You shouldn’t base your future success on the number of Facebook likes you have.
A retweet is not a success. Nor is the number of empty followers you have collected in trade for shallow allegiance.
You need more than this to be sustainable.
Social Media has a catch.
Yes Social Media has changed the opportunity for you to offer your Art to the world.
But there is a catch.
The mass of content being generated today compound by the immediacy of distribution is making it more difficult than ever before to be chosen.
Previously in history distribution was the major challenge in order for your innovation to reach the masses.
Today, with the click of your mouse you can distribute and deliver everything from your musing thoughts to a product that you created with recycled material in your basement.
And you are among a sea of competitors adding to the noise attempting to allure eyeballs, ears and hearts.
How will you and I be any different?
Two formulas of Social Media today:
1) Ease of communication x large crowds = higher probability of being noticed.
2) More content x short attention spans = quickly move on to something else.
Understand how ideas and products are accepted.
The Diffusion of Innovation graph is often used when dissecting the stages and speed of adoption.
Key ingredients required are:
- The Innovation (Your Art, business, book, music, message)
- Communication Channel (Blog, Social Media)
- Time
- Social System (The Crowd, Your Tribe)
Although we have never had a vaster Communication Channel it has become saturated and polluted with noise.
In today’s instantaneous e-world the speed of adoption is accelerated. Yes, you can indeed know within hours or days if your Kickstarter campaign is going to be funded. The downfall is the speed of departure has increased as well.
How many Kickstarter campaigns are there to choose from before they choose yours?
Fickle Faster
The world is rapidly becoming more fickle, faster. In order for your innovation or Art to be adopted it has to be plucked out like a small needle in a one tall haystack standing in a thousand acre field at harvest time.
Your innovation or creation may instantly receive massive distribution but there is another one right behind it to capture the attention of the adopters. The “Like” button or a re-tweet requires so little allegiance or conviction. And the brevity of the impact is fleeting.
Sustainability is still core to survival.
Continual value over time is infinitely more important than a spike, a peak or even a dip in your Google Analytics stats.
The issue is that the information globe has increased its speed of rotation. The rotation increase has caused more of our vision to be blurred. We see more, but we see it at such a high speed that it is something like driving down the Las Vegas strip at 100 MPH.
Yes, we saw it.
Yes we were there, but none of it sticks.
What do we do? What choices do we have?
- Invest your time in original creations, not knock offs and redistribution of someone else’s Art.
- Turn off your Google Analytics and offer your Art to those people who have already chosen you.
- Change your definition of what it means to be rich and famous.
