Creative Pep Talk
053 - 9 Social Media Tips
(upbeat music) Hey y'all, just a quick heads up. The episode you're about to listen to is eight to 10 years old. Now, these episodes were intended to be evergreen, and I still believe there's a lot of good information in these early episodes, but I do wanna let you know that some of my ideas have evolved over time. Times have changed since we made these episodes, and ultimately, I'd like to think I've grown a lot as an artist and a human, and that these don't necessarily represent my best work, or the best of the podcast. If you're new around here, I suggest starting with the most recent episode, or at least go back to around 300, and move forward from there. Enjoy the episode. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Hey guys, it's me, Andy J. Miller, commercial artist, guy who makes a few pennies, drawing pictures, and I also do this podcast, the creative pep talk podcast, where I try my best to share what I've learned, you know, coming contact with others who have learned things about thriving financially, making, fulfilling, creative work, making money, making awesome stuff, and that's what this podcast is about. If that's something that you're trying to do, this podcast may just help you do it better or quicker. So that's what it's about. Now, before we get started, today actually, we're gonna talk about nine social media tips, and I don't really, I usually try to focus on content that is what they call Evergreen, where it lasts forever, it'll be relevant now, and it'll be relevant later. Now, I think there's probably a lot of principles here that you could apply to the way that you interact with people online, and that'll probably be relevant for a long, long, long time, but this one will be especially relevant just for today, and today's market, what's happening right now, because I think social media is so important right now, I wanted to focus a whole episode on it, and just share some of the things that I've learned. I don't consider myself to be a social media genius, but I have learned some things that have helped me find more success in being successful on social media as a commercial artist, so that's what today is about. Before I get started real quick, you can find this show on illustrationage.com/creativepeptalk on iTunes, SoundCloud, or my website, Andy, hyphenj, hyphenmiller.com. I'm a believer in the idea of dressing for the job you want, not the job you have, and I have applied this to my creative practice, too, which means if you want professional results, you need to present online like a pro, and that means going beyond social media and having a professional website that reflects your style and looks legit. I rebuilt my site this year with Squarespace's Fluid Engine, and was so happy with how easily I could build my vision without coding, that when they approached me to support the show, I jumped at the chance because I love and use this product. So go check it out, squarespace.com/peptalk to test it out for yourself, and when you're ready to launch your site, use promo code PEPTALK, all one word, all caps for 10% off your first purchase. Thanks goes out to Squarespace for supporting the show and supporting creators all over the world. Hey, in case you don't know, we have a monthly live virtual meetup every last Monday of the month with supporters of the show from Patreon and Substack. We have so much fun on these calls, and they are the warmest, most encouraging creatives that I have ever met, and we also talk real creative practice stuff. We have authors, illustrators, lettering artists, picture bookmakers, fine artists, musicians, and folks that work in video and film as well, and we have people that are just starting out, people super established in their creative careers and everything in between. For the rest of this year, we're gonna chat through our new Journey of the True Fan series, exploring questions and ways to apply these ideas to your own creative practice, so that you can leave 2024 stronger than you came in, with more visibility, connection, with your audience and sales. Sign up to whichever suits you best at either patreon.com/creativepeptalk or antijpizza.substack.com. And I hope to see you at this month's meetup. If you are a giant fan of the podcast and you love the podcast, and you tell people about it, and you're excited about it, and you're so, you've got so much energy building up in you of love for the podcast, and you're like, I need to do something with this, then go to patreon.com/creativepeptalk and go back the podcast. You can back a dollar per episode, $2 per episode, $5, or 10, actually, there's no spots for 10. And then also, you could back it. If you run a business that is marketed towards creative folk or commercial artists, you may want to consider being one of the first actual sponsors of the podcast on Patreon. It'd be $50 per episode, and there's no contracts, you could do it for a few episodes, and those podcasts would be up on iTunes for the end of time. So, if you're interested in doing that and doing that, go check it out on Patreon and send me an email at Andy at Andy-J-Miller.com. And let's talk about that, 'cause I want to make sure it's a good fit for both of us. But if you're just a regular old commercial artist listening in, I would super appreciate if you're a big fan of the show, to help support it, go back a dollar or $2, even better, and just help me make this thing better and last longer. So, thank you so much. I really appreciate all of you guys who are already backers. It means a ton. Okay, let's get to the show. Now, I wanted to focus a whole show on social media because honestly, I really think that it is the only true, legitimate way of promoting your work at this moment. So, when I graduated in 2008, we had blogs that were a big help, and