Category: Social MediaCategory: Social Media

Investing an hour with other creative people is a good idea.

I host weekly Zoom calls with Social Media Escape Club subscribers. We don’t all work in the same fields, or make the same art, but we still learn from one another, week in and week out. We’re not for everybody, and that’s okay.

Social media isolated us. Facebook and Instagram and Twitter keep us entangled in their products, making it difficult to walk away. They make us believe we’re nothing without them.

Social media is a toxic partner.

It’s time to get back to real life, with real people. To start using the internet as a tool, not a destination.

During last week’s call someone asked about hosting Zoom calls, and the room lit up with ideas, and thoughts, and encouragement.

If you’re an artist, a writer, a photographer, a musician – doing Zoom calls with subscribers is a great way to strengthen your community.

If you’re just looking to get away from social media, Zoom calls can be great to keep in touch with friends and family.

In each case, they’ll be laughter, some tension and silliness, and probably some revelations. The collection of people in Zoom calls can bring answers to questions we didn’t even know we had.

Here’s what I’ve learned from hosting about 30+ video meetings since 2023.

1. Set up a Luma invite, and connect it with your Zoom account. By using Luma, you can limit the capacity of the room. When I started out I limited the size of the room to 8-10 people because – honestly – I wasn’t sure I can emotionally handle hosting that many people on one call. Now my calls hover around 12 or so people each week.
   
   Also, with using Luma, now you’ve got the contact info of everyone who signs up. I did this for months, before I switched my calls to paid-only, but I still invite everyone who signed up for those early free calls. Those 30 people get an invite every week , and they can absolutely unsubscribe if they don’t want to be invited anymore.
2. Don’t just put an invite in your newsletter once and never mention it again. Announce it several times! Put it at the top, in the middle, in the footer – MIX. IT. UP. Do this in the two weeks leading up to your call.
3. Scared of no one showing up? Ask a friend or two (or three) to hop on the call a week ahead of time. Have them sign up via Luma, too, just so you get a feel for the automated emails that Luma sends out, and how it works.
4. Invite another writer / artist / musician on the call, and call it a live interview! This should be someone you’ve spoken with before, whether in person or on Zoom. You don’t want to learn how to interview people live on camera the first time.
5. I learned this from Cody Cook-Parrott; schedule your call for when you have the time and energy for it. Yes, it’s nice to accommodate for time zones and our international fans, BUT… a tired, sleepy host doesn’t do anyone any good!
   
   This also goes for how long your planned call is – 30/45/60 minutes? Do what feels right for you, and how much energy you have.
6. Consider having an intention for each call, at least as a launching point. This could be a recent newsletter you sent, or a media piece that has lot of people talking, and you can lead the discussion around it.
7. Slides? Agendas?! Up to you – I started out with agendas, but calls usually drifted elsewhere after 15 minutes or so. Like I mention above, I usually lead with a main point, and let the vibes take over.
8. The best way to keep the calls interesting is be interesting.
   
   Make sure you’re reading, staying fresh with the current happenings in your field. Also – go outside, get good sleep, drink enough water. How can you care for your community if you’re not your best self?
9. Read Priya Parker’s ‘The Art of Gathering,’ especially the ‘Never start a funeral with logistics’ part. Folks showed up. They took time out of their day to hop on a call. Start on time, think about your opening, and leave the “house keeping” until later in the call.
10. Your audience is counting on you to make space for everyone, so practice cutting people off when they get too chatty. It’s hard, but it’s best for the group.
11. Invite the right people. This is your space. Your baby. You don’t have to invite everyone. Protect your peace, protect your space, protect your guests. Make it as exclusive as you desire. If you’re going to devote an hour a week to bringing people together and creating a positive space, honor your time and sanity and make sure it’s something you’d want to be a part of.
12. Finally – Don’t be afraid to mess up, or stumble over your words. This is what makes us human. AI can write a newsletter, but it can’t build relationships and invite people to chat for 30 minutes on a Tuesday afternoon.

A Zoom meeting can only be as good as the people involved, so be mindful of who’s in attendance. Set the stage, manage expectations, and allow others to seek entrance to your community.

1. From the comment section: “write an ‘Anti-Art World Resume’ that includes all the stuff that usually gets cut from a resume.” Thanks Jacqueline C. What does this secret resume look like when it’s filled with the stuff you leave out?
2. Envision offline, at a coffee shop or a Discord. Don’t just say “open for business” and hope the right people show up, invite the people that match your energy. Be selfish with your project, your art, and who you allow to enter your creative orbit. You can’t build what you haven’t dreamed up, so get dreaming.
3. Get to the point with your story. Write three paragraphs and hit delete. Wipe it out and start over. Blank page every time. Do this three times and you’ll learn real quick what gets left out.
4. Digital clutter is still clutter. Your work is all over the place, and it’s probably dinging your bank account every month, too. Let’s stop giving our money to the corporations for the “convenience.” It ain’t convenience, it’s lock in. How many photos are on your iPhone? Do you have a plan to manage those assets, or will you just upgrade to the next cloud storage tier? It’s $3 a month now. Then it’s $5, then $10. What’s the plan?

