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.

Selling: The Venues (Part 2 of 3)

While I don't generally sell on-line, sometimes someone sees a painting and wants it. This was painted in Castine in 2014 and bought by a collector in New York City.

Yesterday I wrote about N., who is a retiree now painting full time. She wants to sell paintings but doesn’t want to be a full-time businessperson. “Would a blog and Pinterest be a way?” she asked. “I have enough work that I could probably post one painting a day.”

Marilyn Fairman, Brad Marshall and me painting on the shore of Long Island Sound at Rye's Painters on Location in 2013.

Although I get hundreds of repins from Pinterest I have never sold anything there. I don’t attempt to sell via my blog, but Jamie Williams Grossman can and does with her Hudson Valley Painter. It’s a model of neat, efficient marketing.

Showing work in person raises the ante, because there are high costs to framing and mounting a show. Still, I prefer physical selling to internet marketing.

The auction at Rye's Painters on Location, 2013.

While art festivals can net good sales, I avoid them as a solo businesswoman; it’s a lot of work to schlep, mount and tear down a show of framed paintings.

Instead, N. might consider entering some plein air events near her home. Restrain your work to common board sizes, and you have a great opportunity to sell without a high entry cost. If the work doesn’t sell you can reuse the frame. The real fun is in hanging out with like-minded painters for a day or two.

Plein air events are an opportunity to hang out with pals as well as sell art. From left, Mira Fink, Crista Pisano, me, Marlene Wiedenbaum, Laura Bianco, Kari Ganoung Ruiz, Tarryl Gabel at Adirondack Plein Air, 2014.

Many buyers want a sense that the work they’re buying has been judged in the marketplace and found worthy. There is no short-cut to this point, but entering juried shows and being shown in galleries are the two time-honored ways of building a resume.

Sometimes people complain that galleries take “too much” for commissions, but that is money well spent. Even if they only sell a few pieces of your work a year, their bricks-and-mortar stores assure buyers of your professionalism, and the sales process is painless.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula in beautiful Acadia National Park in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.

The Linchpin

Girl falling into fountain while texting, 6X8, oil on canvas

Years ago I had a large brush-pile in my backyard, left over from clearing trees. I would have burned it where it sat, except it was too close to the woods for safety. As the greenwood decayed, it slumped into a solid, stinking mass. I pulled and yanked but got nowhere. After hours of clipping, cutting, shifting and swearing, I was about to quit, when something shifted and the whole thing just came apart.

Beak! Boss! 6X8, oil on canvas

Anyone who’s ever sewn knows that the last seam you put in when you’re overtired will be wrong. And I can’t count how many times I’ve done a computer project only to realize when I was almost finished that there was a faster, easier way to do it.

Art has a steep learning curve because we're often doing things we've never done before. A lot of our time seems to bear no fruit. But stagnation and even falling backward are an important part of the process.

Baby Monkey Riding on a Pig #2 (Abi's Opossum),  6X8, oil on canvas

Every morning I spend about ten seconds posting my blog pictures on Pinterest. I get the occasional note that something has been repinned, but in general it doesn’t feel like anyone is paying that much attention. Yet I recently got a note that I had more than 26K Pinterest hits in 2014.

Esther is the one of the two Bible books that has no star turn for God. It seems to be a series of human interactions, the majority of which go pretty badly for Esther and her people.  But a seemingly insignificant thing happens—Ahasuerus can’t sleep. The story his courtier uses to put him to sleep turns out to be the pin which releases the salvation of the Jewish people. The events are all worldly, but the net result is miraculous.

Baby Monkey Riding on a Pig #1 (with gumdrops), 6X8, oil on canvas

All of which is to say that our human perception of progress is exceedingly narrow. So keep plugging. You never know when you’ll pull the linchpin.

Pull Up Your Big Girl Panties, 6X8, oil on canvas

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.

