The Power of YOU (Part 1)
It’s time to get personal. In today’s world what I produce is not more important than who I am. It’s not enough to produce great art or services. People want to know who you are and why you do what you do. This should be great news! Right?
Well, it sort of assumes and insists that at every turn you are letting the world know what is going on. In an age of information, your job is to stay in the news feed. That means a laundry list of social media to-do’s daily, from trivial to intimate.
Before one’s art was their preferred communication with the public. It was specifically and carefully chosen to be their reveal to the world. Auto-biographies would come only AFTER one had made a life revealing and concealing how they wanted.
In today’s world they want so much more than that. Content still matters. And people will still be drawn to good content, but the amount to which we have to be active is life-taking. Especially for introverts, the task can seem exhausting.
Some will refuse. They will carry on making quality content the way they have always made it. Their fan base will remain for a time and slowly start to whittle away. OR would it? Is it just the great power of suggested influence that make us think so?
Marketing certainly seems like that sort of thing that everybody does only because everybody else does it. If we all agreed to not do it it wouldn’t be necessary. OR if we at least made a pact somehow market in relation to the quality of a product.
It’s called a free market for a reason. It’s free! And it’s full. To get in there one has to work really, really hard. To have a wonderful product or service is simply not enough. However much we daydream about it, it simply won’t cut it.
We must market. Market requires extreme creativity and constant connection-making: connections between the product and customer, between the creator and customer, between the creator and product, etc. Compellingly show the connections!
Marketing in today’s world can be more of an art form than the product-creation itself. Anyone can write a song. Anyone can paint a cool picture. But to be able to compellingly market that to the public so that they care, now that is something.
While there is some definite truth to that statement it can also feel very fatalistic. In other words, only those with enough zeroes on their marketing budget stand a chance. There’s no hope otherwise. It can often feel that way.
Clearly Youtube is proving that to be false. Their so-called “content Creators” have proven that just about anybody with any amount of consistency can develop a following. And content is not king, in the sense of elaborate sets and expensive budgets.
There is a whole new market emerging. It is built on simplifying and focusing life on passion, even if that passion happens to be video games. It has managed to make millionaires out of the most unlikely of candidates. Anything goes!