I think the blog season has kind of died off. Some of them that were still established are still doing pretty well, but I think that it's not what it used to be. The traffic to websites in general is not what it used to be. And if you think about your own behavior with online, you'll probably notice that 99% of your behavior or your interaction with the web. Five years ago, 10 years ago, your interaction with the web was probably spent surfing the web, being on people's websites, working directly with people's websites on a web browser on a computer. But I'm guessing if you're like me, 99% of the time spent online now is engaged through apps. So, even if you're getting to, you're reading some content or interacting online with a web page, it's usually through an app, an app browser. Either you found it on Facebook or Twitter. And so, that's a really, really big deal for how you become discoverable as an illustrator or a graphic designer or a commercial artist, because it used to be that what you had to do was cater to the few gatekeepers of your industry, the art directors. And then, you know, the publishers. But then it was the people who ran the blogs. You had to interact with them and you could focus your efforts on these few people. Nowadays though, it's kind of become this democracy where you have this thing where when the people deem something good, they share it. And that's pretty much what you're going off and it can be really scary and intimidating because I think when you look at the internet, it can feel like a giant casino, Las Vegas, Amsterdam and Disney World all wrapped into one. And it can be really intimidating and it can seem so fickle. And you know, I think in this day and age, we have such a heightened focus of winning the lottery, the viral thing. And we focus so much time and energy on these clever, witty little things that are going to pass all over the internet like wildfire. But I actually think this type of thinking ends up hurting your social media engagement. I think this throw away overnight success attitude is actually keeping you from engaging with people in real and meaningful ways that you can actually be intentional with and get results from in a way that's strategic, not just, you know, impulsive. That's what we're going to talk about today. All right, so number one, my number one thing about social media is come for new, stay for you. How about that nice little rhyme package that I made there? Come for new, stay for you. So think about it like a party. I think if you think about social media as a party, there's all kinds of good nuggets of wisdom that you can get from there because I think the more you can connect real life to internet, the better you're gonna do. Now, if you think about it like a party, if you're the first one to the party, you get the best reward, right? Like when you go to the party, you got all the party food there on the table. You got the veggie tray and you've got the chips and then you've got the deviled eggs. Now, I'm from the Midwest. I don't know what they do on the coast, but here in the Midwest, when you come into the party where it's a pitch in situation, the deviled eggs go pretty quick because they're not easy to make. So, you know, people don't bring 50 of them. They bring 13 deviled eggs to a party of 300 people, okay? So if you get to the party early, you're gonna get one of those sweet, beautiful deviled eggs. Now, if you show up late to the party, either your options are veggie tray, no deviled eggs, or maybe if you're lucky, the deviled eggs tray has one deviled egg left, but it looks disgusting. It's been mangled and manhandled and nobody wants it. That's why it's still sat there. Now, here's what I mean by that. I think it's important to have a general sense of when things, when new social media outlets are starting to kick off, and I think there's a reward for getting in there early. If you can get in there before other people start jamming it up with your industry, you can start developing. There's a reward. You can develop a following on there quicker than other people, and, you know, the thing about social media is eventually people kind of leave, or they follow everybody they wanna follow, and they quit following new people. But there's a real reward if you get in there early. Now, the thing about it, though, is that if you don't, I think you should try it, but if you don't really enjoy it after you give it a real go, I think you should let it go. I think that you get a lot of pressure to be on Twitter, and Instagram, and Pinterest, and Facebook, and this one, and that one, and all these different things, and you gotta do 'em all, and I don't think that's actually true, because I think the only ones you need to be on are the ones that you really enjoy being on, because if you don't enjoy them, A, it's gonna be obvious, and if it's not fun for you, it's not gonna be fun for anybody else. Like, if you're not having fun and engaging on this platform, no one else is gonna have fun engaging with you on it, and I think if you're not enjoying it, you're not gonna be disciplined and keep coming back and keep contributing, and so I think it's really important to come for new when you see, here's something in the industry's buzzing, go check it out, try it out, you know, give it a probation period, but if it's really not feel, if it's not feeling right, if you're not enjoying it, then don't feel guilty, just walking away and leaving. One of the other things when it comes to this, I think it's important to think about which, when you're trying to get an idea of what the new thing is, I think you should try to get a sense of which platform is currently in the growth stage. So I would say as an example, that in 2008, Twitter, being on Twitter, there was like an explosion of growth. So I think those who started