Category: CommunityCategory: Community

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This one is from Ana Calin (see her post here), and is closely related to the idea of getting awareness off your plate.

Make a list of 20-30 people you could partner with in 2025.

These partners should be influential figures with a complementary service to yours and a similar target audience.

By partnering with them you can send referrals, co-market and even launch joint ventures.

It’s a fantastic way to grow.

Get out a piece of paper or make a new note on your phone and think about getting away from doing everything yourself, and figure out the people in your orbit that might be open to creative expansion.

For me that looks like people I could interview for this newsletter, guests I could invite to our Escape Pod Zoom calls, and smart people who could co-lead a workshop.

Who are some people you could work with that’d help you get deeper into your work? Who are the people you could grow with?

We’re not meant to stare at our phones for several hours every day. As Tuğba Avci says:

“It isn’t easy, but we need to start treating our mental and emotional health with the same importance as our physical health. You wouldn’t run a marathon every day, would you? So why do we subject ourselves to this communication madness for 12 hours straight?”

We make ourselves more available to anyone at any time, as we might be on several different social media platforms and their DM inboxes and replies, Slack channels and Discords, and managing multiple email inboxes.

As Seth Godin recently wrote:

“You might not have thought you’d be spending seven hours a day reading the internet, or most of your free time posting and responding, but that’s what the social media companies have pushed us to do.

We’re so scared of leaving social media because we’ve been led to believe we’ll be alone without it.

So, how can we possibly live without social media?

We read books. Magazines. Visit our library and local bookstores. Join a knitting club or take a photography course. Learn a new skill or a language (or two).

We can play shows in weird venues. We do book clubs in diners (or Zoom). We make comic books and zines, podcasts on cassettes, and screen print our own posters.

We build websites, and we update them. We send newsletters that aren’t just digital product catalogs. We buy photo prints and postcards and vinyl from our friends, and if we’re broke we at least tell our friends about the cool things our friends are making.

We stop talking about the 900 things we read yesterday and instead tell stories of shit we’ve done, places we’ve been. Trust me, you’ve got stories.

We host dinners without cell phones. We make breakfast for friends. We talk up our friends who do good work with people who can hire them.

We start radio shows at the local college, make ambient music, make short films with our iPhones, and bring together friends to premiere our work over pizza and seltzers.

None of this is a guarantee. None of this goes viral, or brings in 100 new subscribers, or pays your rent.

None of this is easy.

People working at social media platforms made sure that posting a video is as easy as possible. That makes everything else feel like hard work.

But we need to do hard work because when done often enough, with good people, we create a scene and build culture. That’s how we find our people and start feeling less alone in all of this, because we can’t hang out at the food court at the mall on Friday nights forever.

Let’s start hosting our own Zoom calls, and meeting in basements, studios, and backrooms to create the creative world we want to inhabit.

Buy the plane ticket, get your busker license, take that meeting, get on that Zoom call with total strangers.

“Tension is the feeling we experience just before we grow.

Ironically, it’s what we seek, at the very same time we avoid it.” Seth Godin

Uploading a song to the internet is easy. Zero tension.
Premiering your work “inside the dome of the Oskar-Lühning Telescope” is hard.

That’s what makes the easy stuff so alluring, as no one can judge you, or point and laugh if it doesn’t work out.

You can stay busy making Reels, but that’s another form of playing it safe, as hardly anyone will see them, let alone judge you for it.

Zero tension.

Instead, try writing an email to the five (or 50) people who open all your emails, or people who’ve bought from you in the past.

You could make a podcast and post it everywhere and reach practically no one, or you could make it for a small group of subscribers.

This creates tension because when you make a podcast for just a few people, it’s likely a few of them react in a meaningful way.

Changing the name of your project creates tension – will it confuse people? Will people forget about me? But you do the hard thing because it feels right in your bones.

There’s no tension with a product shot and a “buy now” button.

But you can create tension by documenting the process of making a great photograph and offer a limited edition print to your YouTube audience.

If I remember correcty this video only had 350 views by the time the prints were sold out.

So make that call, sign up for that marathon, email a venue and plan an actual event, with real people, in real life.

All of this hard work is less of a dopamine rush than playing the social media viral popularity game, but there’s tension, and it’s totally what you need.

In last week’s Escape Pod (my group Zoom calls with subscribers), we told stories about our experiences with social media, culminating with one person asking a direct “yeah, but as a musician how do I exist without playing the Spotify game or being on Instagram?”

We all went around and chimed in, but sadly, we didn’t get them booked at Madison Square Garden by the end of the call.

On Friday, Cassidy Frost’s Weekly Live Q+A Sessions had much of the same vibes – we’re all trying to figure things out, bouncing ideas around and chiming in with suggestions, ideas, and concepts.

No one won a Grammy that day, but we all gained a bit from the collective energy and ideas in that group Zoom call.

Figuring out how to lessen our dependency on social media is a journey, there is no map, and it’s best to travel with others.

The people who run social media platforms would hope we isolate and try to figure this out on our own, which is why we need each other more than ever.

• We need groups of writers for every fathomable sub-genre. Silent co-working style, or groups to talk about self-publishing, or pitching outlets.
• I bet you could start a songwriting group. Bring un-finished songs to the group, and everyone shares their work at the end of the call.
• Photography groups, where people could get together and edit photos together, or go through a photobook together, or talk about styles and gear or anything else.

Fire up your favorite video chat service and get back to being people, making connections, and building each other up. Do this in person if you can.

Because I don’t think competing with the daily publishing schedules of the more prominent media outlets is our game. Instead of churning out daily “content,” what if we slowed down and hung out with the core people who appreciate the art we’re trying to make?

Is it scalable? Heck no.

But is spending 12 hours this week posting to Instagram and trying to lure people to sign up for our newsletter the best use of our time?

How many subscribers is enough? How many fans is enough? Do we ever find contentment? Is our thirst ever quenched?

When do we stop doing things we hate for people who don’t care and start doing things we love for people who already love what we do?

• “God, I hate posting on social media.”
• ”Making content for social media is so draining.”
• ”All the time I spend on social media promoting my work feels like such waste of time.”

We have people right in front of us – digitally, and in real life. Imagine if we spent our time and energy on them, instead of spinning our wheels on social media trying to impress everyone and no one?

Like Molly Ella says in ‘The hard truths of content creation” (emphasis mine):

“The community that I have grown online are the reason that I continue to do what I do. Their thoughtful messages and comments can lift me even on a bad day. I recognise the names that come back again and again and I’m so grateful for them.

I intend to continue to prioritise nurturing these existing relationships as opposed to solely focusing on attracting new people.”

Growing relationships isn’t just about subscribers or “fans,” either. It’s about the entire community that exists in the little world around us.

In the music world, this could include producers, label owners, painters who make album art, effects pedal makers, and/or the local record shop owner.

So instead of posting for “everyone” and hoping to get discovered, we build a foundation of great people in our orbit with intention. That community is how we’re going to untangle ourselves from the social media / creator economy shit show.

As Metalabel wrote, “The creative status quo has made us lonely content machines” (read the whole thing from their New Creative Era booklet).

Our individual Social Media Escape Plan gains momentum in backyards, and on Zoom calls with other creative spirits, without algorithims.

Let’s go.