515 - Want to Quit Social Media? 3 Essential Considerations for Any Creative Practice

0:02On the creative journey, it's easy to get lost, but don't worry, you'll lift off, sometimes you'll just need a creative pep talk.

0:20This is the question that I think so many of us are asking today. Should I quit social media? Can I quit? Please. I'm sick of it, man. Social media has become such a difficult space to engage in, not just as a human, but as a creative person. If you're trying to build a creative practice, have a creative career, for a long while, having social media felt like it was non-negotiable. You had to do it. And I think, yeah, in some ways for a lot of us, that was true. and nowadays I think it's a little bit more complicated than that and that's why we're gonna talk about you know some of us maybe should some of us maybe shouldn't what have you but if you're thinking about doing it I think you need to ask yourself these three questions before you quit social media and if you stick around to the end I'm gonna give you something you can do that is going to be more effective for engaging, getting your work out there more than just doing whatever random trend is happening on social media right now.

1:42It's called Follow Their Leads, and it's our creative call to adventure for today. We'll get to that at the end, but for now, let's talk about those three questions that I think you need to ask yourself if you're considering quitting social media.

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3:43Okay, what are the three questions to ask before quitting social media? Before we get to those, let's just dive deeper into this question of should I quit social media and ask ourselves, what does this question even freaking mean, man? Why are we asking this? What is this about? It's not about social media, obviously. It's about something deeper. And these three questions are really getting at the deeper layers, the three layers of what's going on when you ask that question. Why should you be on social media? What could you possibly get out of it? That's what we're getting at. It's about how do people discover what I do?

4:32How do people become fans of what I do? How do I make sales? Those are essentially the three questions, but we're gonna go into them a little bit deeper. And I think they're underneath why we feel like we have to be on social media. Because if you have a business, a creative career, you have to have answers to those three questions. How do new people find out about you? How do you go deep with somebody? How do they become fans of what you do? And then third, and maybe most importantly in this run of questions, how do people fund your practice? How do you make the sales? What are they buying? And where do they buy it?

5:22And so that journey, that's the customer journey. They talk about it in marketing. We're not going to do too much marketing speak today, but this is what they call funnels in the marketing world. And, you know, I never wanted to know that. I never wanted to know what a funnel was, man. Honestly, I didn't. I say jokingly, but seriously, when I started my creative practice back in 2008, when I graduated with a degree in graphic design illustration, that's what I studied while I was there. I, you know, just went out there, pound the payments, trying to get my work out, doing all kinds of things for exposure, trying to make it work.

6:13And then we hit the recession in 2008, 2009, right when I freaking graduated. And all of the momentum I had just disappeared overnight. And I had to quit hoping I'd get lucky and try to figure out how do you do this on purpose? If I want this to be my career, I got to take it a little bit more seriously. And so I hit rock bottom. A lot of people, rock bottom is turning to drugs. And my rock bottom was turned to something much darker than that. Business books, marketing funnels, man. It was a dark time. But the funny thing is, is that here's what I realized when I started to open up these business books and marketing books and magazines and podcasts and what have you.

6:59Here's what I realized. First of all, a lot of these creative or a lot of these business unicorns that they put on these magazines, they're actually like ADHD people. They're creative people. I have more in common with some of those people than I would have ever believed. And then secondly, there is an element to business and marketing that can be really creative. I actually think when we think about business, and for good reason, we think about some terrible things because some of the most powerful business people have done some terrible things or used their power for not so good. And then there are just a lot of ethical issues that come up in the systems that we find ourselves in trying to make a living.

7:46So, yes, I get all of that. I recognize all that. But I don't have the expertise or the background or the ability or resources to figure all that out for you or me here and now. But for the place where we find ourselves, I think there are ways that you can go about the business side, the marketing side of your creative practice in a way that has ethics in mind and is part of the creative side of the practice. It requires an immense amount of creativity to be successful in business. And one of the things that surprised me most as I was reading these books and hitting this rock bottom was that business isn't what I thought it was.

8:37When we talk about business, like if you go to a creative conference or you go to an art school and you think there should be a course on business because all the kids will sign up to that, they probably won't. My experience is it's not until you hit that rock bottom or it's not until you hit that brick wall that you realize, oh, this is actually really difficult and super important. Then you might go for that resource. But when I would think about that as I was coming up, like what a business course might look like, I think it showed my ignorance of what business really is. And so in my mind at the time, I would have thought business was taxes and accounting and all of that kind of stuff.

