niques now being imple­mented work far bet­ter than the old ways. Con­ver­sa­tions work, engage­ment works, con­nec­tion works and the beauty of it is any­body can do it and any busi­ness that wants to suc­ceed from here on out will need to know how to use these and other tools not yet invented.

Also cool as Chris said is that the LA Times set up the video so it could be embed­ded in anybody’s blog or site just like YouTub not only does it spread the word about a very real exam­ple it also gets peo­ple to it’s site.

To read the whole arti­cle go to LA Times

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See what twitter can do for the world

ArtWorks by Bill

A lot of peo­ple still can’t fig­ure out point of Twit­ter. We have been stress­ing it’s world wide con­nec­tion abil­ity as a tool to bring peo­ple together orga­nized around an infi­nite num­ber of sub­jects and objec­tives. Here is an exist­ing live event orga­nized as Twes­t­i­val to help bring water to those in need. As I […]

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What 2009 will bring and how artists can lead the way.

2009 by Bill

Over the last few days I spent time scour­ing the web for fore­cast­ing trends related to small busi­nesses that could then be trans­lated to the world of artists espe­cially those rely­ing on art fairs as a major source of sales. What I found was a lot of hope (you read that right!) the catch is that hope will not be real­ized with­out a change in the way you do business.

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A Different Look at Creativity Part II: the social media mix

ArtWorks by Bill

Before we go any further…

I want to point out that what I am describ­ing here is a process, a way of look­ing at how we cre­ate whether it involves groups of peo­ple or indi­vid­u­als and what we need in the way of tools and envi­ron­ments to sup­port us along the way. The con­cepts and processes are not lin­ear or pretty and admit­tedly leave lots of room for fur­ther explo­ration and devel­op­ment.
Let’s get going..

Now that we have the cre­ative spec­trum some­what sketched out let’s see how it can work with the social media. The pri­mary ele­ment of social media, in fact its’ key­stone is con­nec­tiv­ity at lev­els that far exceed what we could have imag­ined even a year ago. And… this con­nec­tiv­ity has dif­fer­ent lev­els of applic­a­bil­ity depend­ing on the users intent and goals. Before we look in detail at spe­cific social media let’s try to find what Cre­ators, Mak­ers and Pro­duc­ers need to suc­ceed, what tools are most use­ful to them. The brief list below sum­ma­rizes com­mon tools and meth­ods, some have been avail­able but lim­ited in their usefulness.

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A different look at creativity

ArtWorks by Bill

A frame of ref­er­ence started to emerge …instead of a hop­per of cre­ativ­ity maybe we need to look at it as a spec­trum with dif­fer­ent shades or lev­els each fad­ing into the other. For sim­plic­ity sake I defined the spec­trum as con­sist­ing of: Cre­ators, Mak­ers and Pro­duc­ers. This seemed to explain for me why I for exam­ple thrive on cre­ative inter­ac­tion and often feel lost with­out it while oth­ers tend to keep them­selves iso­lated. So let’s take a closer look at these parts of the cre­ative spec­trum. The graphic below is sort of an abstract rep­re­sen­ta­tion of how I see the spec­trum, there is no sig­nif­i­cance to the size or color of each section…just in case you were wondering.

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Thoughts on paradigm shifts, collaboration, community, tribes, and open source art

ArtWorks by Bill

Yes­ter­day I received my pre­view copy of Seth Godin’s new book Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us in it he addresses a grow­ing move­ment that I have been men­tion­ing in pre­vi­ous posts when refer­ring to social media. The sub­ject of com­mu­nity and tribes and the role they can play in cul­tural growth and even­tual par­a­digm shifts is some­thing I have been chew­ing on for sev­eral decades, going back to my days in city plan­ning. The power of the book stirred up mem­o­ries, of the ‘60s and later grad­u­ate school, as I read on, I started think­ing of Godin’s premise in the con­text of our cur­rent state of things espe­cially the shifts I have been notic­ing lately. There was some­thing famil­iar about it all.

So I went to my base­ment and dug around to find one of my favorite books from grad school…Thomas Kuhn’s The Struc­ture of Sci­en­tific Rev­o­lu­tions. While Kuhn’s focus was on sci­ence it is worth look­ing at how his the­ory applies to cul­tural and polit­i­cal change…no this is not going to be a dis­ser­ta­tion of the nature of rev­o­lu­tion. Re-reading Kuhn reawak­ened me to the process of par­a­digm shifts and how they might apply to our present cir­cum­stances and in turn to the notion of com­mu­nity, col­lab­o­ra­tion and art. Really, there is a link here…just hold on!

You see part of Kuhn’s the­ory was to draw par­al­lels to the process of polit­i­cal (and cul­tural) change. This process orig­i­nates with a grow­ing sense that insti­tu­tions orig­i­nally cre­ated to resolve prob­lems faced by the com­mu­nity can no longer func­tion as solu­tions to the prob­lems they were orig­i­nally designed to solve…an old par­a­digm stops work­ing. Over time alter­na­tive par­a­digms come and go each offer­ing dif­fer­ent and con­flict­ing mod­els of com­mu­nity life. Even­tu­ally, these new par­a­digms start to start to merge as fol­low­ers of lesser par­a­digms are assim­i­lated replac­ing the old which can­not coex­ist with the new. The end result is a change in world view, we in essence begin see­ing the world in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent light. We have evolved to another level allow­ing us to look at the old prob­lems differently.In doing so we also may see things we were not able to see under the pre­vi­ous way we looked at the world.

How and what does this have to do with any­thing? It has been my long held belief that our “old par­a­digm” of top down indus­trial man­age­ment was not long for the world and was not nat­ural to the way we as humans pre­fer to live. That model it can be argued served a pur­pose… it brought us to where we are now ( for good or bad). The early rum­blings of the par­a­digm shift I think began in the ‘60s and led inevitably to the shake ups we are expe­ri­enc­ing now. No we are not expe­ri­enc­ing the “End of Days”…we are expe­ri­enc­ing the death rat­tle of a dying way of life and the rough­ness that is being dra­mat­i­cally exclaimed is the shift to a new level

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