back then are a lot of the people that have the bigger Twitter followings. Because I think now, most people have a pretty clear sense of who they're trying to follow, and they're not adding a bunch of new people all the time because it's not in that stage of growth. Now I think on Instagram, I think it's in that stage of growth. And those are the ones that you wanna be getting on and investing in right now and being a part of. And I think that it's important to be a part of those platforms when they're in that growth stage. Because after that, they can still be really effective, but you've missed a reward. The deviled eggs are gone. All that's left are the drags. Nobody wants it. All right. Number two, speak the native language of the platform. This is a Gary Vaynerchuk tip. He's a social marketing, social media marketing kind of guru out in the marketing world. And he has all kinds of crazy ideas. A lot of them are really good. He's like a big personality. Now, here's the idea with this. Is that every different platform on social media has a different native language. And you need to respect it, know it, understand it, and speak within the native language of each different platform. Now, think of it like this. If Toyota, who is a Japanese car maker, if they took their ad, whatever their ad was, and let's say they had a commercial, and when they launched their commercial, they checked the box that said, share to all countries. That would be very, very, very ineffective. If we had Japanese car commercials over in America, they would not be doing very well. We wouldn't understand them, we wouldn't engage in them, even if they had subtitles, or even if they were overdubbed. There'd be all kinds of cultural things that were missing by just not speaking the native language of our culture. And I think when you go on Tumblr, you go on Instagram, and you post something and you just click, share to all accounts, it's that lack of nuance of speaking the right language. And I think Gary says it like this, that when you get on Facebook, there's a certain mindset, and there's a certain expectation of the type of thing that you're trying to encounter when you're on there. You know, it might be more of a conversation, something where you're taking part, you're actively participating in the content. Whereas when you go to Instagram, you're looking for things that look really good. Instagram has always been about engaging with beautiful photography, beautiful images, things that are curated. That's why I've always loved Instagram because Facebook felt more like a place where people air their dirty laundry or just say whatever they want, or have big conversations, or, you know, shout at each other, whatever, I don't know. Where it was all about this big dialogue, where Instagram was more like a curated interaction, where it was a more considered communication. And what I've noticed is, if you go to Twitter, or you go to Instagram, I mean, and you start posting photos that you would post on your Facebook, your engagement is gonna be really low because that's not the native language. On Facebook, often you're showing a side of your personal life, right? It's more personal, on Instagram, people expect things to look good. So you need to be speaking that native language and respect why people open that app, respect why people are there. And when you start to understand, okay, GIFs work really well on Tumblr because Tumblr is this novel kind of youthful platform. Twitter is more about having a dialogue about what's happening right now. Now, I'm not saying that that's exactly what the native language is of these platforms because depending on what industry you're in, the language is gonna change. And so it's been mindful of what works on each platform for my niche or part of the market. Okay, that's number two. Number three, know thyself, don't brand thyself. So, you know, I feel like we as an industry have, you know, I think what happens with semantics, what happens with the way people think and feel and interact with different terminology. You know, it ebbs and flows. People really get into something and there's a big backlash and this just always kind of happens. And I think right now, we're in the middle of this backlash against this word brand. We're sick of the word brand. You know, it feels a little bit gross for some reason. And you know, I think the reason why we're having that backlash is because brand feels synonymous with mask. You know, when it comes to corporate brands, I think we often think of corporate branding as, hey, you wanna trick your customers into thinking you're this type of person, put this mask on. And I think when it comes to, when you start talking about branding yourself online or branding your work or your profession, I think sometimes it sounds like we're saying, be dishonest, put a mask on. You know, be consistent and you're branding. I think sometimes that sounds like saying, you know, be a robot. And I think my suggestion, instead of branding yourself and having this extremely tightly woven brand online, I think what would make more sense is to make an effort, instead of making an effort to decide how you want other people to perceive you, make an effort to have a clear understanding of, who am I, really? What am I actually inspired by? What do I care about? What's meaningful to me? I think we talked about this last week. You know, one of the biggest things that will help you be successful as an artist and a commercial artist, is learning to be extremely present and observant. One of the things, I think, one of the best ways of getting to know yourself, who you really are, is to observe yourself, observe your emotions. Be mindful about what's happening in your brain. You know, figuring out what inspires you is often about figuring out what inspires you is often about