9:27And that's one of the reasons I wasn't interested in it. But the further I got into it, the more I realized like those are like the necessities of business to happen, but they're not business. The business and the marketing is actually much more of a creative endeavor. It requires intuition. It requires testing. And a lot of these same things you see in creative practices built in to the way they go about making their work and that they get very creative in those ways. So if you look at, you know, for business, a lot of it is like, how do you test the market and get that product market fit? And, you know, fun phrases like that.

10:06You see stand-up comedians trying to find product market fit while they're testing material on stage. They call it writing on stage. They go into the clubs, they test new materials, new ideas, and they're trying to find what they think is funny that the audience also thinks is funny. This is something one of my favorite comedians, Mike Birbiglia, talks about all the time. It's like, that's what stand-up is. It's finding that Venn diagram. That Venn diagram in business is just called product-market-fit, the product that you can create that the market wants. And yes, it's a little bit gross to me to kind of, I'm not trying to be so crass about creativity, but just temporarily while we're putting our business hats on, put your business hats on.

10:51I think it's worth realizing that there is an element of business in which being a creative is a superpower. And that was a big shift for me that was super helpful. And so when we say, should I quit social media? What we're really asking ourselves is, can I build the creative practice I want without being on social media? And so the three questions that I think you need to ask, I want to put them through the lens of another industry or creative field where these business practices are embedded into how they go about their creativity. We're going to use the world of market or world of music to explore these three key factors of a thriving creative business or creative career.

11:44We're going to use music through the lens of singles, albums, and tour to address these three questions. And instead of just saying, should I quit social media, which is such a broad thing, it's so emotionally charged because it is just wrecking our brains, man. I consume a decent amount of material about the studies on what social media is doing to our youth, what is social media doing to our brains, how social media has evolved. There's interesting articles out there about this idea of like, will social media become the malls of America, these ghost towns, because nobody's actually there? I would actually argue you know that they've become more like our daytime TV because now it's literally like flipping channels when there's nothing great on and you're just getting snippets of televangelists, infomercials, and America's funniest videos, home videos.

12:50So that's kind of what I feel like social media has become. But the reason I bring this up and what I want to get to is I think it's a worthwhile question in your creative practice to ask yourself if you should quit social media. But I think you can only do so if you can answer these three questions without needing social media. And the three questions are, number one, where do you distribute your singles? Now, you might not be a musician, but everybody's got singles. Everybody's got work that they're putting out into the world that's hoping to get new eyeballs onto it or new ear balls onto it.

13:31They're hoping to get new people to engage with this work. And that's the purpose of a single. So where do people discover you? These are going to cover the three things that you need to be thinking about in order to build a thriving creative practice. And for a good decade or so, a lot of these things were handled by social media. So where you distribute your singles, where do you get new people to find out about you and put that kind of work that's designed to be hooky and catchy used to be social media. Where is it now? Do you have other places where you can hook people? And this is really important because social media right now promises you, like TikTok and Instagram primarily with their short form video and their ability to blow up and get millions of new eyeball, earball.

14:27I'm not going to say any other ones because it's just getting weird. But the promise is so huge. It's never been more tempting to think this is the place to distribute your singles and get new people to hear it. But there's a huge freaking problem with that because there's an assumption that if people discover, if millions of people discover you in these places or thousands of people, that that's going to convert to people listening to your album and then going to your tour and funding your creative practice. But the truth is I had a suspicion for a long time that that wasn't true because I kept thinking these people that do get millions of views and have these viral videos, do they equal followers?

15:18And even if they do, Do those followers equal any kind of real sale? And there's two things I want to reference on this. One is there's a great episode of Podcast Perspectives, which is a podcast that the people, the good people at my podcast network, Podglomerate produce. Jeff Umbro is the host of it. He's the head of Podglomerate. And they did an episode all about short form video and actually video in regards to podcasts, long form video as well, and how there's this huge movement of podcasts going to YouTube. And I was curious about it because we have a podcast on YouTube. This one is also on there.

