Part Two.
The question is, how does anyone successfully sell any media creation these days? Other than buying a hundred million in TV, where else can you find eyeballs? So the community and friends centered social media platforms and services morph into a marketing platform, mainly because it’s there and people are there…and of course companies don’t just want friends. They want dollars.
But having a Facebook page can’t hurt, right? If James Paterson can have one, why not you? Social media platforms are just one more, relatively cheap, relatively available place to make noise about what you do.
No one knows what will resonate commercially. Media consumption habits are changing monthly. Traditional marketing is becoming less effective or impossible in new digital marketplaces so what can anyone do? Companies have to continue to try to get their products to resonate with the public. Every publisher has stacks of new books they are trying to sell from ever shrinking shelves…and the best advice is to have your stuff everywhere it can be. It’s that old saying about just showing up.
That’s what social media is about. Showing up. Be there, just in case. It doesn’t create success. But it can amplify success. It can find like minded fans of genres. It’s being open to the age old marketing wisdom that being everywhere you can, can’t hurt.
No one can predict what will be wildly successful in the commercial arts 100% of the time. But in today’s saturated markets where your self published novel sits on a digital shelf next to Stephen King’s new book, you have to try everything you can.
I think it’s unlikely that I would have found your work if it wasn’t for social media. It also meant I could connect with you quickly about your work and have a conversation, which to me, is wonderful. Agree about the ‘just showing up’. Hard as it is to do!
I think you have hit on exactly the most important component of social media, the outreach. Or the ease of finding people and things you are interested in. Of course the Internet is all that and a bag of donuts, but I think social media is akin to being a TV guide for the short attention span age. It helps you find things you might be interested in a little easier than a Google search.
I have met a lot of people through my website, the blog, and Facebook. And I enjoy the conversations a great deal. I’m just suspect of how social media is being co-opted by marketing agendas. I’m not surprised, I’m just trying to figure out the path between just being there and at the same time having publishers really wanting you to utilize social media for a marketing reasons. I’d rather write about, well, whatever I want to, then end up treating the online world as an extension of a sales process. I know, I know. The two,aren’t mutually exclusive. I hope!