Ten Online Marketing and Social Networking Tips for Authors, Artists and Musicians

This is a response to David Battino's request for suggestions on online marketing and social networking for authors at http://blogs.oreilly.com/digitalmedia/2009/03/web-presence-for-publishers.html

1. Structure your socials 

Utilize the constellation of social networks – find out where your readers and market hang out and create a presence there. For that matter, create a presence on as many sites as you are comfortable with maintaining.

The key to this is to have a master collateral store of your bio, pictures and “metadata” style information – everything that you need to set up an account/page at any given social networking site. Think of each site as a copy of your book, placed where people congregate. In this way you can be everywhere all the time. Your master collateral store can also be your personal webpage…

The setup is just the beginning; make sure you have the site set to email you comments made on your page so you can monitor them. The next key is to use each service at their “sharp end” (like a pencil). For instance, LinkedIn is great for business relationships – only connect to those you would like to have refer you or that you would refer. Facebook is the stage your life is played out on – connect here with those you wish to have and interact with in your life. In addition, create a Facebook Artist page for your general public interactions. MySpace is a good place to reach out to a broad, generally younger audience. Take all comers and monitor comments for “kitty porn” spam.

There are and will be more focused sites as well for books and publishing, feel free to add those to your constellation, but be careful of the echo chamber syndrome. Best to address the audience where they live…

2. Leverage your status

How can you be everywhere  at once? There are secret weapons. Hellotxt.com is one of these. Status entered here propagates to all your social sites that provide status updates. In this way, a generally static page at one of your many points of presence can appear to be regularly updated – and you can create the generally static page from your master collateral store.

With all these sites, use the concept of leverage and fulcrums. If you are doing everything yourself manually, it is as if the fulcrum is very close to you, and you have to expend lots of energy. Using tools that multiply your leverage is like the fulcrum far away, giving you much more action with much less time and energy expended.

3. We are creating the story together in the Emerging Global Consciousness

In this new world (which is just the old world multiplied infinitely) each person is becoming a responsible intelligent agent, a neuron in the Emerging Global Consciousness (EGC). Email and twitter are the synaptic connections of this structure. Understand that there is a very big echo chamber; writers and storytellers are now meme generators. We create thoughts in the EGC.

4. Transparently share your research in real time

As authors, we constantly research. I know I spend most of my non-externally-paid time finding information. On Facebook (and other sites) you can post links to interesting items, which appear on your connections pages (and their links show up on yours). This is one of the sense organs of the EGC. Enrich it. When people that you are connected with post interesting links, it creates an info waterfall on your page. This becomes a source of information that you can selectively repost from (and it keeps you up to date with a broad scoop of research!).

5. Maintain your brand

This comes back to your master collateral store – which helps you present a consistent appearance and integrity across the social networking space. Do post a picture, and give as much information as your “privacy policy” is comfortable with. Since the audience is going to be spread out over as many sites as you wish to monitor and maintain, it is a good idea to present a common image to them all. This does provide a leverage point, however – if you hide different aspects of yourself (or “Easter Eggs”) at different sites, it may benefit the dedicated fan to find you on all of them!

6. All the world's a stage...

Do you remember the movie “Stop Making Sense” by Talking Heads? It begins with a guy with an acoustic guitar and a boombox… From there bits and pieces are added through the show until – a huge stadium show with full stage. The same continuum can be used on the social networking sites. It doesn’t matter how big and complex your presentation is (simple is just as good) as long as you realize these are performances - and that your presentation is crafted. Be aware of your audience and respect them…

7. Diversify your offerings

Your creativity is your currency. Make once, deploy many. There are several great authors who post their work for free on the web, but also publish hard copy. Using the Nine Inch Nails model, you can pre-sell a work at several price points and quality levels – including giving the information away.

8. Make it easy to get paid

Prominently display PayPal tip jars and links to your works on Amazon and any other place your work is available for sale.

9. Encourage comments

In the continuing communication to your audience, include “The Ask”. Make sure you let them know where they can buy your work, and solicit comments generally. Ideally solicit them to be placed somewhere you can control and delete the unhelpful ones…

10. Enrich the community - be an asset

The whole idea of Social Networking turns the old way of cocooning and “woodshedding” inside out. You now are working in public – but the trade-off is that you get to select the forums and presentation of your work and image. Information not only wants to be free – it wants to be meaningful. That leads to relationships – and that leads to sales.

