Entries Tagged 'Social Media' ↓

Chris gave me this login so long ago and I haven’t got round to writing a blog post because I’ve been busy, so I’m going to put that right now.

Sometimes it seems that you just can’t find the time to do all the promotion that your artwork deserves.  Sometimes you’re too busy working on the artwork itself, often it’s the demands of your day job, family or friends.

As part of my online activities I run my own blog about promoting artwork, a discussion forum about art, music & writing, and of course my own web galleries (and galleries for various friends on the same site).

Sometimes the promotion seems to use up all the time I need to actually make artwork!

So one of the best promotion tools I have—one which doesn’t take much time and doesn’t even feel like work— is adding meaningful and constructive comments to other art blogs (and non-art blogs too).

Not “Nice post.  By the way, check out my art!!”, but a well-thought-out response to the blog post you’re commenting on.  Don’t even think of it as promotion - it’s just social interaction.

Every blogger (myself included) will always check out the link of every person who comments intelligently on their blog posts.  You don’t need to draw attention to it, or even mention that you’re an artist - just respond to blog posts that you find interesting.

Many blog readers will also check out the links of commenters on blogs if the comment is well written and relevant.

What you can’t do is speed-up the process: no pre-written comments that you can cut and paste into multiple blogs (that’s just spam), no hastily typed-out thoughtless comments in order to reach your self-allotted target of comments.

Social interaction—conversation—is the best form of marketing. And the less you think of it as marketing, the better.

Paul.

There is an article on doshdosh.com called “Social Media Networking and ROI: How to Maximize Value and Minimize Cost“. For those of us who want to sell our work online, it is important to understand how the online world works these days. In the last couple of years and especially in the last few months, social media networking has become a valuable tool to help us connect with people and sell our work. But online social networking is much more than just a tool to sell more art. Think of offline social networking and how that works. When you go to an event where you know other artists and gallery owners are going to be present, do you come barging into the room and start handing out your business cards and telling everyone what you have for sale? Of course not. You know that it is about building relationships.

Read this article and help yourself reach a better understanding of what the online world is really like and how you should be involved.

.

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com
www.YourArtMarketing.com
www.CreativeTribe.TV

What is an online social network? An online social network is any site where you can communicate with other people online. (Yes, it’s that easy.) The first ones that come to mind are the big ones, MySpace and Facebook, but there are hundreds more. Do some Googling and see how many you come up with. Don’t forget places like Flickr and YouTube or any other site where you can add content, use tags, and leave comments. Did I mention StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us? There are also blogs, forums, chat rooms, groups, and many other ways to meet people online. You could spend 24 hours a day on nothing but social networking and still not get to them all!So, where to start…

Make Friends

You know, this should be at the top of any list. The “new thing” in sales (which has been around for several years, now) is what they call relationship marketing. You have to work at establishing a relationship with your potential customer. Act as if you really do want to make friends. I do not mean that you should be fake, but that you should develop a real concern for who your customer is and what their real wants and needs may be. You want this relationship to last and you do that by being authentic, honest, and helpful.

Making friends online can be a relatively easy task. Go to their blog and read it and leave useful comments. Join a forum and help answer people’s questions. Be friendly and be yourself and do not push your work. Simply use your web address in your signature and people will check it out if they like what you have to say. Go to Yahoo Answers where you can help people and leave a link to your site at the same time.

I have given this advice to artists before and they almost always nod in agreement and most actually get online and visit a few sites… and then most stop completely. I do not understand this! How could they possibly think that they could make one or two comments and expect anything to happen from this?

Have a Website that Grabs Their Attention

If you are going to make friends and send them to your website, you should have something worthwhile for them to look at. Have samples of your work, a gallery, and if you sell online, make it easy to buy from you. Have a detailed About Me page that tells your story. Have a blog that you update once a week or once every two weeks or, at the very minimum, once a month. You can definitely have an online presence without your own web site, but it is best to have one place where people can go to learn about you.

Do Not Spread Yourself Too Thin

At what point do you become too spread out and it becomes too difficult for people to grasp who you really are? If you try to send people to all of your websites and social media sites, it becomes too confusing and they will just shut you out of their mind completely. I would suggest that you have one website that is your main online home. This is the place where you send everyone that has an interest in your art. Now, you may choose to have one or two online stores, depending on which services best suit you, but you still send people to ONE site.

