Kat Rice of Veribatim has convinced me of the value of an Internet presence and social networking, so I’ve been busy. Of course, for me the Internet always meant email, ftp, and usenet–so social networking, blogging, and such were all new to me.
Oh, I have a LinkedIn profile, and use it extensively, but I had never really understood the value of blogging, or even what I had to blog about, until my friends Teena Johnson (who convinced me that I had something to blog about), Keith Ray (who convinced me that people actually wanted to read the information I had, and gave me some ways to classify it and convinced me of the value of the information I had), and Jane Ray (who provided moral support) beat me over the head with pointed sticks until I gave up and started using some of these platforms. It was then I discovered that not only was I not alone, but that there were plenty of people blogging about just such things as we have been dutifully writing about! One of the most impressive I’ve found is Life’s a Pitch, about adapting marketing techniques to the arts.
I’m also reading Imagining Marketing: Art, Aesthetics and the Avant-Garde (free registration needed). I sent the link to the author of the Life’s a Pitch blog. It turns out that marketing and the arts are quite closely related (I always imagined marketing as being like a used-car salesman’s pitch and not important to what I’m doing). Both are social activies . . . and now the penny drops and I understand why social networking is important to marketing the arts!