Advice for the Freshly Self-Employed

If you want a piece of work well and thoroughly done, pick a busy man. The man of leisure postpones and procrastinates, and is ever making preparations and "getting things in shape;" but the ability to focus on a thing and do it is the talent of the man seeming o'erwhelmed with work.

Elbert Hubbard, from The Philosophy of Elbert Hubbard, page 42; published 1930

This quote exposes a very powerful truth - the busy person gets the work.

If you find yourself "freshly self-employed" one of the best things you can do for your state of mind (and your future) is to stay as busy and productive as possible.

What to do? Do what you love and love to do. If you have a particular favorite aspect of your life (music, art, programming, flower arrangement, it could be anything) dive into it. If it requires capital, dive into the communities that focus on these activities (they used to be called user groups - probably Facebook groups these days). If you can't find a community around your special interest, form one.

Remember, you now have 40 hours returned to you for your use each week, keep them productive. If you are visibly productive, it will be noticed - and there is always someone that needs something done. If they are wise and follow the quote above, you may be the busy person called on to perform.

The Emerging Global Consciousness

Consciousness:

Consciousness is a characteristic of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment. It is a subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. (Thanks to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness)

Greetings.

Since my last blog post there have been two events, one wonderful and one terrible, that caused me to become aware of some subtle (and not so subtle) changes in my understanding of the world and our place in it.

To review, last time we mentioned the curve of Internet connectivity and connectedness - being able to log on to servers in 1989 (ten foot pole), updating to 9600 baud modems and the ability to have listserves and websites (the equivalent of Braille) and recently to find ourselves it the last couple of years through YouTube and iTunes to bring sensation right to our eyes and ears. An immersive reality...

In considering this curve, I pondered what the next stage was. When something rushes up to you, it typically knocks you over or goes around you. It is not in our understanding of the everyday world to have something rush up to you and not only go inside you - but turn you inside out...

Now, on to the two events. The wonderful event was finding out that in Germany, someone was using the name Ars Divina (divine art in Latin) which I have been using as my business name for over 10 years. This person had started up in April and she contacted me on Facebook near the end of November. I found that we shared the same goals and ideals, and as my tag line is to be an umbrella organization, there was plenty of room for both of us.

Her name is Claudia Sophia Fuss and she is an artist and philosopher among other things. In time, she discovered my various activities and we discussed art and dreams. In order to really explain an understanding of a dream sequence to Claudia, one day I sat down at Photoshop  and designed "The Arc Of A Dream".

This, in turn, inspired Claudia to paint four pictures...

Claudia had already planned to have an Ars Divina art exhibit in her hometown in January, and with this mutual respect growing, she invited me to participate. I then printed several large format images of mine, sent them to Germany, and Claudia framed and hung them with the several other artists in the exhibit. This is quite an honor and my first public exhibition - realized through enhanced communication in Facebook, specifically. There is a tour posted here: http://snipurl.com/aix9v

This was the wonderful event, and it is happening right now.

On the other hand, a very tragic event also occurred, driving home to me the emotional healing potential of Facebook relationships.

This story involves my family, and it started out pretty neat. Over the past two months my brothers and I have manged to bring our family (including our 88 and 90 year old parents) into Facebook. Many of the kids were already there, but as of the new year everyone was in and accounted for. I have two brothers, one nine years older than I and one 14 years older. Dave, the eldest, has three children, Michael, Mark and Michelle (37, 33, and 26). As they have all grown up in and around Minneapolis and I have spent my life in Seattle, there was little interaction with the kids (now adults). Michael I had not seen (or spoken to) since he was a teenager, same with the other two. Now Michael and I were Facebook friends and we found that we shared similar hours and began to have IM chats at night, getting aquainted for the first time. I was looking forward to doing the same with Mark and Michelle.

This is when things get very human. On Tuesday, January 6, as I understand it, Mark had an issue with a defibrillator that he had implanted for four years. There was some kind of defect that caused it to start beeping in his chest - not fun. He went to the doctor and they decided to replace it, a reasonably routine operation. Evidently, the way defibrillators are replaced is to shoot a laser down the lead and dislodge the lead from the heart. In Mark's case, the lead was fractured and the laser diverted into cutting a three or four inch hole into his heart. The doctors did not realize this for a while, and in the confusion Mark lost oxygen to his brain for about 20 minutes. The next day, after much tension and confusion he was gone.

