Category: CommunityCategory: Community

I made the above video reply for my Substack pal Mariah Friend, who is “diving into the world of offering live events/workshops with the hope of building community and engaging more directly with my readers.”

You can find her original comment here.

“Unfortunately, I’ve had little to no engagement. I have around 370 subscribers and offer both free/donation based events and ticketed events… so far, I’ll have 2-3 people sign up on Eventbrite but then not show up. This honestly makes me anxious because hosting a workshop for a live audience vs. doing a recorded workshop with NO audience has a very different flow! I’m not sure how to best prepare for a scenario I’m uncertain about until it’s happening.”

Hosting these events can be a lot of fun, and build lots of goodwill among your subscribers, but getting them to show up can be a challenge!

Hopefully, this video is helpful. Every situation is unique, and every audience is different, so take everything I mention with a grain of salt and then apply it however to your process.

As I mentioned a bit ago, Michelle Warner said “get awareness off your plate and onto other platforms,” and that phrase has rattled me to the bone.

This doesn’t mean putting our “content’“ on platforms to sit and collect dust, hoping someone will magically discover it.

Oh no.

Be intentional and work with creative people in other vibrant communities. Connect with the energized souls doing good work. Those are the “platforms” you want to inhabit.

Need an example?

Joi mentioned this in one of my recent Collaboration Station chats, working with someone she was introduced to:

“We made a collaborative mixtape and broadcast it LIVE last night and discussed the song selection like we were having a coffee on a Saturday morning.”

Collaboration is an art form—approaching someone, pitching an idea, discussing how it might work, and imagining where it could lead for both parties.

Even though I’ve got 20+ years of experience doing all this, I’m always looking to collaborate.

Two collaborations I’ve got in the works:

First, remember last year when I wrote about how many bands played Furnace Fest and had an email list?

I’m doing something like that for this year’s Decibel Beer and Metal Fest, but it won’t be in this newsletter!

Nope.

I hit up my friend who runs a newsletter better suited for that sort of heavy music nerdery, and it will be read by an audience who will devour that sort of article.

Second, someone I’ve been following on YouTube talked about restarting their newsletter, so I emailed them. A few days later, we spoke via Facetime, and now I’m helping them get their newsletter back into gear (I’ll link to it when it’s live).

You can do a lot of things to “get the word out” about your project, like making another Reel and signing up for the newest social media platform.

But consider the creative energy that could be exchanged right within your own network – and slightly beyond.

“It takes two to make a thing go right,” goes the smash hit from Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock. “It takes two to make it out of sight.”

My first few Threads on Substack were duds, but then I flipped them upside down.

1. Make something that’ll be interesting for my readers
2. Reach out to smart people and ask them to drop a comment
3. Share the Thread post and quotes in future posts

Not only is it a fun way to get input from your friends, but it’s great for learning about your readers (and way more fun that surveys).

I made this thread, “Where are you at with social media?” and linked it from my Welcome Email.

Craig Lewis of Running Tales left a comment recently, and I wanted to answer it for everybody so we all benefit (though I did post a note about it here):

How do you practically make that move to talking to those closer to you/simply putting out quality content if no-one is seeing/interacting with it?

If you never post on socials etc, no-one ever sees what you do. If you have an audience already, it’s cool to get stuff out to them and they will hopefully do you a good turn and shout about it for you.

But if you’re still building an audience… back to shouting into the void?

Imagine you play the game, and you get 100 new followers on whatever social media platform. Big win!

But the next time you post something, only 10-20% will see it (probably).

That’s 10-20 people – out of that 100!

This is why getting “just” 10 new email subscribers is worth celebrating – because you can actually reach them!

So, where do you find those ten people?

