Master Class | It's not enough to be good.

It's not enough to be good.  You also have to be discoverable.  

The landscape has changed drastically in the past ten years.  When I first started out, it was all about networking and building those in-person relationships.  Social media has altered the way we do business and has removed the local boundaries to our work.  It allows us to connect to people worlds away and show our work to hundreds upon thousands of people who would never have otherwise had a chance to be exposed to us and us to them. 

Rather than focusing on networking, we can now focus on building a network.

On the other hand, if you're an unbelievably amazing artist, but don't have a strong social media presence, how do you plan on being found? 

If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one there to hear it.....

These days, it's simply not enough to be good at your job if you don't also maintain and build your social media presence.  It's a tool, just like your email and your computer, that has to be maintained and used on a daily basis.    By maintaining and updating frequently, we’re building an audience we can leverage later.

So many people make the mistake of creating something in the shadows and in the background of their business, hinting at it, being secretive, but not actually showing it or sharing it. Then one day, a new product is launched but is launched to such a blind audience, that it falls flat. Showing the growth and process is part of what makes an idea or product successful and desirable. A big reveal without anything leading up to it only reaches a very small portion of your audience, while exposing and sharing along the way builds anticipation and reaches a much wider group of followers.

Creativity also isn’t born in a vacuum. Great work is rarely the product of a lone genius, but is rather the culmination of collaboration.

A network of creatives challenge each other, mimic each other, look at each others work, drive the industry forward, develop trends, it allows for the rapid exchange of techniques, and out of that mindset of collaboration, genius is born.

Being part of a community like this isn’t about being a genius, it’s about what you have to contribute.

There are so many benefits to sharing and showing your work. It makes you discoverable, it builds anticipation for upcoming work or projects, it builds a network, and it contributes to the overall community. Developing your work in solitude because you’re too scared to share it or that it will be copied or stolen only hurts you because without it, you aren’t discoverable anyhow.

To read more on this idea, check out the idea of Scenius, developed by Brian Eno.