At Social Media Escape Club, we believe in escaping the idea that “the new way of doing things is the only way of doing things.”

It’s a lie. We’ve all heard that lie in various forms:

• Nobody visits websites anymore, so just be on all the social media platforms.
• Email marketing is too crowded, so keep paying for social ads.
• No one buys music these days, so just point everyone to Spotify.

None of us picked up paint brushes, cameras, and electric guitars to fall in line with what everyone else was doing.

We took a risk, didn’t we?

This is why so many of you have been building websites recently, to take ownership of your work, your brand, your message.

This is why so many of you have built your own Twitter-like feeds on your websites, to own the small bits of magic and wonder, to have an archive of the tiny things you post about week after week.

I took a risk this week, cancelling my Google Workspace account which hosted my freelance work email.

I cancelled my Google cloud storage plan, and downgraded my Apple iCloud storage by getting the photos off my iPhone to an external hard drive I already owned, all backed up via Backblaze.

These are small risks, and not really big public marketing wins. But they’re a signal to how I want to run my business, which is giving as little money as possible to corporations for services I already own or already use.

We’re all sending signals, remember? Even to ourselves.

I’ve seen some of you refusing to put your music on Spotify, or play bars. Some of you stopped making videos for vertical video feeds, or deleted entire social media accounts, entirely. Some of you have resisted the urge to sign up for other newer social media platforms.

Those are signals to ourselves, and the people in our creative orbit.

There are risks in all this, yes, but social media has done a great job telling us to take less risks.

Social media says, “just keep posting to further your career!” That’s like saying buy another scratch-off lottery ticket. After all, you see other people win, so maybe the next winner could be you!

That’s safe. Low risk. Everyone is doing it.

What about emailing someone directly? Like Katie O’Connell, who wrote an email to the folks at People & Company back in 2019:

“It’s an email that wrote me into the job at People & Company and the one to follow at Substack — jobs that didn’t exist and the email conjured into being.”

Sending an email can be scary, but there’s a 50/50 chance you get a reply. I like those odds more than playing the social media slot machines for five hours per day.

And think of the ways you could take more calculated risks with an extra five hours per day.

What about turning your portfolio into a zine “mailing it to a bunch of agencies and creative studios?”

Learning how to write better newsletters? Write a better bio, or freshen up your About page?

Pitching yourself to be interviewed on podcasts and YouTube channels? Getting “awareness” off your plate?

Busking downtown?

Making a poetry zine and leaving them random places?

Making stickers from your photos?!

Making a limited run of your podcast on cassette?!! What?!

I think it’s time we start our Risky Resumé in 2025.

Hire yourself to make bold, audacious products. Interview yourself on taking up more space in your creative endeavors. Give yourself that raise by offering the sort of workshops and courses and offerings that the world needs right now.

What does our Risky Resume’ look like by the end of the year?

How many risks did we take?

How often did we just “go with the flow?”

Did we just keep posting? Did we keep upgrading our iCloud accounts because we just have sooo many photos? Did we keep opening new social media accounts, thinking this next one will be THE ONE?! Did we neglect our website again?

Or did we boldly launch ourselves into things that maybe didn’t “work out?”

Because honestly it’s not even that they don’t “work out!” We just learn new angles, fresh perspectives on how to work and exist in this crazy world we live in.

Maybe we all just step back and look at what everyone else is doing and ask ourselves if there’s another way to do our work.

How are you going with the flow?

What’s one risky thing you can do today?

What’s the big thing you want on your risky resumé at the end of the year?

It’s Friday, so another Four the Weekend – four things I hope you’ll do by Monday.

1. If you’re still on social media, ask one person to subscribe to your email newsletter. Yes, one. Avoid saying “sign up for updates.”
2. Watch ‘Real Art Matters In a Digital World’ by Joshua Heath Scott, then think about how you can bring your digital work into the real world (thanks Zach Sprowls).
3. Did you make a video to promote something you’re selling? Try embedding it on your sales page, instead of sending your fans to YouTube. I explain why here.
4. Practice leaving social media and experience being unavailable. Be bored and do nothing for a few minutes. Leave your phone in the car.

You know that if you leave a comment, someone will see it. That’s how it works.

You also know that screaming from a street corner will get you some weird looks and not many positive interactions.

Where then is a good place to put our energy? What’s the best use of our time?

We are so entagnled in this “micro-blogging” quick fix life. It’s so easy to post a photo, a remark, an opinion. In the past the social media overlords swung the attention in our favor. They knew our friends would hit like, and some friends of friends.

They knew we could get addicted to this. So they slowly pulled it away, so some people who relied on (small businesses, creators, etc) would start paying for the impressions.

It was all a house of cards, and it’s crumbling.

But now as we return to blogging (like this), or email list, the rush isn’t there. The likes don’t flow like they used to. Fewer replies.

Which then makes us long for the social media hit. The quick fix. Post again, and again.

It’s gone, and it ain’t coming back.

The fulfillment we seek is already in us, it’s never from something outside (thanks, Alex for that one).