Category: Social MediaCategory: Social Media

Spend time setting up a new social media account, and in five years you’ll be right back where you started.

I’ve seen this song and dance before. We’ve learned nothing from the days of Xanga, MySpace, and Facebook. What was the name of the app that’d replace Instagram?

“I’m wondering if another social media network is really the answer we need.”

It’s time to build something that lasts – your own website, a homebase on the internet that becomes the primary source of all the work you put out into the world.

A place where casual fans can turn into bigger fans of your work.

Now, most “build your own website” services make websites that are good enough, but your work deserves so much more.

“We are the creative professionals who base our entire careers on making things look interesting.

Why would we stop with our branding, our collateral material, and – for the love of God – our website?

We are in the world of visual excellence. We should make visual excellence the priority feature of our brand.” Photographer Don Giannatti 

• Roman Muradov made a micro-site for his comic, and Diana Pappas & Tom Bland made a site for their photo & video shoot location titled Meadow, both using Cargo.
• Cody Cook-Parrott uses Notion to explain their upcoming classes.
• My interplanetary commuter music project (Hunterthen) needed a website, so I built one using Carrd. MMM is another website builder, but weirder.
• You could upload HTML files to YAY.BOO, made by A Good Enough Newsletter (they make Pika, too, which is a neat little blogging platform).
• I have a WordPress guy, and they set up my blog sethw.xyz in 2018, and I’ve been manually importing photos and posts dating back to 2004. I can introduce you.

You can do whatever you want!

Relying on a platform to get it right is hard because platforms are made up of people, and it’s hard for people to get it right for everyone all the time.

I was on the phone with my buddy Dino Corvino the other day, bumming about the recent election, and he said, “Someone in your town is hungry; make them a sandwich.”

I searched “Thanksgiving volunteer (your town)” in Google and found a local non-profit organizing meals for the upcoming holidays. I told a friend, and we went out and bought three meals for people needing a Thanksgiving dinner.

Today, for me, that’s my answer to all this.

From Embedded:

“It’s time to stop ceding our humanity to these platforms. It’s time to invest back into IRL community. It’s time to stop 24/7 scrolling social media—you will not find the answers there.”

I’ll find more of the answer when I drop off these three boxes of meals later this week because the answer is people, not platforms.

We need more people working on bringing joy into the world instead of uploading vertical videos for no one to see.

As Alice Katter says,

“The systems we live and work in today are human-made; they were created by people. So, why not create something different? That’s the beauty of creativity — it has the power to overcome established rules and even the language we use daily.”

Get to know the people who work at your local record shop, music store, gas station, library, or grocery store.

Say hi to your neighbors. Tell other creative people you like their work. Start Zoom hangs or phone calls with your friends.

Start a blog, an email list, a neighborhood group, a community meeting of artists, or gardeners, or joggers.

Conversely, don’t hang out with people who drain your energy. Set boundaries. Cut people from your life if you need to. Yes, even family. Life is short.

Spare me the “echo chamber” talk. We can have different opinions about economic policies and football teams, but if you think people I love don’t deserve basic human rights, well, go fuck yourself.

Yes, we should continue throwing stones at Spotify and Apple and Facebook and Amazon, but we can also do the work of engaging our communities for the benefit of humanity at the same time.

We can create new systems, new ways of working, new ways to show our work. I know it’d be super cool if I just laid out all the answers for your super-niche category, but I promise that you already have the ideas inside of you.

Do the thing you want to do. Most people won’t see what you’re doing anyway, so you might as well do it how you want.

Email someone way up the food chain. Go to the event. Ask for an introduction. Make your own luck. Your next big break could be one email, one interaction, one person away.

Hitting the viral jackpot on social media won’t save you, but building genuine connections with people around you just might.

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.

LET YOUR SUBJECT SELL THE POST FOR YOU

If you interview BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, his quote leads everything. That’s my rule.

We don’t need anyone to tell us that he “talks about writing” blah blah blah, so get out of the way and let his words lead the way.

LET YOUR POST SELL YOUR WORK FOR YOU
Stop explaining what you wrote and let the thing you wrote do the marketing.

GET TO THE POINT

You don’t need to explain the details. Nobody cares.

Do what Gabbie does, tell us what the post is about in the first few words, and get out of the way.

STOP APOLOGIZING

Blake and I had a pleasant exchange after this recent Note, but I included it because I want everyone to stop apologizing.

You can post a video, skip posting for a week or a month, you can do whatever you want, but please, you don’t need to apologize.

EMBED YOUR MEDIA

If you ask 100 people to click a link, you’re very lucky if 5% click, so put the thing RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT THE THING.

PEOPLE BUY BOOKS BECAUSE OF WHAT’S INSIDE THE BOOKS

A book cover and a pre-order link are boring.

People take screenshots of chunks of text, bits of dialogue, illustrations, and photographs from books…

Until you’re big enough for everyone to be excited about your new book, your biggest job is to make sure everyone knows what’s in the book.

At the end of the day, you compete with other writers and outlets posting the same wishy-washy “marketing,” where everyone is trying to sell a 12-pack of soda at the store.

But Coca-Cola is selling flavored sugar water, the most boring shit on the planet, and they make commercials like the one below to get the word out.

You don’t make boring art, do you? You’re work is more exciting than soda, right?!

That’s why the magic can’t stop when the piece is done, or the song is mastered, or the photo is printed.

It’s fucking time to apply the same creative magic in telling the world about your work.

Today is a great day to delete a social media app from your phone.

Just one.

You can always re-install it. But maybe today delete it. Live without it for half a day. Catch yourself reaching for it, and when you do, be gentle with yourself.

Start thinking of the times you get on the apps. While watching TV? Warming up food? In the break room?

Think of things you can do in those times and spaces instead:

• Maybe do some yoga while streaming your favorite shows.
• Do some stretches while making coffee.
• Have a book of crossword puzzles on hand.
• Practice the piano.

We can’t just delete the apps and magically be delivered from their pull. We’ve gotta be deliberate in how we extract ourselves.

Look at how JustSomeMustard has replaced Instagram with learning another language. Spending just five or 10 or 30 minutes per day on positive learning can make a huge impact over weeks and months.

We can’t be our best selves if we’re drinking chaos and drama from the firehose of social media whenever we’re bored.

When do we write lyrics? Reach out to that old friend? When do we just let ourselves be bored for a minute or 10 on the bus ride to work and day dream like we did when we were kids?

If all our downtime is consumed with arching our necks into uncomfortable positions for too many hours per day, then what becomes of our art practice or the number of books we read per year?

We can watch 100 videos about marketing our work, but first, we have to set down our phones and then do that work. Talk to other people doing similar work, see the results, and adjust accordingly.

We can’t do that if we’re watching 3.6 hours of videos per day, all at just 15 seconds per clip.

Zuckerberg and Musk would love for you to spend a few more hours with them today, but I think it’d be better if you deleted one of the social media apps from your phone today.

Once you do that, you can start doing the things you know you should be doing.