• They’re in your DMs, or Discords, Messages – send them a link to one of your latest posts in a cool and chill way
• If you sell something online, you have email addresses! Send them a link to subscribe (DON’T just add them to your list, let them opt-in)
• There are people you talk to every day who have no idea you even have a newsletter (I’ve been doing this one for 2.5 years and some friends still have no idea)
• You can collaborate with someone and make something together, expanding your work to a new audience.
• Ask to be a guest on a podcast (via Astrid Bracke)
• Take online courses relevant to your field and expand your network of cool people
• Start your own online video chats (like Raz from Running Sucks), or Discord hang outs, or streams based on things adjacent to what you do and build a community (musicians do this a lot with video game streams)

These ideas require some thought to get your point across in a way that feels good.

It’s hard work.

But it ain’t “make video content that you hate doing four times a week” hard.

That said, it’d be way easier to forget all this Social Media Escape Club nonsense and upload a new piece of content to social media and get that dopamine rush when it gets four likes in the next 10 minutes.

This is how social media rots our brains.

They’ve convinced us that the only way to market our work is by using their platforms, every one of them optimized to get you to spend more time using their products.

Do you have time for more unpaid work?

Are posts not doing well? Try a carousel (which is more images you have to make).

Are carousels not working? Try making short-form videos!

No, thanks.

The power lies in our networks, our communities, our scenes – things that social media has done its best to rattle apart, but they still exist.

“Are we so powerless to change the current situation that we sit back and hope somebody else fixes everything?

And then what? That person will sell the company to a Nabisco+Tide hedge fund subsidiary, and we’ll be back where we started.

Maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer.”

Here’s an example: every week, a friend of mine emails creative people he sees making things he enjoys.

He’ll cold email the person who did lighting on a music video he saw on YouTube, or the person who edited a great essay.

No agenda, no pitch, just an appreciative note to say good job, keep it up.

Does it lead to work? Sometimes, but most often it doesn’t.

Did I mention this friend has a Grammy and an Emmy award?

And he’s not on social media anymore, either.

Don’t just follow other cool artists; BECOME FRIENDS. Creative partners. Support one another. There is strength in our collective magic.

Make cool stuff, and show it to your friends in casual ways without social media.

Get to work.

Vulfpeck’s Jack Stratton spoke recently about the streaming landscape and how Apple Music could be fixed.

Lots of people are writing about the death of Pitchfork.

Bandcamp saw 50% of its staff laid off last year.

In 2017, Spotify’s RapCaviar was the “most influential playlist in music.” Now, folks at major labels have “seen streams coming from RapCaviar drop anywhere from 30% to 50%” because “editorial playlists are losing influence amid AI expansion.”

There’s a Taco Bell commercial featuring Portugal. The Man – not for their actual music, but as a “feature” to highlight how broke the band was, but at least they could eat at Taco Bell.

It’s almost as if Seth Godin knew what I was going to write about today:

“When things don’t go the way we hope, one alternative is to look hard at the system that caused the problem. And another productive strategy is to figure out what to do with what we get, instead of seeking to find the villain that’s causing our problem.”

Right now, phones can shoot music videos, laptops can become studios, taking pictures with a disposable camera is chic, and we can post everything to the internet in seconds.

But the days of posting something on social media and getting 10,000 people to see it are over. That ain’t coming back.

If you’ve been a subscriber, you know I always say this – it will never get easier to reach your fans on social media.

Don’t blame Spotify, or Apple, or Meta – these are all companies that were built to make money for shareholders. They’re doing their job; are we doing ours?

Are we making the best art that we can?

Are we writing 1000 words a day?

Am I practicing my bass for 15 minutes a day? (No, I’m not)

If you were the lone creative weirdo in high school back in the day, well…, you’d better read some books and find some magazines because you’re on your own.

Now we have websites, Zoom, internet radio, email, and a thousand messaging apps – there’s no reason to do any of this alone.

We know the villains in the current landscape. We know what we’re up against.

Time to stop playing games we don’t want to play (and can’t win), and figure out what’s next.

My three quick ideas on that:

1. Write a good newsletter to your fans that they’ll want to read
2. Set up a website and fill it up with all the cool stuff you do
3. Delete the social media apps from your phone this week

Will that raise streaming rates and bring back organic reach on Facebook? NOPE. But it’s action, something we can do right now, and it’s a step toward new possibilities.