The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

Since a not-insignificant portion of my peeps and potential clients are organ grinders of the artistic sort, I thought I’s pass along Kevin Kelly’s thought-provoking article on making a living as an artist in the 21st century, 1000 True Fans.

According to Kelly,

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

[snip]

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

Kelly’s formula is at once breathtakingly simple and yet compellingly feasible:

First, create 1000 True Fans. According to Kelly, this involves finding and converting 1000 regular fans to True Fans by connecting with them personally and directly, which is an imminently rational goal and one that any artist worth their salt should be able to do, given access to such basic resources as an Internet connection, some basic marketing smarts and a salable product or service.

Second, Kelly estimates that a True Fan will spend an average of one day’s income per year on a favorite artist, although of course some will spend more and others less. For easy math, he rounds this sum out to $100 per True Fan. At this rate (which is, you have to admit, an entirely realistic reflection of what many of us spend on our own favorite artists in a year’s time) 1000 True Fans + $100/year = $100,000.00 per year gross, a nifty living by any artist’s standards.

The key, he points out, rests on that personal contact. You’ll need to nurture, connect with and personally involve these True Fans. Of course, for the average artist, this isn’t a problem. You want to reach out and touch people personally and profoundly. You want to enter into a conversation with them and hear their responses to your work. You want to learn about them and geek out over mutual interests and so on. That connection is a vital part of what makes your art worth doing. It’s fun. And it’s one of the reasons why you sing/paint/play/film/photograph in the first place. (For those who don’t, however, he suggests that an intermediary or manager can handle this task perfectly well.)

Obviously, as Kelly himself points out, the requirement of 1000 True Fans applies best to the solo artist. Bands, comedy troupes, painter’s collectives and other groups would have to increase their effort to achieve enough True Fans per member to scale the formula. But nonetheless, it does scale relatively easily. Also, the number of fans varies depending on the type of media, price of the work, costs and so on, although not by so much that it upsets the formula in very many cases. Finally, Kelly notes that this formula only applies when the fan support is direct (people go to your site and buy a download) rather than indirect (people buy your book or click on a blog ad, which spreads the money out over a wide variety of middlemen). Indirect income means you’ll need far more True Fans to support you in a reasonable manner.

There are several interesting case studies mentioned in the article, including an author that funded his novel through direction donations and a musician who is paying for the production costs of her next CD through a truly creative, tiered level of direct support ranging from…

…$10 “unpolished rock,” which earns them a free digital download of her disc when it’s made, to the $10,000 “weapons-grade plutonium level,” where she promises “you get to come and sing on my CD. Don’t worry if you can’t sing - we can fix that on our end.

Wrapping up, Kelly has this to say:

The usual alternative to making a living based on True Fans is poverty…I am suggesting there is a home for creatives in between poverty and stardom. Somewhere lower than stratospheric bestsellerdom, but higher than the obscurity of the long tail. I don’t know the actual true number, but I think a dedicated artist could cultivate 1,000 True Fans, and by their direct support using new technology, make an honest living.

Sounds like a plan to me.

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Business, Conversation Economy, Customers, Social Media by Soni Pitts
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Patrick Coffey has an insightful - and statistically supported - take on why making the front page of a major aggregator site like Digg, Stumble Upon or Reddit doesn’t do you any good.

His key message? A small amount of highly targeted or qualified visitors will out-convert a tidal wave of random visitors every time.

Through some trial and error, Alexis was able to help our natural health e-letter site get a boatload of traffic from Stumbleupon. In fact, in the last month, one page generated over 28,000 new visitors.

When I heard this, I thought it was great news. You see, when we get traffic from outside sources, we can generally convert at least 10 percent of it into e-mail sign-ups.

So how many of these 28,000 social media visitors do you think signed up for our natural health e-letter?

500? 1,000? 1,500? 2,800?

No! Try 80. That’s a conversion rate of just over 0.2 percent.

In the article, he notes that the reason for this is that social media visitors are notoriously hard to convert. They tend to be very ad and marketing savvy (and resistant), they rarely sign up for stuff like newsletters and they don’t tend to stay around on a site for very long (stickiness is vital to making sales). He also notes that the added expense of the bandwidth use and server strain also detracts from any value this sort of traffic brings

Being someone that surfs the social media sites for news and other interesting tidbits, I have to agree with his conclusions. I rarely stay on any site I click through - usually just long enough to skim it for relevant news. I almost never sign up for anything on the sites (who needs more inbox filler?), nor do I buy stuff. I’m news and giggles hunting, not shopping.

Of course, your mileage may vary. Increasing your traffic can help sell advertising and increase awareness of your existence. Plus, sites that get Dugg or Stumbled stand a better chance of attracting the attention of top-level media sites, highly-rated blogs or other websites that can provide qualified visitors. And if your product or service truly does fit the needs of all those Diggers, you might have better luck with the sales. So it’s not all bad news.