being inspired. No, that's not what I meant. Figuring out what inspires you is often less about going and searching for inspiration and it's more about observing when you're feeling inspired, noticing when something hits you on a visceral level, when something moves you emotionally, or something gets you to start thinking, you know, at a quick pace. That's what learning about yourself is about. I think often branding feels kind of contrived because you're coming up with ideas of who you want to be rather than observing who you are. And my suggestion is, instead of trying to have this super tightly woven brand online that is super consistent from every avenue and every angle, you know, part of me says, that's not super, that's not really human, you know, because we're often a bag of contradictions. Oh, the holidays are here. You gotta find a unique gift for Uncle Derek and your sister, Katherine, and her kids, Jetson, and Jetta, and Jeffrey, and Jaggob, and another two Jay kids. There's so much thinking, so much searching. Plus there's the ethical thing. You gotta shop small, it just, it's a lot. But it doesn't have to be. Uncommon goods makes all of this simple and straightforward, for real. The site is chock full of unique and interesting gifts that also support small businesses. My fam loves advent calendars. I think Sophie would like the Stitch-a-Day advent calendar and 12 days of hot sauce is definitely shouting my name. Sorry, that wasn't me. That was the 12 days of hot sauce calendar shouting. Seriously, we had tons of fun browsing the site for ourselves and kids and family to get 15% off your next gift. Go to uncommongoods.com/peptalk. That's uncommongoods.com/peptalk for 15% off. Don't miss out on this limited time offer, uncommon goods. We're all out of the ordinary. You know, I love minimalism. Like I love like modern minimal typography. But I also like wild, crazy busyness. You know, those contradictions are what make me me. They're what make me human and different. And I think trying to brand yourself as this very concise thing is kind of dishonest. And I think what's more important is to have a clear understanding of who you really are. And when you have that clear understanding and you understand what you gravitate towards, then you will have a degree of consistency. You will have something that's real and authentic. I know that authentic word is overused like crazy, but I think the meaning is important because I think it's getting to something that's important, that people can start to understand who you are. And when they get a sense of who you are, they can engage and especially you can connect to the people that are like you. And those are the people you wanna work with. Because that's where you're gonna be understood. And that's where they're gonna, you know, one of the things that's been really bad for me is when someone hires me, but they really don't understand what's valuable about what I can bring to the table. And that's almost always a recipe for a bad job, bad client relationship. And so I think making, being observant, knowing what you're about is gonna help you come up with what you're gonna bring to these different platforms. And you're gonna bring the best stuff. Okay, number four. Number four I titled Keep Your Pants On, You're in a Business Meeting. So if you're trying to engage social media as a commercial artist, as part of your business, then I think it's important to understand the boundaries that separate you from your work, your personal life, from your work life. And I think that there are interesting things that happen when you mix them a little bit together. But I think there needs to be boundaries. And I think boundaries are really important. I think often we think that honesty means full disclosure. But it doesn't mean that. Or being vulnerable means being completely transparent about everything in your life. But if you study anything in psychology, you'll see really quickly that boundaries make for healthy life. They make for a healthy world. You know, you can't say everything that you would say to your boss that you would say to your partner. That's, it's just not how it works. And it's not dishonest. And I know we just talked about being yourself. But there's a difference between being yourself and putting your best foot forward. So you don't roll straight out of bed and then jump in the car and go to work. You wouldn't do that. Because you need to brush your teeth. We're talking about brushing our teeth for the second episode in a row. I don't know why, but you need to brush your teeth. You need to make sure your hair is all right. You need to put some clothes on because you need to be interacting in your best way. It's not dishonest. It's not dishonest to put art in a nice, well lit art gallery. It's not dishonest. It's putting it in its best light so that the presentation doesn't distract from the important stuff. And I think if you don't put those boundaries up and you don't, and you overshare and you over communicate and you divulge all of your insecurities and everything behind the scenes and all of your fears, hopes and dreams, if you do that, then you're not gonna have a healthy interaction online. You're not gonna present yourself and your work in the best light and you're gonna start missing the opportunities on social media. You're not going to get the most out of it. And I think it's important to understand the difference between bad boundaries and being too considered, too contrived and too not yourself and being too much yourself. I think there needs to be these boundaries that are understood and everyone has different boundaries. Everybody's a different species of dog, right? So some dogs, you can get them and their demeanor is lazy. They actually literally don't need tons of exercise. But I think everybody can