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January 11, 2018

Has the internet revolutionized your career?

Twitter, Instagram and Facebook have replaced print marketing, but how we use them remains the same.

Full Stop is one of my favorites from 2016. But will a juror like it as much as I do?

This is the time of year when plein air artists apply to shows. It’s not easy to look at the year’s output and try to guess which three paintings will most impress jurors. But at least it doesn’t involve slides. (For you young readers, those were 35 mm photo transparencies stuck in little plastic frames.)

In the old days, artists took (or, more likely, had a trained professional take) three bracketed exposures of each of their pieces with a film camera. Slide film’s exposure can’t be fixed in the developing process, and it was important that it be right. We repeated that a second time, because we wanted to be sure of our work. That meant that a 36-exposure roll netted exactly six unique images.

Apple Tree with Swing was painted for Castine Plein Air.

The film was then sent off to a developing service. When the slides came back, we looked them over on a light table. The keepers were sent back out to be duplicated. All applications—which went off by mail—included a stamped, self-addressed envelope to return those precious slides.

The process was expensive and time-consuming. Whenever I see a $50 online entry fee, I think back to those days and smile.

Yesterday, Keith Linwood Stover of the Cyber Art Show asked, “Would you say that the internet (including social media) has revolutionized your art career?” It has certainly changed my work, but in many ways, the work itself remains exactly the same.

Flood tide has to be one of this season’s contenders because, well, boats.

Take marketing. I’ve just spent three days doing an overhaul of my spring marketing efforts. Meanwhile the paint for a project I’m excited about is jelling on my palette. Is that so different? Not really. I remember attending a seminar back in 1980, where we learned that we’d have to spend about half our time on marketing. We’re not doing it with physical portfolios anymore, but we’re still doing the exact same thing.

There’s no real fundamental difference between advertising in a magazine and advertising on social media. It all costs a lot of money.

Drying Towels was painted at Ocean Park.

Instagram occupies a similar niche to the art festival as a way to court new fans. The only people who miss doing art festivals are those who’ve never spent time in a hot, humid sales tent or unloaded a van full of unsold merchandise at the end of a terrible run. On the other hand, Instagram requires just as much work.

Plein air events themselves are a modern phenomenon. They started thirty years ago with Plein Air Painters of America, founded in California by Denise Burns. This group held annual paint-outs followed by a show. The format has been copied by countless other groups and events worldwide.

The point of these events is their immediacy, and their growth has been entwined with that of social media. Most well-run events use Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to keep fans up-to-date on where and what we’re painting. Some maintain an online map telling fans our whereabouts.

How do artists know about these events and their relative prestige? We follow them on the internet, of course. In fact, the whole modern plein air revival is so intertwined with the internet that it’s impossible to separate the two.

October 24, 2017

The Internet is a control freak

There is no Fountain of Youth on the internet. Publish or perish, my friend.

Jonathan Submarining, 2016, Carol L. Douglas

Earlier this month, I went sailing. That made social media almost impossible. I could have found a workaround solution, but it would have been time-consuming. Constantly searching for a phone signal to make my next tweet, post, or pin would have wrecked my trip.

I’ve written before about how important frequency is to blogging. The results of my mini-vacation were immediate and dramatic. The following week, hits to my blog dropped by half. It was as if Social Media was in a snit, refusing to speak to me. I was talking to myself in an empty room. Then, suddenly, I was forgiven and my readership went back to normal.

If Social Media were a person and had given me the silent treatment because I went sailing, I’d know exactly what to do about it. I don’t have much use for control freaks. But in our relationship, Social Media holds the whip card. I need her more than she needs me.

J&E Riggins and Bowdoin in Castine Harbor, 2016, Carol L. Douglas

Most artists don’t have access to market research, so we end up guessing a lot, looking at successful posters and trying to figure out how they manage to get so many followers.

Guessing, of course, is just a nasty word for ‘testing.’ We read, try things, fail, and try again.

A marketing guru gives the following as his schedule:

Tweet 14 times a day during the week, seven times a day on weekends;
Post to Facebook twice a day, once at 10 AM and once at 3 PM;
Post to LinkedIn once each weekday, at 8 AM;
Post to Google+ twice each weekday, at 9 AM and 7 PM.

Obviously, there’s a big problem here for one-man shops like ours. We don’t have the staff to post at 3 AM, and we don’t have the time (or in some cases the knowledge) to automate posts to go ‘bang’ at that hour.

Storm over Lake Huron, 2016, Carol L. Douglas

Socialbakers, a media analytics company, found that the sweet spot on Facebook is five to ten posts a week. Of course, that was done in 2011, and Facebook has tweaked its algorithms many times since then.