Your Online Store

Obviously, if you are going to sell your work, you need an online store. If you just have a store on your website that does not connect anywhere else, you’re missing out on some powerful social networking possibilities. With Etsy.com, you can put images from your store directly into your own website or blog and clicking on them will take people directly to your store. People often browse through Etsy.com looking at whatever strikes their fancy. You can add any store to your own list of favorites and see who else has added that store to their favorites. It’s a good way to build community and sell your art at the same time. eBay is also worth your while. Millions of people go to eBay to look for art and you can not only sell to them directly, but if you have a well designed About Me page you can send them to your website and capture their attention and hearts in many more ways.

The point, here, is that you can have any old store on your site, even just a few PayPal links, but if you ignore the more community based online stores, you will be missing out on the attention of thousands of potential customers. Take advantage of the social networking capabilities of sites like Etsy and eBay and accomplish far more than a few “Buy Now” links.

Okay, this post has gone on long enough. I know I barely scratched the surface here, but it gives you an idea of how to get started using social networking to sell your art. Good luck and feel free to ask questions.

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com

As I stated in an earlier post, I believe that 2008 will usher in the age of the personal social network. Every method of online communication (email, bulletin boards, instant messaging, blogs, etcetera) has had that initial period where only the early adopters used it and then it suddenly gained widespread exposure and exploded into use. This next year will be when that happens to personal social networks.

The real question, though, is WHY would you want your own personal social network? Or, why would you join a personal social network? The reason is because they provide a new tool to facilitate the gathering of a smaller, niche group of people. We have always had these niche groups. Families are a niche group of people. The company you work for is a niche group of people. Your artist friends are a niche group of people.

A personal social network uses the technology of the web to help form these niche groups of people and then help them communicate easily.

Let’s look at an example.

There is a small group of painters that get together once a month to talk about what they are doing and learn from each other. They are all watercolor painters and they usually each bring a recent painting and share techniques, etcetera. They all have friends that would love to join the group, but a lot of these friends do not live nearby. They decide to form their own online social network and invite all of their friends.

Now anyone can join the group and easily share with anyone else. They can form sub-groups that are based on location or interest or anything else they can think of. They can easily stay caught up on what everyone else is doing and easily set up their in-person meetings. They can hold live, online meetings or they can make them time-delayed so anyone can contribute at a time that works best for them. There are many different ways that people can communicate through social networks and therein lies their real power.

Social networks combine many different forms of communication into one package. Because several forms of communication are combined, there is a synergy that takes place which creates entirely new ways of communicating based on those combinations.

A Deeper Explanation

The online world is changing and growing FAST! Because of the nature of the underlying structure, the web grows geometrically. What this means is that when you look at the change from one year to the next, it’s not a doubling of information and new technologies that you see, but a quadrupling or… well, whatever 8x and 16x and 32x is called.

And what is our interaction with the web mostly about? Two things: information and socialization. Think about it… at one time people completely downplayed using the telephone because it just wasn’t the same as meeting someone in person. Yet the telephone is much more personal than email as a means of communication. The early days of the web were truly less personal than talking to someone on the telephone.

No longer!

A social network combines text, photos, video, voice (e.g. Skype), and so many combinations of those that the interaction can actually become overwhelming. And this is just the beginning of this trend. We can guess from past experience that at some point in the very near future, social networking will seem archaic. Imagine when we start to use virtual reality and can interact “physically” with each other. Have you ever read “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson? That is not as far away as you might think.

And yet we have only thought in terms of re-creating the reality we currently live in. Even virtual reality will only emulate the experience of actually meeting someone in person. The truly amazing part will come after that when we start to imagine completely new ways of interacting.

When I first heard about virtual reality, I was a chemical engineering student. The first use I thought of back then was to imagine physically interacting with atoms to combine them in new ways. With virtual reality, I could be in the same room with the atoms which would now be large enough to handle, perhaps the size of Legos. As I tried putting them together in new ways, they would either fit together or not based on what we knew about their properties. These new molecules could then be played with in this virtual setting and new emergent properties would be seen on a macro scale.