agree that putting a dog and leaving him in a little tiny pen all the time is not very healthy. But at the same time, I don't think it's wrong. I don't think you would think it was wrong if a dog had a decent sized backyard with a fence. Like having that boundary, it's not a problem. That's not a bad thing. Now if you put a, I think they call them blue healer inside a regular fenced yard, that dog is gonna go a little bit crazy because they're used to living on a farm. They need more land or room. So I think understanding who you are, what type of work you make, having a clear sense of when you're going too far. Some people, there's a lot of benefit from oversharing more. I think of like comic artists. A lot of comic artists put so much of their personality and if you're gonna be a successful comic artist, so much of their work is autobiographical. And I think it's okay for them to be more transparent online. But I think that's different than someone who works in a corporate environment as a commercial artist. And so I think it's understand and know, what kind of species am I? How much room do I need on here? But have an understanding of boundaries because I think you don't need to share every single part of your life with every person in your life, with complete strangers. And that's a judgment call. You may completely disagree with me, but that just might mean that you're a blue healer. You need to go live on the farm and be open and free in front of everybody 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But I think it's an important understand, where are my boundaries? When do I have to have my pants on and be true to that? All right, number five, retweet others as you would like to be retweeted. This idea is about doing things to others online and social media in ways that you would like to be interacted with. You know, I'm a big believer in this idea, this abundance mentality about life, that there's more than enough for everybody, what everybody needs. And it's the Gandhi quote. He said that, you know, there's more than enough for our needs, but there's not more than enough for our greed. And I wanna live in a world and I wanna work in an industry where if everybody is looking out for everybody else, everybody's needs are taken care of. If everybody is scraping to make sure their needs are met, they're probably gonna be greedy and they're gonna be looking at things in a scarcity mindset and they're gonna be hoarding things because they're gonna believe there's not enough for everybody. So they have to cling to what they have. And I don't wanna work in an industry like that. And I don't think that's actually the best way to look at life. And I think even scientifically, there are a lot of results that say that the more generous you are in the long run, the further that you'll go. So I go out of my way to retweet things on Twitter when I think it's worth retweeting. Even if I think that I'm giving my competition a leg up. And I think that by doing that, you start building positive relationships and you start growing your interactions online. I think of it like if your neighbor came to your house and tried to borrow a cup of sugar or you go to your neighbor and you try to borrow a cup of sugar from them and they're like, "Yeah, sure." And they give you a cup of sugar and then they come back next week and they say, "Hey, can I borrow an apple?" And you're like, "Get lost." Like I think it's important to think of it. Like compare what you're doing to real life scenarios. And so if you like it when other people like your work and retweet your work and all that good jazz, go be part of that scene. Don't be so stingy with your likes. There's a secret. You have an infinite amount of likes in you. You're not gonna run out. So I think retweet as you will like to be retweeted. It's a very profound philosophical statement. Number six, this is another Gary Vaynerchuk idea. Don't see social media as distribution. See it as your actual tools. Like the thing to write the story with. Not the thing to just push the story out. So don't see social media as a billboard. See it as the, don't see it as a TV channel. See it as the TV show. Like I think that some of us have been uncomfortable transitioning into a day and age where art is made for the internet. And that's its final resting place. Like we feel that kind of, you know, it's does a tree make a sound if it falls in the woods and there's no one there to hear it, that idea. Some of us feel like if we make some art and it doesn't ever hang on a wall in the real world, then we really didn't make any art. And I think there's been so much advantage for those who have been willing to make stuff, make art just for the internet and see that as a legitimate place to display your work just as legitimate as a gallery. I think those that are willing to do that are gonna get the best advantage on social media. If all you do for social media is use it as distribution as a place to flog what you have for sale, if that's the only way you're using it, it's not gonna be that much value to the audience that you're engaging with. Like if they can engage with this stuff in a different place and it makes more sense to engage in it in those places, then that's fine. I'm not saying that you can't promote your gallery show on social media. I think there's a time and place for that, but I don't think that's only what it's for. I think the more you get interested in into telling the story, creating stories for Twitter, particularly, the more you do that, the more you're gonna speak the native language of that platform, the more it's gonna be interesting and valuable for the audience to engage on that platform. Like developing a web show, there's different things you would do for a web show than you would do for TV. There's different things you would do for