MD104

My form of self-branding, at the moment, is through the use of Facebook to (hopefully) acquire work as a performer. In this particular instance, the arguments against brandmaking as an individual fall apart, because the entire point of my creative skills is to show off my personality. Social media is an inexpensive and potentially far-reaching tool, and seeing as I have only just started the process a year or so ago, it still seems to be the best way forward.

My strategy is to build up a base of snapshot video, like many other magicians, because that's what fuels public imnagination. However, small pieces of well edited video also attracts the attention of the cardistry (fancy card flourishing) crowd. They are intertwined with other magicians across the world, so by promoting other aspects of my work I'm hoping to build into other, related markets.

A company that I think is using social media in a 'right' way (meaning to engage with their target market successfully) would be Cool Shirtz, an Australian clothing brand. They use several platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Mostly, they tend to rely on word-of-mouth of their customers, makng use of being tagged in posts and writing the occasional reply, but sometimes use direct posts themselves.

How they use their social media prescence, however, is the main way that I think they do it 'right'. Their shirts rely on pop culture references and a morbid sense of humour, which plays directly into the generational target market that they have. That market tends to be young adults and late teens, those who might remember playing early Zelda or Pokemon games, or can recall older episodes of the Simpsons. This particular age group is also the same group that engages through memes, and possibly as a cause of the issues they inherit and must face, a not insignificant amount of those memes relate to death.

Cool Shirtz particular style of product, coupled with their nihilistic memery and tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation, is a perfect fit to engage and provoke a empathetic response in their customers. This is perfect for a company of its size and scope, because it encourages the word-of-mouth spread on the internet without requiring sizeable advertising budgets.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coolshirtzz/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/coolshirtz?lang=en

For this week’s social media experiment, I chose to communicate entirely through Facebook Messenger for 3 days. As expected, this was mightily inconvenient at times, and several people became angry with my ‘slavish devotion’ to the task (notably a tutor in one of my other papers). 

I totally agree with all the frustrated reactions I received from others regarding this. It became quite isolating, not being able to talk when I’m face to face with my flatmate and instead pointing to his phone to read my reply. Eventually, my flatmates stopped communicating with me entirely. 

It made life a lot more difficult than it needed to be - especially for when I needed to talk to people that I wasn’t connected to on Facebook. As mentioned above, tutorials for other papers were frustratingly hard, especially since they were for an acting paper. Being unable to rehearse effectively was a real kick in the teeth, especially since it was an issue I hadn’t thought about before I started the experiment.

It was very quick transition to being almost a non-person in life, as everyone assumed I was being rude or just taking a joke too far. Explaining later was an absolute relief.

References

I decided to write to my mother, in 3 different ways. The letter felt like it had a more personal quality to it, seeing as I wrote it by hand, and so had this affordance of being almost more intimate. Sadly, however, at the time of writing, she has not yet received it.

Next up was email, and this was coloured by my experiences of using email in the past. Easy enough, and containing more or less similar thoughts as the letter, but it was more businesslike, wanting to almost prepare her with a subject line and a sender before she’d even opened the message.I usually tend to communicate this way only for university or for work purposes, and while the affordance for social contact is there, it is not one I am used to in this medium.

Thirdly, was sending her a message over Facebook. This was easy and quick, and felt totally normal to engage in a social activity - that is what Facebook is built for. That said, no matter how preferable it was to me, I harbor zero hope to ever receive a reply to that particular message. For while my mother does have a Facebook account, she has not logged on or used it in two years. There is an interesting contrast in that.

While I find Facebook familiar and easy to navigate, she refuses to engage with it out of unfamiliarity. This is almost a limitation of her generation rather than that of Facebook.

References: