The blog post lands roughly 120 views. The typical engagement on this post is 6-20 engagements. That's a fairly solid relationship between stats. Typically you'll 'engage' 10% of your audience on an average post. I really used to care how many likes my posts would get and know all that really matters is that i enjoyed making the work and the people i met through it.
OK boring stuff over. Let's talk about social numbers and what it can mean for the creative industry. Last night, a good friend of mine told me about him losing a video commission. He lost it, not off his creative work, but off his social numbers or lack-thereof. I get it, marketeers want to minimise their risk and guarantee their views, likes and engagement. BUT i also don't get it. As someone who has been on both sides of commissioning art, that is a risky approach and shouldn't be something aspiring artists have to deal with.
SCENARIO Let me set up a situation that we all know. Person A loses the job based off social numbers. Hypothetical Person B who wins job makes terrible but passable creative with a HUGE AUDIENCE. Now, let me create a hypothetical situation and pretend that that piece of work created was Kendall's Pepsi ad. Simply, we can see the negative outcome of valuing guaranteed outreach above all else without thoroughly acid testing the commission to get the best idea, director and casting for the commissioned creative. Why do you want to have a big ass audience to push out your polished turd of a campaign. That just means a lot of people are going to see your terrible work, Mr Marketeer. Work comes first. IDEAS come before. Great brief before that. I can't stress this model enough to newbies coming through. Don't aspire to have big numbers, aspire to make kick ass work and, if the bigger numbers are a result of the kick ass work.. it's a nice to have. Man, this is a vanilla Mr World 'World Peace' post.
My fear and worry is when that numbers game floats over into us film-makers and photographers and it becomes a broadly accepted T&C to winning a job 1) on top of having a great book 2) having won the competitive pitch. I mean, give me a shit tonne of hoops and i will jump through them like it's the Olympic final but we already do jump through an Olympic number of hoops to survive as creatives so DEAR SOCIAL NUMBERS, off you fuck.
I don't feel like this is as fully fledged a post as usual but man, i hate this 'like' culture.
Pls like x