creative
Creativity + Social Media = a REAL Revolution!
The exploding growth of social media tools & sites is changing how everyone does everything.
Are Artists different? Should marketers, news and casual conversation be the dominant content using these tools?
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFZ0z5Fm-Ng
Slides and good images of visual art work are still important, but should their first destination be a gallery owner’s desk or the jury of an immense and pricey to attend craft show?
Head shots and a good reel are as important as ever for actors, but are casting calls and agents really the first place to be showing your work?
Is the default course for a first time producer to mortgage their home to produce their film and submit it to large film festival today?
What does your social “footprint” look like? How wide is your “net”? If you’re paying attention, what action steps are you taking?
In the 70s and 80s a common conversation in the arts and media was about how democratized media was becoming because of the “cheap” availability of video cameras. Almost nothing happened because the distribution infrastructure remained in the control of broadcast networks. The same has been the case for the visual arts and most forms of expression.
Art is the first technology! Without creative insight nothing moves forward. Distribution mechanisms are now truly open. Broadcast and distribution is playing catch up to what is trending on the net. Marketers and news is being delivered via net dominating more traditional distribution.
The only thing restricting creatives from dramatically increasing their influence and availability of their work is lack of familiarity with technology, and a choice to not exploit this technology. Reasons include everything from lack of time, lack of money, feeling it’s too commercial or just not being comfortable blowing your own horn.
Maybe these reasons have merit, maybe they don’t. In practical terms judging that gets us no where.
Broadcast and distribution is playing catch up to what is trending on the net. Marketers and news is being delivered via net dominating more traditional distribution.
This isn’t going away. This is how everything is getting done. The real choice is to either learn how to utilize it or surrender to those who are using it.
When the internet and television merge, as they already are doing, we’ll have lost an opportunity. Everyone learning the use of these technologies now has such an immense opportunity over those not using them that it’s hard to verbalize. If you’re reading this, you’re already ahead of the game and I congratulate you.
Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.
Artists…PageRank doesn’t always equal Traffic!
Artists, performers, writers and other creatives using a blog or web site to showcase their work need to be aware of PageRank. It’s a number calculated based on link analysis that’s supposed to indicate how relevant your site is to other sites discussing similar content. The problem with that is, for artists, often our content is very, very specific! The more specific and individual we make ourselves and our work, the harder it is to be seen by search engines as “similar” or relevant to a keyword phrase or sites that may be tangentially related to the subject of our work. For many visual artists or performers who’ve documented their work with photos or videos the problem is compounded by a lack of text on pages for the search engines to index. For these it is very important to annotate images and videos with tags, captions or some descriptive text.
Having said all that, PageRank is only an indication of how likely your site will turn up in a search for specific keywords found in your site based on links from other sites seen as also relevant to those keywords. PageRank is not necessarily a direct indication of how much site traffic you can expect to see on your site! Often we see advertising for SEO services or instruction on how to improve search engine optimization for our sites. I’ve even seen this being offered specifically for Artists and creativity related sites. I’m all for optimizing your site for search engines, but the assumption that doing so will have a direct and immediate impact on site traffic for artist’s sites is typically not accurate.
When you are making work that is highly individual it’s important to realize that search engines are really not smart enough to grasp the subtle differences that might make your work or performance great versus something manufactured using similar descriptions. If your goal is to increase awareness of your work and a broader base of collectors or fans the thing to concentrate on is traffic. How do you increase traffic if you’re not focused on PageRank? For specific, individual work we all need to focus on virtual locations where targeted influence can result.
These methods have a higher likelihood of resulting in site visits from individuals who have already self filtered themselves, who are interested in the content they find in these channels.
Please mention your own experiences and add methods you’ve found to be effective in the comments below.