They also say that between three and five tweets a day gives you the optimal engagement per tweet. This isn’t, of course, the optimal engagement for your brand, it’s just the point where you wring out the most value for your work. If you want to get the most value for your Twitter presence, multiply that by ten. No joke.

I’m never going to tweet 30 times a day. I haven’t got that many insights. I’m not sure I can stretch them to 3-5 times a day.

Parker dinghy, 2015, Carol L. Douglas

Social media experts measure posts by ‘half-life,’ which is the time it takes for your post to reach half its total engagements.

Twitter’s half-life is eighteen minutes. Instagram’s is slightly less than an hour. Facebook posts have a half-life of 90 minutes. Conversely, a Pinterest post has a half-life of 3.5 months.

It helps to live in the eastern time zone. About half of Americans do, which means you get a timing advantage.

What does this tell us? Basically, that artists can use the so-called ‘free’ marketing platforms to great effect, but only if we’re constant and aggressive. Otherwise, we’ll sink without a trace.

Note: if you want to read this blog without having to find it on Social Media, you can always subscribe. There’s a subscription box right below that gold medal on the top right.

July 11, 2016

The chattering classes

“War and intimations of war,” by Carol L. Douglas, 2001

Lack of solitude has interrupted my work over the last week. Creativity is a singular process, and too much interaction—even when you love your visitors—is hard on your work. My Mainer friends tell me this is an occupational hazard of living on the coast. After two seasons I understand. But social encroachment takes many forms. Physical contact is only one.

Auberon Waugh coined the phrase “chattering classes” to refer to the politically active, highly-educated urban middle class. While the term is peculiarly British, the concept is not.

Social media has been a very useful invention in my line of work, which one could describe as “self-appointed expert.” In the past, we had to convince an editor of our brilliance and relevance before they would let us opine in print. Now their role as arbiters has withered away. In some ways it’s a pity, since a good editor stops a person from looking like a damn fool.

Older people like me are still daily readers of news. This is an engrained habit. The newspaper was in the kitchen at breakfast and the television wasn’t. Growing up, my local paper (the Buffalo Evening News) was dignified, measured, literate and informative. It shaped my understanding of writing, certainly, but also of reading.

Concurrent with the decline of newspapering has come a rise in public cynicism.Almost nobody believes that the Fourth Estate is independent or accurate. I’m not innocent of this; I too have media sources I don’t trust. But I’m not sure where a culture goes when it can no longer rely on facts.

It was this past weekend’s horrible violence that finally tipped me into paralysis. No responsible citizen can watch a series of public executions and not be moved by them. However, the hardest part was looking at Facebook. Crisis exposes social media’s fatal flaw, as the chattering classes rush to judgment and normally-intelligent people engage in the blame game.

A number of my friends have pointed out the similarities between the Current Crisis and 1968. Let me point out a few of the differences. In 1968, we were a nation of middle-class values. These acted like a giant counterweight to extremism. In 1968, we hadn’t become as profoundly cynical about the ruling classes.

We live in perilous times. When you’re sitting on a tinderbox, it behooves you to speak peace, not war.

The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine. The wheels of public opinion jump to conclusions and then warp the facts to meet their preconceived ideas. I need social media, but at times it drives me nuts.

June 13, 2014

Social media and selling

Boats, by little ol’ me. Social media allows you to get your work out to a larger audience.

Last week I got into a spirited discussion with other painters about social media and marketing. As I frequently do, I cited one of my favorite painting students.

In his other life, Brad VanAuken is a brand consultant to Fortune 100 companies and the author of a texton the subject that’s going into its second printing. (In fact it’s his success in his chosen field that somewhat slows down his progress as a painter, since he’s always jetting around the globe instead of coming to class.)

Using photos of myself painting on location helps my audience understand what I do. Standing in creeks will someday also give me pneumonia or a broken ankle, but I try not to focus on that. (Photo courtesy of Mitchell Saler, a painter you’ll be hearing about in the future.)

Brad is the person who made me understand an essential truth about social media: it works more like a mesh than an arrow. I can’t cite a particular connection between, say, a Pinterest post on Tuesday and the sale of a painting on Friday, but there is no question that—somehow—it works. I’m completely booked from now until September with invitational paint-outs, shows, and classes.

Sunset in Maine, by little ol’ me. I try to be transparent, to let people see my failures as well as my successes, because I want people to understand that painting isn’t a question of genius, but of plugging along.

One painter suggested that platforms like Tumblr and Twitter were a waste of time because their target demographic doesn’t buy paintings. This is untrue. I need look no farther than 22-year-old Anna, who not only owns her own home (which contains purchased art) but takes painting lessons from me to boot. And even if it were true, her age cohort is in some ways the arbiter of taste for the rest of us.

I have three openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.