I also imagined streams of data from a chemical process (or any process or system, for that matter). If you could virtually insert yourself in that stream and start guiding things into different patterns, you could go back to the sources of that stream and figure out which sets of input would produce the desired results.

The real point of all of this rambling is that 1) things are changing fast, and 2) we will see benefits arise from these changes that we never expected or imagined.

Immerse yourself today in a social network. Come to understand it as only an involved insider could. Use it to tell your story and connect with more people in more ways. Let go of the idea that you are there to sell. More than that, you are there to connect and build relationships. If you have something to offer that is wanted by your connections, they will buy from you. Don’t hide the fact that you have something of value to offer, if you truly believe that it is of value you will make sure that people know about it and will make it easy for them to acquire it. Just don’t come into a new relationship doing nothing more than pushing your product.

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com

It is now possible to build your own social networking site, one that goes beyond a mere forum and has the functionality of Facebook and MySpace. The following list comes from Matthew Sherborne’s site.

1. Ning - http://www.ning.com/

Ning will have your social network site up in running fast. Similar to a Blogger blog, free Ning sites are all linked to the central hub. This can be a blessing or a curse depending on how popular your Ning site is. The most popular sites are featured most prominently. As of this writing there are over 6500 Ning sites in operation.

2. CrowdVine - http://www.crowdvine.com/home

Similar to the Ning network, Crowdvine is easy to set up. Crowdvine can even allow you to incorporate RSS feeds to update from your blog, other social network sites or photo stream.

3. KickApps - http://www.kickapps.com/

KickApps offers users a vast range of features including Widget support, guest books, video feeds and a lot more. One of the more feature laden of the up and coming social networking platforms.

4. GoingOn - http://www.goingon.com/

GoingOn allows you to set up an interactive blogging platform with many features such as blogging search tagging and feeds.

5. Me - http://www.me.com/

The Me.com concept gives you the tools to create your own social network site around your passions and splits 50% of the revenue your site generates with you.

6. CollectiveX - http://www.collectivex.com/

With CollectiveX you can create an online community around you product, blog, interest or publication.

7. PeopleAggregator - http://www.peopleaggregator.net/homepage.php

The PeopleAggregator site was created in order to allow you to edit store and share all of your digital information in one place. You can use it to manage your friends, groups and content.

8. Elgg - http://elgg.org/

Elgg is an open source social networking platform that brings together some of the best resources commonly found on popular social networks. With Elgg you can create communities of specialized targeted networks.

And an additional one:

9. Vostu - http://vostu.com/

Why would you want to create your own social network? Funny you should ask, we’ll be talking about that next time!

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com

This last year has been the big year for online social networks, especially MySpace and now Facebook. The trend this next year will be towards smaller, more niche-based social networks. I can see a social network for artists. I can see a social network for painters. I can see a social network for painters that do plein-aire. I can see a social network for painters that do plein-aire in the Pacific Northwest.

Get the idea?

This is not a new idea. There already exists such organizations. Many of these exist online as forums or email groups. I went to Yahoo! Groups and within seconds found the Pacific Northwest Plein-Aire Painters Group. Imagine a format like Facebook where you can add friends, easily email or write on “walls”, join sub-groups, and all the many other services these provide. Online social networks are about getting together with your friends, sharing, communicating, seeing what everyone else is up to… everything you do with offline social networks.

On Monday we’ll look at some of the tools that are available right now for building your own social network.

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com

Social media is supposed to be the cornerstone of Web 2.0 and with this I agree. I’ve been dipping my toes in the social media waters for over a year, now, and I’m just starting to get a clear picture of what roles each piece should play. (How’s that for mixed metaphors?)

I still think that blogs are the most powerful forms of social media and communication out there. They are so flexible and can be customized in so many ways, that often you do not even know you are looking at a blog. Blogs have also become mainstream and that has increased their power and reach several-fold. Whatever you do, you MUST have a blog. You can see my personal blog at PeacefulBirder.com.