He leaves behind a chronically ill wife (for whom he was caretaker) two children and lots of pets. And a loving family. Pre-Facebook, we would have heard the story, sent a card and grieved. But, with everyone on Facebook the extended family could see the love Mark had generated in his community and could participate as if not at a distance. The most striking aspect for me was the continuing IM discussions with Mark's brother through this time - someone I had not communicated with for decades, I now had the honor of grieving with. 

So now Mark is gone (his funeral was on Dave's 63rd birthday). And I have a much deeper understanding of the events around this event.

How does this relate to the Emerging Global Consciousness? I think through these two events I have experienced what comes next in the curve of internet connectivity and connectedness. We have become intelligent agents - neuron-like, with synaptic inputs generating through our actions and decisions synaptic outputs.

The people walking down the street with bluetooth earpieces receiving messages to pick up milk on their way home are very similar to the nerve cells I activate when I ask my arm to pick up a glass of water to drink.

It feels to me as if the state of the world and the population taken as a whole is like a hung-over college student that passed out laying on their arm in a very uncomfortable position, and just waking up. The structure for consciousness and the autonomic systems have been in place for a long time. The discomfort of the situation is causing people to connect in new ways that may actually bring about positive transformation in the whole.

I am observing one more activity on Facebook that leads me to these conclusions; spontaneous communities. For example, a friend of mine was recently "freshly self-employed" from a local pro audio manufacturer. He was quite active in the music scene in Seattle prior to the Grunge movement of the 90s. This scene was from the later 70s into the early 80s and was dubbed recently the "Seattle Syndrome" after a local compilation album. I was in a synth pop band in Seattle during this time (The UltraViolet Catastrophe) and there was a significant community at the time.

My friend decided, since he had the time, to create a Facebook group called Seattle Syndrome and invite a few dozen friends and post a few pictures. Within a couple of weeks there were 200 members of the group and hundreds of pictures - all generating comments and finding others not yet a part of the group. This spawned (or was co-incedent to) dozens of subgroups based on various local clubs and hang outs of the time. All these groups (and I assume this is happening all over the world) feel to me like aveoli in the lungs of the Emerging Global Consciousness...

I read lately that the population of Facebook would make it the eighth largest country in the world. I have connected with a large subset of all the friends I have ever had in my life, and my entire direct family. Those that are not on Facebook with me are conspicuous in their absence.

Another behaviour I have discovered much value in is the posting of positive information to my Facebook profile. I habitually post links to scientific breakthroughs and items that have meaning to me. This nourishes me and those who get value from the information. I look forward to the day when more of my connections are also posting links that teach me and allow me to share even more with others.

In conclusion, I believe we have a new scale for decisions - actions and behaviours that encourage and lift the emerging global consciousness will be rewarded, those that supress it - not so much. It turns out there is even another Ars Divina - this one a Museum of Modern Art in the south of Sweden... Many hands make light work...

The Future Of Entertainment Is In The Past

With the advent of instant digitization products like the Zoom H2 and the Flip Mino, it continues to become apparent that the lifestream of humanity is transitioning to an accessible format...

As we see YouTube videos of the show last night - and the Cab Calloway show in the 40s, the whole of human endeavor is almost instantly accessible by anyone with the appropriate technology. This sum total of available content continues to expand with the dual drivers of the just passed moment (last night's show) and the ongoing digitization of everyday assets (photographs to Flikr, video to YouTube).

The nature of this content swings from the highly personal (family photos) to the obscure but amazing (multi-track versions of Bohemian Rhapsody). The time used to transduce these assets (from analog to digital) is only spent once per asset, but the asset is thereafter generally available.

At the dawn of the current information age, to touch the net was similar to using a ten foot pole - I remember my excitement in 1989 when I could within a couple of minutes log on to a server in Europe, then a server in Japan. This was big news... With the advent of faster modems and the evolving world wide web, the experience transformed into something closer to Braille - you could feel it but not see it. DSL and the continuing WWW evolution brought the fragmentarily digitized world even closer to the senses - with the world apparently getting even smaller.