16:03And one of the things that I thought was really telling was that there was a person who used to work at YouTube who said, if you look at the backend analytics of how short form relates to long form videos, you would assume that a great strategy was put these short form videos out, clips of your podcast, and they will convert to long form video subscribers and viewers. But when you look at the data, it doesn't show that. That long form video viewers don't tend to come from short form. Short-form video viewers don't become long-form video viewers. They just stay over in the short form. And so that's where the questions get really interesting because it can seem attractive to say more followers, more viewers, more of a thriving creative practice, but that doesn't actually pan out for the most part.

17:07And so it's not as simple as where can you get the most eyeballs on your work. It's as important to say, where can you get the right eyeballs? Where can I get the right eyeballs? Just isolate that into a short form video and see how like, where can I get good eyeballs around here? That's a much more important question. So you don't need to just ask where to get new people. You need to get the right people. And the second reference that I was going to give you was, because I'm a podcaster, I listen to some content about podcasts. One of the podcasts I've listened to for a long time comes from a guy named Kev Michael who used to have a podcast called Grow the Show and it was all about podcasting, but they've rebranded, refreshed recently and it's now called Chief Audience Officer.

17:56And it's all about not just getting attention, but building an audience that is the right kind of audience for you to build a practice around, a business around. Now, this is pretty businessy as a show, but I think in the world of marketing, it's not sleazy. It's one of the least sleazy marketing podcasts I've ever heard. It's an area that can be dicey, and I think he has a lot of integrity about the way he goes about doing stuff. A lot of that podcast is about podcasting, but that's really about the second thing that we're going to talk about, which is singles that lead to albums. Albums being where do people go deep with you?

18:41How do they get into the deep cuts? Is there a place, this is the second question, is there a place where people can go deep with you? Where can people listen to your album, metaphorically speaking? And that podcast chief audience officer is a lot about that, Building not just attention, but an audience, a genuine audience that is the kind of person that can support your creative practice. And so one of the best places to go deep with somebody is a podcast. So when I was starting out and I was hitting some brick walls and I was thinking about, I was doing all kinds of work. I was doing editorial work.

19:26I was doing work in design. I was doing a lot of design work on the side. I was doing whatever I could. I was doing work for brands and advertising campaigns. I was looking at everything I was doing and I was trying to figure out how do I make this sustainable? Who are the right eyeballs to look at this work that could make this actually work? And I realized that the only work I was doing at the time that was really sustainable was the stuff for advertising. It was the illustration for brands. And I started thinking about who are the people that get this work. And the thing that I realized is that they were the people that were doing talks.

20:12And I thought, I want to do talks. First of all, I already wanted to do talks because I like talking, as you can tell. And then also I realized like, oh, there's something about the people that do the talks are the people that get the best jobs. Now, I didn't understand it like I do now, but I realized, oh, doing talks was a way of people listening to my album. It was a way of people going deep with me. It was a way of going from discovering I exist to becoming a fan of what I do. And those people are the people that end up buying the merch and go to the tour. And so that was going deep. Long form is where you do that.

20:53Podcasting can be that. Newsletters can be that. Doing talks can be that. Albums can be that. It has to be a place where they can go deep with what you do. And so that's the second question. Okay, you can get off social media, but where are people going to go deep with you? You can get off, the first question being, you can get off social media, but as long as you know where people are going to discover what you do, as long as you know where you're going to distribute your singles in a place that the right people are, the right ear balls are going to hear them. And so I'm going to keep saying that.

21:28The third thing, the third question is, where's your merch table going to set up? Because nowadays musicians have a pretty difficult time just making a living on the music sales themselves. they've got to sell the tour tickets they've got to sell the merch at the tour at the show that's where they're really going to fund it and so it's really useful too I just like this model as a way of thinking about creative marketing through singles albums tour or singles albums merch because it helps you realize that all the things you do aren't created equally for every objective that you have some things are better at getting on radar for the first time.

22:14Other things are good for converting those people into fans, and other things are good for actually funding your creative practice. And they're all important. You have to do all of them, but you have to be aware of what their purpose are, and it really helps you. Deal with the fact that everything you do isn't going to be a moneymaker, or deal with the fact that everything you do isn't going to go viral on the Internet. Or maybe nothing you do needs to do that if it doesn't actually lead to that third thing, which is where's the merch table? And the real question behind this is, who are your clients?