Tumblelogs are a form of mini-blog, a way of sharing various forms of media (text, photos, video, and more). To get an idea of what these look like, you can go to the Tumbler home page or to my own Tumblelog.

Twitter is even more streamlined, 140 characters of text per post. I can see many uses for Twitter that go way beyond the traditional “here’s what I’m doing now”, although even that serves its purpose. Here are some of the more unusual ways of using Twitter and here is a good guide to Twitter. You can see my own Twitter feed and even follow me if you wish.

This is just a brief introduction to some of the means of social networking available. The next post will talk about some of the really big social networks, like Facebook and MySpace and what changes I think we’ll see in the next year.

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com

Continuing my review of this ebook, “Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook” by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo…

This book does a great job of introducing you to many of the ways that you can use the new social media aspects of the web. This includes blogs (writing your own and participating in those of others), social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, etcetera), microblogs (such as Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku), wikis (and Wikipedia in particular), virtual worlds (such as Second Life), and more. Much of the focus is on blogs (about half the book) and I think rightly so because blogs are still the most prominent form of social media out there and have the most options for anyone involved in marketing (or just communicating).

There is a section on risks or things that could go wrong and they address what I think is the biggest issue: It Doesn’t Get Off the Ground. So many of us have tried to make an impression on the web and have supposedly done everything right and have done the blog, Facebook profile, photos, videos, etcetera; only to find that nothing happens. We even contact other bloggers, join various groups, and have tons of friends on our Facebook account and nothing much happens. This section of the book addresses that and gives some useful suggestions.

My overall impression is that this book is a great start. I highly recommend it because so many of us simply do not have a good grasp of what has been going on with online social networking and how to get started using it. I immediately saw a need for a second book, one that gives you even more specific tools and ideas. For example, what are the all the different kinds of posts you can try on your blog (contests, top 10 lists, and so on), what sorts of things do you put on there, what additional plugins and features can you add… the list becomes very long. [I am currently putting together a toolbox of all the various online marketing tools you can use and this will become part of my upcoming paid membership site. Just the section on blogs alone is expansive.] I look forward to the next book from these two!

(Question for Darren and Julie: do you have an affiliate program set up for selling this book? Have you looked into ClickBank?)

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com

This book was impossible to just plow through because they kept giving so many interesting examples and websites that I was constantly setting it down to go check things out (damn Baitcar.com!). My first “oh, yeah” moment was when I read the section “Get Linkable”. I have been designing websites for artists for a couple of years, now, and almost everyone wants one of those pretty Flash-based gallery sites. The problem is that you cannot send someone a link to just one of those pictures and say, “hey, I really like this one.” The best you can do is say, “go to this page and then click on the 12th thumbnail over and that is the picture that I really like.” In this new age where more is happening online rather than offline it is vital that you make everything on your website linkable. How does a blogger send someone to their favorite painting of yours if they have to explain it in terms of navigating a Flash site. They don’t. They will end up not even bothering because you’ve made it so difficult. So in addition to my motto of “make it easy to buy from you”, I add a new one: “make it easy to link to you!”

Along these same lines, they suggest that you make it easy for people to embed your images into their website. A great way to do this is to upload your images to Flickr. (I am already picturing a remake of one of my websites where all of the art images are only in Flicker and I simply use their code to embed them into my website.) Another great benefit of this method is that you can tag your images in Flicker which makes it even easier for people to find YOUR picture! (For those unfamiliar with the term, a “tag” is simply a “keyword”.)

My next post will wrap up the review and give you my final recommendations.

The website for this book by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo is www.socialmediaready.com. They are also run the company Capulet Communications where they offer web marketing services and truly walk the walk. From Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, they now live in an old farmhouse on the island state of Malta (south of Sicily).

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com

Boy, that sounds bad. But actually “Getting to First Base” is the name of a book by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo on social media marketing. I just requested a review copy, so hopefully I’ll get that and can give you a detailed review so you can decide if you want it for yourself. It sounds like a great addition for what we do! I’ll keep you posted.

Update:
Within mere minutes of my request, I had heard from Darren and received my review copy. He even subscribed to this blog! I just printed it out and should have a review up for you in the next few days.

P.S.
Their website is at www.socialmediaready.com.

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com