I’m twittering away. I used to be against it. But here I am
doing it. I am still against it but what choice do I have? We independent
creatives, or deadbeats and failures depending on your perspective, do not have
a big corporate publisher investing in the promotion of our efforts, nor a big
studio with a huge publicity budget to drag the unwashed masses into the
theatres to admire our brilliance. We have but ourselves. If we were better,
luckier, savvier, connected, unscrupulous, whatever one's excuse, we might have been
picked up by the establishment and made into great artists, but we weren’t and
might never be. Either we are starting out and unproven, or long term
recidivists who swallowed all that nonsense about perseverance eventually being
rewarded and woke up one morning with no choice but to just do what we like
doing. Either way, we have to promote ourselves somehow.
But how annoying it is to have one’s Facebook obliterated by constant reminders of someone’s blighted existence, or their next minor appearance on an obscure local radio station that we will never listen to, or the posting of some dyspeptic blog not too dissimilar to my own. Facebook was once a simple site where one could share a few photos and post things like, “Am in town today, anyone around for lunch?” And then it became flooded with updates on the various stupid games people were playing and then it linked up with Twitter and Youtube and suddenly everyone was a spammer.
True they have divided it up between Fan pages and Friend pages but it is all so complicated to unravel and life is too short to work out where to go with any of this, that one just blitzes everything. I need time to write my scripts and stories. I need even more time to cast, rehearse, shoot, edit and distribute my films. And time to cook lunch, go to the post office, and take some exercise! To be working one’s way through all the million different options for self-promotion is stopping one having anything to promote in the first place.
And who are we promoting ourselves too? Mostly it is other people who are promoting themselves. We all want them to keep on coming to our sites and tell us how brilliant we are and at least click on an advert, or buy a copy of a book, or watch our video and tell others how wonderful it is. But everyone is too busy to do anything more than set their AutoTweeters to sending out automatic declarations of how marvelous it is for you to follow them and how blessed we are for your input.
How many followers do we need? How many hits? If you want money out of this you have to have a million hits to make any headway in any sort of revenue. Conversion rates, as they say, are small. You can improve those by running marketing operations offering all manner of goods and services, most of them of a nature that hold no interest for people who want to be writers, film makers, and performers of some kind. Does one want to be an Internet marketer, or does one have something to say, a talent to prove, a passion to pursue?
But what is the point of writing if you have no readers? Or making a film if nobody knows it exists? Or performing in front of the mirror on your own? The traditional ways through the system were not run fairly or dispassionately, and were often outright corrupt. So they shrink along with their credibility. But our much dreamt of level playing field means we are all in marketing! And the more of us in it, the more we have to do it, and the less time we spend on creating the thing we wish to market.
Given the limitations of one’s time and the escalating need to spend it like this, it makes me wonder if the solution is not far behind. It’s a high octane fully automated Twitter that extracts publicity material from your web sites, Social Networks and YouTube accounts, broadcasts it to other machines, that then automatically link back scoring a hit and automatically posting a pleasant message saying how wonderful it is. It might even watch your YouTube Videos all the way through to the end to increase the Audience Satisfaction statistics thus improving one’s chance of enticing investors to back one’s projects.
I think I’ll patent the concept right now and call it Twoverkill!