Now, having Web 2.0 and cloud computing collide with the science of social networking, we come to a state of being close to a global consciousness. At our fingertips we can "recall" a large number of "thoughts" and "memories" (blogs, photos and videos). Each individual is an intelligent agent, determining by their preferences and the input from others what outputs to generate, in near neuronal synchronization... I read recently that Twitter is a form of telepathy - the instant knowledge of the general state of another at a distance. This is a sensorium that is now a step beyond the mundane, and may lead to a richer decision space to work in.

The most important decision to make is the next one. This is (hopefully) consciously determined by following the process of 1. Accepting Reality, 2. Choosing Independence and 3. Taking Action.

With a greater number of inputs (if we can mentally evolve beyond the total distraction factor) we have the potential to make better decisions. We stand at the forefront of an increasing wave of recorded human activity which is becoming increasingly accessible to more and more people...

Many of us strive to gain a closer connectedness with those in our lives. The advent of Facebook and other online applications provide clear avenues for that. This, to me, is the definition of entertainment - and it is unfolding behind us with high availability...

A revolutionary revelation regarding music distribution with Soundcloud

Greetings, 

I try hard to avoid statements like "this changes everything" - but this changes everything. 

I've been experimenting with distributing a track for the last couple of days*, and I have used Soundcloud http://soundcloud.com/ to do it.

Ars Divina - Fill The Ocean by Steve Turnidge and producer Christian Heilman

So, in addition to being a great collaboration and production tool (allowing private workspaces with timed comments on high resolution files) it also provides a 128 MP3 to stream in widgets - which they provide shortcuts for, so I can embed a wav image with a play button on Facebook.** It also allows those that play the track to virally share as well - in email and on social sites - quite friction free.

So this is all well and good, and not entirely revolutionary. I sent the email with the link around to my closest friends, check. I posted it in a MySpace bulletin - check. I pasted it into Facebook, as a link and embedded with its own app, check. So, you can track play count (and chronology), and I've gotten into the two digit figures of distribution. Check. Another fizzly little distribution method.

But then this morning - BANG. I had a realization and it's making me shake a little bit.

Some context of my current analysis of the social networking space:

1. LinkedIn is backstage - limited access, trusted insiders only.

2. Facebook is the stage - this is where we interact with our true friends, patronizing and keeping our patrons up to date with current status and ideas.

3. MySpace is the audience. Take on all reasonable comers, and regularly delete kitty porn. BUT - this is the large audience, a subset of them read their bulletins. (I do religiously).

Here is the epiphany - One of the share methods from the Soundcloud file is an HTML string which beautifully embeds in a MySpace comment field. Wow. Now instead of me waiting for the audience to come to me, I can embed a pretty wave with a play button directly in front of highly targeted markets. Wow. If Weedshare had worked out, these could be Weed files and I could potentially start revenue streams - but those days are not with us anymore, so the track is promotional for producer Christian Heilman and for my band as brand. Wow. 

Also, I have flagged the track to be downloadable as a full lossless .wav file - 52 megs. I believe this inhibits low bit rate downloading, because you can always have the player available for that - with the branding intact! And if you are serious about the track, you can get the real thing.

I now have a super-high traction promotion entry to a friction free world. Rock.

As a side note - I got an Android Google Phone last week, and, hesitantly, it is changing everything as well. Specifically, there is an app called ShopSavvy that reads bar codes from products and lets you know who carries it locally, on the web, and at what price.***

I figured out its true value last night in my library. I have been actively collecting music and books for over thirty years and have a few gems. I scanned them and have an instant, no BS appraisal. Some art books that are going for $200 at a dozen sites are going for $45 at one site. Wow. This changes everything...

With warmest regards,

...Steve>>>

http://www.arsdivina.com/

*I might as well have some fresh personal knowledge of what I advise others on - where are your tracks?

**If you are on this list, and not already my Facebook connection - please feel free to connect.

***As well as Shazam, iMeem and a Bubble Level...

Rules of the Road for Self Employment

1. Be close and responsive to the phone and email.

2. Facebook is the water cooler of the self employed.

3. LinkedIn is backstage, Facebook is the stage, and MySpace is the audience.

4. Assume an hourly rate, and charge yourself for productive time. This goes into an imaginary account, become wealthy in this account.

5. Aggregate ALL the skills and crafts you have obtained in your entire life and use them productively – including becoming expert in each (this is called the Fibbonacci Leap).