JH AfterParty 1.2

I had this notion of creating a short – 60 seconds or less – ad video that’s intended to be used by “you,” Constant Reader, to introduce me to the part of the world you have contact with and I don’t.

This is one of those rare things where I’m thinking pretty much in straight-up marketing terms. When it’s necessary I sort of have a little consultant in my head that I allow to run his mouth in small doses and look at me and my work as a product and service and object to be distributed and communicated. According to him, it would be really effective to reach out with a short vid pointing directly to past support and largely intended to be shared by you folks who have been behind me and watching me go through all this mess for the last harumharum years.

Basically it’s an ethical and righteous way of leveraging social proof. Like these clowns that go buy 200K fake followers from an agency right out of the gate so you see them and think “well, obviously with that many people behind it there must be something worthwhile there.” It’s a known human “thing” to do that, and nearly everyone in any kind of marketing space leverages that with the artificial appearance of this support (called “social proof”) to build “real” support.

I think that’s crooked as hell and reduces discourse and platform access to another dollar chase, and the dollar chase is exactly the disease I’m trying to vaccinate us all against. Unfortunately we live in a world that runs on money, and while we can fight to change that all day long it’s still the present reality and we have to work within it to some degree or we don’t work at all.

Consequently I need to lean in a bit harder on the whole marketing thing even though I absolutely HATE it. I’ve often said that I’m a proud graduate of the Bill Hicks school of marketing and advertising…

But the reality is that you good folks are all out there. There are dozens of names I could think of without looking, should I take the mind, that I know I’ve been seeing in and out of my comment section for many years. You all have an ownership piece of all of this work whether because you’ve put literal cash into it or because of the time and energy you put in reading and watching and liking and sharing and commenting, and I feel like growing the support base is as much a validation of your support as it is of my work.

I want to give you a way to say straight up “hey I’ve been watching this cat fight like hell through some unimaginable garbage that’s been thrown at him over the years, he keeps on going and keeps on kicking out this really good work, I support him and I think you should too.” Everybody loves an underdog, everybody loves a comeback, (especially when it’s against the odds with righteous cause), everybody loves a story of a powerless individual triumphing against the malignancy of power arrayed against their desire to simply live freely. Everybody wants to be part of that.

We just gotta let ’em know I’m out here, and I’m unfortunately “that asshole” who refuses to cheat the system by buying artificial appearances of social approval to “sell” myself emotionally to people by unethically bypassing their critical thinking. That means I’ve got to work a thousand times as hard to magnify and enhance the legitimate social approval I do have. It means eventually I’ll buy advertising on various platforms that I’d rather not exist at all, because those platforms have a monopoly on information gatekeeping and if you don’t pay them, your information doesn’t get in front of people’s eyeballs.

Mostly it means I need to work harder to give you the voice to spread the word, so I’ll be doing that Real Soon™. Clearly the word needs to be there, to be spread, so I’m balancing the need for creating these kinds of overt marketing materials with the need to create quality original content that speaks for itself and doesn’t require a bunch of carnival barking or sales pitching.

Obviously the idea is very rough at present and I’m not 100% sure how quickly that will be done, so that’s about all I’ll say about it for now, but obviously I’m always interested in your feedback and thoughts on stuff like this.