22:50And I was doing that when I was looking at all of the different things I was doing for money as an illustrator designer and started thinking about who are the right people and where do they find people and what do I sell at my merch table that allows me to succeed I'm looking at how long does it take? What are the profit margins on these different things that I'm doing? And so if t-shirts are the right bet or posters are the right bet or hats are the right bet, whatever it is, I have to be mindful about that. And I have to be mindful about where is that merch table? What's on that merch table?

23:34And who are the people that are going to be purchasing that?

24:00All right, it's time for the creative call to adventure. You know we don't want to just pep you up and then leave you with nothing to do. we want you to actually be able to put this stuff into practice in a way that's going to make a difference in your creative practice today. And so today, your creative call to adventure is follow their leads. Now, again, a little marketing lingo. I'm sorry. Had to do it. When we talk about these three questions, these three steps in the funnel, it's three things. And I have to review this stuff all the time. We talk about this in a bunch of different places on the show.

24:35If you want to go deep into this whole thing, we did a series about it last year. It starts on episode 473 and it's called The Three Steps from Strangers to True Fans. And we released episodes every couple episodes in that series. There's four episodes. So you can go check that out after this one. But first, let's talk about follow their leads. What I mean by that. So a little marketing lingo. when we talk about where people discover your singles and where people go deep with the album and then where the merch table is or where is the tour gonna be. What we're talking about in the marketing way is where do you get new leads?

25:16Where do you warm those leads? And where do those leads convert to sales? Very gross. Converting people into sales don't like it, but that's the business side of how this works. and one way to talk about it. Here's what I mean by follow their leads. Where are the people that have the kind of creative practice that you want doing this successfully, not five years ago, not two years ago, today? How are they answering these questions well? And it's a good place to start is what are the jobs that you want? Where are people going deep with people that are getting those jobs, and then what are they doing to get discovered by those leads.

26:05And so following their leads are, where are those leads? You need to go follow them in those places. And so once you have an idea of who you think is crushing it in these ways today, what kind of jobs you want, and who are the people getting it, then you can ask yourself, where are those people? How are they answering those questions? Now, let's talk about discovery right now. So like I said, where people are distributing their singles, it's not as simple as, oh, new eyeballs the most. It's not about the quantity of people. It's about the quality of people. It's not just, oh, the most new people are on social media.

26:48People are getting discovered on social media. Okay, well, then if that's the only place, then you have no option. you have to play that game. But if those leads aren't quality, then where are the quality people coming from? And so for me, this has looked like Substack Notes has been a big one for me. Substack Notes has basically a Twitter inside of the Substack app. If you don't know, Substack is basically like a blog that you have that people can subscribe to as an email newsletter. and I'm a big fan of how it works within my creative practice and one of the things I like about it is that I'm able to do kind of all three things, all three of these answers on one platform in a way that I haven't been able to do in any other platform.

27:39And so I can distribute my singles. I can distribute my catchy, hooky things on Substack Notes. And so here's what I would recommend you do. Follow their leads means. if you want a career like I have, then you go follow me over on Substack and you watch what I'm doing. But maybe that's not the kind of thing you want. Maybe you want the kind of career that someone has that gets discovered on YouTube. So go follow them on YouTube and watch what they're doing. Whoever it is, where they're releasing their catchy singles, where they're getting new people, go find out how they're doing it and follow their lead there and start watching.

28:24So you can go on Substack and watch how I use Substack Notes. It's been very successful for me. It's really been effective to share. And by the way, I'll tell you what I'm doing. I'm releasing my greatest hits over there. My singles. I'm re-releasing my best things that have been the catchiest things for the past 10 years that I've worked. I'm putting them on sub stack notes and they're gaining a little bit of traction and it's turning into subscribers of my newsletter. And so you have to ask yourself, who's doing it? Then where are they releasing those singles and go follow them in those places and learn what they're doing.

29:07And then you can go into how are people going deep with those people? Maybe it is a newsletter that they're sending out and they're reading, or maybe it is a podcast like this, or maybe it's long form video on YouTube. Maybe it's something they're doing long form in real life, like talks or events or communities in real life. You have to answer that question. How are people going deep? And you have to go to those places and see how it works. And then the same goes for how are they funding the practice? And so go follow the people that you want to learn from, watch how they're doing it and study them so that you can figure out, do you need social media as a part of this ecosystem?