Images of Old Maine

The image on the left was shot with a Canon SD850 IS and printed on a plastic banner in 2008. It's about 20X24. The image on the right was shot with a 2.25x2.25 format Ciro-Flex in 1981 and printed a few years after that. Both are fading, but the image on the left has spent considerably more time in the light than the one on the right, which has been stored in a flat file. On the other hand, that photo is still holding up a lot better than I am. (Yep, that’s me and my trusty dog.)

The truth is, I lied: I can’t show you any images of Old Maine. They’re locked up in a medium I can’t easily access: Kodachrome slides. In fact, my entire life prior to 2001 (when I purchased my first digital camera) is more or less stacked in a cabinet in the living room. Yes, I can show them to my children by fishing the carousel projector out of the garage and pointing it at the kitchen wall, but they lose a lot in translation. Kodachrome was the gold standard for transparency film, but unless you have a modern-day Magic Lantern, a lot of that is lost.

Of course, our slides are stored in a dry, dark, temperature-controlled environment, in which Kodachrome is remarkably stable. Future archaeologists are free to reclaim them, if they get there before someone dumps them.

My photographic lock-box, a/k/a slide carousels.

My father took tens of thousands of photographs, starting with photos of his mother in their cold-water flat in depression-era Buffalo. He was a professional photographer during and after WWII. His plates languished in his darkroom until they were tossed out earlier this year. There went a tremendous bit of history and art, lost forever.

(Ironically, it was his paintings that have survived. It’s unequivocally true that painting is an obsolete medium, largely supplanted in our day-to-day existence by photography and to a lesser degree graphic design. But that actually elevates its importance. The same people who blithely toss out photo albums of Grandma’s wedding wouldn’t dare to dispose of a painting of Grandma, for example.)

My first digital camera—a Minolta Dimage 7—did not take particularly good pictures compared to the Canon EOS film camera and lenses I was abandoning. However, the marginal cost of gazillions of pictures was exactly nil, and the images were tremendously easy to store compared to their film predecessors.

In 2001, we still thought of photos in terms of printing. Our hard drives were lock-boxes out of which we had to coax images via blurry printers with unstable inks. A mere decade later, our primary platform for showing pictures is the internet. Today, physical photos have become lock-boxes of a different kind.

And within a few short years, the quality of digital cameras and digital printing had improved tremendously. Above see two prints. The one on the left was taken with a $200 pocket camera (a Canon PowerShot) and printed on a plastic banner in 2008 (it has subsequently been hung outside in all kinds of weather). The image is about 20X24.

The one on the right is an older photo, taken in 1981 with a 2.25x2.25 format Ciro-Flex twin lens reflex with Kodacolor film. That camera was, comparatively, a much higher-market item than the Canon, selling for about $110 in 1948. Of course, one telling difference is that a 33-year-old camera wasn’t completely obsolete then. With film photography, as long as you could figure out the exposure and the lenses and back were intact, you were good to go, whereas I’ve replaced my digital cameras on average about every three years.

The photo of Antietam on the left is by me. The one on the right is by Matthew Brady, of course. It took a fraction of the time for me to find these two images on my server and on the internet than it took me to find the hard copies of the photos above.

Last summer I spent a few hours at Antietam. I am familiar with this photo by Matthew Brady; I of course took a corresponding photo of it myself. But how was I familiar with that photo? Not from the bound copy of “The Photographic History of the Civil War in Ten Volumes” that sat on a shelf in our home when I was growing up—it was too valuable for children to touch. I’d seen the pictures online, of course.

One of my favorite of my own works has been a day-to-day account of the replacement of my local grocery store with a new, contemporary version—a two-year project that isn’t yet finished. I publish it on Facebook, of course, because there it gets a larger viewership than it would in any gallery. (You can see it here.)

I’m mercifully free of the need to monetize my every transaction, which makes it possible for me to exploit and enjoy the open-source world of the internet. But truthfully I’m as baffled about where it’s going next as I was about where digital photography was leading us. I hope my art stands a better chance of surviving than did my father’s, but who knows?