TV than you would do for a vine, right? So every different place, you can find value in developing stories directly for those places. And just because it's not printed or in a gallery or in real life or you can't hold it, doesn't mean that it's not art. And I think if you're willing to make stuff directly for social media, I think there's a lot of benefit and interest there. And I think, you know, looking back through history, the people, the artists that were willing to engage in the moment, in what was happening that moment, that's where the reward was. And so you can cling to the old ways, but you're gonna be missing out. Number seven, develop strategy and invest intentionally. So I think one of the things that I really hate the most about the internet is this idea of viral things. I think that, I think this phenomenon of things going viral actually really destroys how we view significance and significant achievements and how to develop significant success. Because I think going viral is the equivalent of winning the lottery. Now everybody, everybody has to work to make money. Well, not the Kardashians. I don't know, I don't really know their story, but they don't seem to work. But most people, they have to work. And I think of this bright eyes quote, it's a lyric that says I'd rather be working for a paycheck than trying to win the lottery. And I think when it comes to your online interactions, it's you can work for a paycheck. You can commit and strategically invest in these platforms and receive a reward for doing that. And you may never go viral. I did a sketch this week and I put it on Twitter and it was a gravestone that said, RIP, he never went viral. And I just thought, even just every person in the world now has this secret ambition. Maybe they don't, but a lot of people seem to have this secret ambition that maybe my Facebook post will just randomly get 100,000 likes. And I think one thing we know is that planning on winning the lottery is not a plan because you can't plan it because there's no patterns. And when there are no patterns, there can't be a plan. A plan is based on seeing patterns and the data. And so I tested this theory with Twitter and I thought, all right, I'm gonna sit and I'm gonna think of the types of things that I wanna tweet, who my audience is, what I wanna say to them and what I think, how can I bring value? And I'm gonna try to consistently do that over several weeks. And when I did that, I had the best interactions on Twitter that I've ever had. Way better than just off the cuff stuff because I engage with it like there were real people on there and that I could actually bring value and I could think through what I was doing and really invest in it. And I think this viral idea has got us, I'm thinking that it's totally random what works on social media, but it's not true. If you spend the time and energy to really invest consistently, there is real reward. And so number seven is have a real strategy and invest intentionally with discipline and there will be good things that come from that just like there are in all other parts of life. Like when it comes to all other parts of life, we all kind of have a general wisdom that there are things that you do that work and things that don't. And if you're consistent and disciplined, so if you eat low calorie diet every day, you're gonna lose weight. You know, we roll our eyes at these diet fads, but we don't take that same wisdom to our interactions online. Number eight is have fun and make friends. Have you ever been to a networking party? There they can be absolutely terrible, but they can also be pretty fun and pretty enjoyable. And I think it all has to do with what your attitude is about going into it. I think that really a big mindset shift for me that was really helpful was to go in to work and promoting and realizing that I have value to bring to other people and other people have value to bring to me. And I don't need to beg everybody to interact with me because I have things that are valuable too. And I'm bringing stuff to the table and they're looking to me to bring something interesting to the table. And when I realized that, I also realized that there were people that I didn't wanna work for or with. And I think when you go into those networking parties, if you're thinking, how do I go make some friends? How do I go connect with people that naturally connect with me? Because those are the people that I want to work with because that's when good stuff happens. And I think when you go into a networking party and you think, how can I weasel as many connections as I can? How can I get as many jobs as possible when that desperation is so disgusting and off-putting and repelling to others? You know, it's like the restaurant that doesn't have anybody in it looks disgusting. But the restaurant that's booming will just get more booming. You know, they talk about it in sales as this idea of having walk away power. That if you're a salesman and you look desperate, like you have no other option, you have to make this sale, people just wanna not buy just to spite you for some reason. But if the salesman goes into a sale and they say, look, I don't need this sale, but you do, you really need this product. But I don't need to sell it. There's something interesting about that. And you have walk away power. You have real value to bring to the table. You don't need to make every single connection. And when you shift your mindset from, I need every single interaction to be perfect and awesome and helpful and useful, you're gonna constantly be trying to use other people. But if you go out there with the idea of, you know, I heard it like this. If you go out there desperately trying to get or as many friends as possible, you're gonna have no friends. It's gonna be really hard to find a friend. But if you