Dopp Juice Archive

I had the giddy pleasure of speaking on the Indy Arts and Media panel last thursday on DIY Online Promotion for Artists (alongside the inimitable Abi Jones and Hannah Eaves). We started a wiki of good online resources for the topic, for those looking for the Cliff’s Notes.

Things I wanna keep pontificating on…

Addictomatic — Woah! Hannah brough up this resource, and it pretty much won for Awesome Tool Recommendation of the night. It aggregates all online vanity searches onto one page (think google alerts + twitter search + everything else you forgot to check). My only complaint is that doesn’t seem to do daily email summaries (I want info to come to me). Maybe we can join together and sway them to add the feature. (They’ll probably find this blog post within minutes of it going live anyway.)

Bit.ly — I had NO IDEA this URL shortener included analytics tracking! (This means you can tell how many people clicked on it when you posted it to twitter… and whether or not they did it through a web browser or another client.) Sorry, is.gd — I know your base URL was a character shorter, but think just found my new best friend.

Asking for money — One of the audience members jumped in with an important question: “So if your bread and butter is getting people to buy your art, where do you put the ‘ask’ in all of this communication stuff?” We fumbled a bit on this one because it’s kindasorta not about that, except it always is. I said: treat social media as a metaphor for your in-real-life friendships… if you ask your friends to buy your stuff every time you see them, you’re not going to have many friends. But if you never ask them at all, they won’t realize the opportunity is there. So you have to strike the right balance of reminding them without being annoying.

There’s more, though, and I realized it on my way home from the panel (so question-asker, wherever you are, here’s what I meant to say): it’s not about asking. It’s about making it really easy for them to buy when it occurs to them that they might want to. Yes, your job is also to get them to want to, but that doesn’t have to be an ask — it could be a matter of talking around it, about it, over it, between it, and consistently building buzz about the awesomeness that is inherent to everything you do. What’s way more important is having the Buy button right there (or as close to “everywhere” as you can get while still being tactful), with a super easy checkout process and as much perceivable instant gratification as possible. We are an impulsive people, and we like to think that buying stuff is our own idea. But we also get distracted by the next shiny thing really easily, so turning our interest into a sale before that happens is your real challenge. The ask is secondary to that.

And in other news… I’ve been avoiding upgrading to iPhone 3.0 software because I’m moving to a place that doesn’t get AT&T, and if I decide to change phones along with carriers, I’d rather do it with a maintained resentment for my current phone’s lack of copy-and-paste and video-recording than with a feeling of lost love.

But someone demoed the new copy and paste function to me at the panel, and my blissful ignorance has been destroyed. Thanks, dude.