Creatives Have All The Power

In a world abuzz of social media discussion, we seem to forget that creatives have the power. I forget this all the time. While there's a lot of extremely relevant marketing discussion going on, it's mostly coming from the marketing people that don't specialize in content creation. That's the job of the creator, and it's a power that we should be tapping into much more.

We complain about social media, but it's our weapon moreso than thei

Say you're a writer. It's your place to create 60,000 words for a novel. You've got a lot of work to do in order to create a coherent piece of work. On the other side, it's the marketer's/advertiser's job to make 20-100 words of fantabulous copy and spin that into a multitude of views for your 60,000 words.

While this might not seem fair to you, please realize that you just wrote 60,000 words. You can *probably* figure out a way to write 20-100 and spread it out. And even if you aren't very good at creating those 20-100 words, the really hard part is getting over mental blocks, putting those words out, and convincing people to listen.

But honestly, that part is much easier.

Dive in.
Learn from others.
Get good at talking about your work.
Don't be so hard on yourself.

Content is still king.

- Mr Benja -

P.S. I'm not talking as if I'm some outgoing, social maven. I'm still working at this myself. :) 

Our Thinking Is Changing

All this technology that we are using to broadcast our ideas has done something to our thinking:

If we have a verbal thought, we Tweet it.
If we have a thought to show and tell, we YouTube it.
If we have visual thoughts, we Instagram it.
If we have thoughts that need to be share with Friends, we Facebook it.
If we have thoughts that we need to share with randoms, we Reddit it.
If we want to dance like everyone is watching, we TikTok it.
If we want to throw some art to the world, we ArtStation it.
And if we have slightly deeper thoughts, we blog about it somewhere.

In other words, these social media outlets have become extensions of our brains. (And there are many of them.)

If you step back and think about it, it's kinda weird...and amazing.

What We're Calling Social Media Is More Like Social Telecasting

I just realized something.

Although interactive, newer social media platforms aren't really trying to connect people like before. They're not conversation platforms, but are more akin to telecasting platforms. They're set up so that everyone gets their 15 minutes and can spend money to use and access it. Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube follow this paradigm I'm calling social telecasting.

That's a different point of view from the genesis of online communication, which came from telephone and mail systems. That would be your multi-directional communication platforms like text messaging, Facebook, email, forums, Discord, and Twitter.

It's like television and radio when compared to telephone and the water cooler.

I say this after hanging around some kids and watching how they used social media. It's like they were maintaining their own unscripted reality shows via the social broadcast platforms. BUT they actually communicated via messaging apps, phone calls, and in person.

This got me thinking about how I have been using (or misusing technology). Because to have a conversation, you still need to have an audience that you are talking with and listening to, not simply broadcasting your video at.

Minor shift in thinking with possibly major ramifications for me.

People Need To See Validation, Not Just Results

After months of low-engaging posts on a topic (elsewhere, not on this blog), I decided to post a link that grossly generalized a topic to the point of lying. Everyone jumped on it as if it were fact. At that point, I realized that no one was reading and considering what I had been saying all along. They didn't believe me. BUT they believed this link from a dubious source because it "looked correct".

I really had to stop and think about that. The people that I was posting to KNOW that I have credentials and KNOW that I don't post without thinking, but that didn't seem to matter to them. This got me going on human nature again...

See, people are funny creatures. Regardless of the quality and the results of a thing, humans will require a heavy amount of weight to our requirements for validation of a thing. It's pretty amazing and a bit disconcerting.

What am I getting at?

There is no intrinsic value on it's own. That's nearly impossible.

People assign value based on many contextual factors that may have nothing to do with the actual value they purport to want. Hopefully, the truth can be gleaned from those many factors.

It's the white lab coat effect.

Scenario: If a barefoot person in jeans on the side of the street told you to take some pills they gave you, you'd probably tell that person to go to hell.

• You could know that they are a doctor on vacation
• You could validate all of their claims with a quick Google search
• You could know for yourself that the information about the pills is sound
• You could personally know the doctor in question
• You could have a valid reason why they'd have pills on them
• ...and so on. 

After all that, people still wouldn't trust them completely because they aren't wearing a white lab coat and standing in an office. That context is too strong to overcome with mere truths. Our minds would deny ourselves until we got over whatever mental barriers we had constructed. We simply wouldn't have the proper context we desire for that situation to make sense. 

Personally, I've been trying to battle this in my life, but the need for "proper context" is legitimately difficult to get around. I'm not immune to these mental barriers, I've just started trying to think about them.

I wonder what the proper context is for validation nowadays. Likes? Retweets? Influencer mentions? Guest blog posts? Podcast appearances. There seem to be a lot of them.