go out there trying to be a friend, you'll have a billion friends. And I think when it comes to your interactions online, I think it's really important to go out there and just try to have fun, try to make real connections, try to make friends with people that you would really be friends with. And I think it's the same with a networking party. So you go to a networking party, go try to make some friends, go have some fun. Because those connections that you make will be the ones that last, they'll be the ones that the great work comes from. And I think of it like this, I've thought with Facebook, if you imagine Facebook as a party, no one would go to that party, be the worst party ever. Just imagine inviting every person that you've ever met into a big room where 99% of people are just monologuing to themselves about all of their controversial thoughts and opinions and just shouting out loud. That sounds like the worst and the worst idea in the world. Like I would rather do anything else in the world than do that. And so I think it's important to make that connection. And that's why my last point, number nine, is this is real life. I think the biggest mindset shift for me was refusing to see social media and online interactions as some virtual reality or some video game where it's not deeply connected to real life. And when I've been off in my cave, I work from home, I have my home studio, and I love working from home. I'm kind of an introvert, actually. I like to be alone when I'm working, especially. I need that time. But sometimes when I'm off in my cave and I'm pushing out some interactions online from that cave mindset, I'll go out and be around other people from our industry and I'll feel a little bit of embarrassment and feel like, man, this stuff I'm putting out there, I'm not putting it out there like there's other real people interacting with it. And that any time most of these points are about connecting what you really know about your real life and what you interact with online, how you interact with people in real life versus how you interact online. Figuring out how to fuse those together and not disconnecting them. Don't disrespect people online in ways that you wouldn't disrespect them in real life. Don't say things, don't, you know, if you're at a party, you don't just air all your dirty laundry and complain about everything. That's not gonna get you, you know, a great party. So I think the more that you can see social media just like real life, the better you'll be, the more you can connect those things and not disconnect them and not see it as some virtual reality video game. I think that's when things start to actually get interesting. So this has been a different type of episode. I wanted to bring a different type of episode. This is something I feel like I needed to chime in and share some of the things I've learned. I'd love to hear what your tips are because I know that there's tons about social media that I don't know and I really think it really is important right now, whether you like it or not. Like there are things about social media that I don't like, that I'm not crazy about. But whether you like it or not, that's where you're gonna be discovered for new work. That's where you're gonna be able to promote your work online and in the world in general. That's where the conversations are happening right now. That's where people are finding new artists. And so I think it's important to figure out how do you engage there? So if you have tips that I didn't talk about, tweet to me, you know, write me on Instagram. Another thing is I got a creative pep talk Facebook page now. I think it's facebook.com/creativepeptalk. Go like us there. We're gonna try to have some conversations on there. Gonna try to start a conversation about social media on there after I post this episode. So I hope this has been helpful to you. I hope there's some new thoughts. Love to hear your thoughts on the subject. Next week I'm planning a pretty exciting episode. I'm excited about that. Thank you guys this week. A bunch of you went out and reviewed on iTunes and I read 'em all and some of them were cracking me up and there was some really good stuff on there. Thank you for doing that. That helps other people find the show. Thank you for all the support. Thank you to the band Y and to Yoni Wolf for letting me use their music for the theme song. And until I can talk to you again, figure out how to stay excited about what you're doing and keep peped up. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Hey y'all, one more quick thing. Earlier this year I rebuilt my website using Squarespace's new fluid engine and I was so pumped about how it turned out that I have been really thrilled to find as many ways to partner with them and tell you about what they can do and bring you discounts as possible. With social media going haywire, I think having a site that feels as unique as your creative work is essential to building trust with your target audience or your clients. I have had several clients point out how cohesive and fresh my site looks lately. And if you wanna check that out and what I was able to do without any code, check out AndyJPizza.com. If you wanna test it out, go to squarespace.com/peptalk to test it out yourself. And when you're ready to launch, use promo code PEPTALK for 10% off your first purchase. Thanks Squarespace for supporting the show and for supporting creative people. (upbeat music) - I did consider Barney a friend and he's still a friend to this day. - The idea of Barney is something that I want to live up to. You know, I love who you love me. I call it the purple mantra. - Barney taught me how to be a man. - Generation Barney, a podcast about the media we loved as kids and how it shapes us. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. (upbeat music)