The key here is that social media sites are a great tool for getting traffic, but getting traffic is meaningless unless that traffic converts once it’s on your site. If they don’t, then no matter how many hits you get you’re no better off than a storekeeper on the Pamplona bull run. There’s a lot of people running by, but none of them are going to stop and shop.

This doesn’t mean you should ignore these sites. Nor does it mean that hitting the front page is pointless. Just keep in mind that for the most part, it unlikely to bring you much of anything other than a temporary spike in transient traffic. To increase sales, you need to increase your exposure to specific, qualified people. Everyone else is just passing through.

Tags: Conversation Economy, Internet Marketing, Social Media by Soni Pitts
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The ladies over at the Bitchery are discussing the concept of authors promoting their books in Second Life:

…not only can authors promote themselves in the “real world,” but they can promote themselves in virtual worlds as well, with avatars representing their actual selves, interacting with an entirely different audience of potential readers. (Or you can be really pessimistic about it and shriek to yourself, “OMGWTF I have to promote myself in TWO UNIVERSES NOW?!”

It’s 1:30am. Do you know where your avatar is?

(BTW, if you’re interested in some weapons-grade visual humor and not offended by a little man-titty - okay, a lot of man-titty…a lot of scary, scary man-titty - spend some time working through their Covers Gone Wild category on the Archives page, where they roast God-awful romance and erotica book covers. But save it for home. Some items are most definitely not safe for work, and most of them will provoke sounds that could cause co-workers to call in EMS on account of your having a choking seizure in the next cubicle over. A recent commenter’s angst sums up this collection quite effectively: Saying “behind the fold” isn’t nearly warning enough. You ought to add “viewing these covers may permanently damage your DNA and affect future generations.”)

Tags: Business, Internet Marketing, Social Media, Society and Culture, Web 2.0 by Soni Pitts
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Back in September, Wil Wheaton’s Sept. 12th Geek in Review column at the Suicide Girls website did a good job of describing the effect of the meteor of the Conversation Economy on the fragile Jurassic habitat of Business As Usual:

There is a communications revolution happening right now. It crosses generations, and it scares the absolute shit out of a lot of people who benefit from ignorance and the control of information…Communication empowers people, and an empowered people are very, very scary to the powerful upper class who hope that we’ll just go away, right after we buy a lot of crap from them that we don’t need. And holy shit are they scared right now. The revolution may not be televised, but it’s being blogged, YouTubed, MySpaced, Facebooked, Dugg and Netscaped.

I would have blogged about it then, but I didn’t have the blog up and running yet (you’ll probably be seeing a lot of this in the near future - I have a whole folder of “to blog” links I’ve been squirreling away over the past few months). But the passage of a few months has done absolutely nothing to dull the fatal sharpness and ninja-like accuracy of his point.

Mature Content Alert: Although Wil’s column is safe for work, the Suicide Girls is a punk/goth/alt softcore “pin-up” site, and as such there will likely be adult advertising, topics, verbiage, etc., on the same page as his column. Might want to save this one for when you get home.

Tags: Business, Changing the World, Conversation Economy, Social Media, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
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Over at Gaping Void, Hugh is going on again about social objects:

4. My overall marketing thesis invariably asks the question, “If your product is not a Social Object, why are you in business?”

Social objects are one of my new, favorite marketing concepts. The problem is, it’s one of those concepts that is so important to get, at a very deep and implementable level, and yet at the same time so difficult to nail down in concrete terms for someone who doesn’t know what they are or who doesn’t get their importance.

So just what is a “social object?” It’s something that draws people together, something they can share, talk about, play with and so on. It can be a movie, a religion, a piece of gadgetry, a food item or even just a sound (remember the Teen Buzz, aka “mosquito ringtone,” phenomenon?). Social objects create a “memespace” that is shared by all those folks who flock around it and play with it, allowing them to interact, connect and interconnect at a deeper level than they ever could otherwise. Social networks (known to some business folks as “markets”) may spring up around social objects but, as Hugh points out in this piece, the object always comes first. Photos were around long before Flickr.

Here’s what I think is one of the most important take-aways:

11. The interesting thing about the Social Object is the not the object itself, but the conversations that happen around them. The Blue Monster is a good example of this. It’s not the cartoon that’s interesting, it’s the conversatuons (sic) that happen around it that’s interesting.

What conversations are you customers having about your products or services? Who are they sharing it with? Why? If you don’t know, or if the answer is “none, no one and no reason” that should scare you.

Tags: Blogs and Blogging, Business, Conversation Economy, Social Media, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
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Tags: Business, Conversation Economy, Social Media, Society and Culture, Toys, Gadgets and Fun Stuff by Soni Pitts
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