“Whether you believe in social marketing or not, there is a common perception that if you don’t exist online, you don’t exist in life or in business. If you don’t exist online, what are you hiding? Can I trust you? Do you NOT want my business? Who are you? ~Cat Smith”
The New Networking
Back in the day, networking was a must, especially for independent contractors, entrepreneurs, writers, creatives… even real estate agents! It is still true and I stand by it. Personally, I have to keep myself out there in the real world because my target audience is those people not comfortable with being on social media. My bread and butter are people afraid to even open the Facebook app for fear they will blow up the world. You can’t do that by the way. (Remember the movie War Games? Would you like to play a game?)
Most networkers can skip a lot of the in-person rubbing of elbows. I used to sit on a panel at the San Diego Comic-Con International as an expert. The panel, which you can still catch every year with fabulous panelists, is called Full Time Creative Work on a Part-Time Schedule. Really valuable advice, especially for creatives, but also great for any entrepreneur. By the way, did you know if you’re a creative (or again a real estate agent!) you are an entrepreneur?!
Anyway, the question we got every year…
the one that got the biggest sigh from all of the panelists…
“I’m too shy to network. Do I really have to?” Yes! And carry business cards everywhere you go! What is it they used to say about Hollywood? It’s not what you know, it’s who you know?
In more recent days, I would give a very different answer. I should look at getting back into that panel! The power of the Internet is grand. Let’s put a little perspective into this. I’m a social media strategist now because I was an early adopter. There was no school for this. At the time, there wasn’t even much planning.
Let’s go back to 1993 when America Online aka AOL started mailing compact discs to entice new users[1]. “You’ve got mail!” Although, I’m that nerd who went way deep into computer settings and changed the alert sound for everything. My mail announcement was something like a dog barking. But I digress.
At that time, I had already studied photography and was on to a new major: theatre! I lived in San Diego and was happy on the stage, but had a small inkling of trying out Hollywood. I was nowhere near ready to move there and it was a good two-hour minimum drive on any given day, if lucky.
Enter, AOL Chatrooms. Chatrooms! A place to talk to complete strangers in a non-creepy way. I’m not blind. There were a lot of creepers along the way, but for the most part, people could have an interest and join a conversation with a few people, or a hundred, sharing information, advice, and personal stories.
No matter what I was studying, I was always writing and taking classes on creative and other types of writing. During my high school years, I helped start the Dragon’s Tale, the school newspaper. I was editor of the club news section and was a columnist. In college, while studying photography, I spent one semester (or two?) as the editor of photography and was a staff photographer several other semesters. With that came a little journalism with my photography. Later in life, I spent a couple of years as a music columnist for a local paper. Why do I bring that up? Just to point out, I like to “write.”
Back in the early days of Yahoo Groups, I was a blogger. At the time, I didn’t know that’s what I was. I had been studying HTML and built a website as part of my first class that then became a passion project. LiveJournal was becoming popular around the same time, but I just kept adding pages to my website. It was called, Cat Smith D.I.Y.ing (Do It Yourself in Gothic). I was a little goth girl back then. Everything black! People like to say, “Aren’t you glad the internet wasn’t around for our childhood?”
I think that’s funny because it was around. People just weren’t on it yet. I remember my first computer class in middle school. I can remember writing “go to” programs which probably none of you even know let alone remember!
GeoCities hosted my website. That service is long gone, but someone “mirrored” my site claiming to be an “archiver” of all of those old sites. In reality, they were making money by putting ads on my stolen content. The reason I bring this up is that for the last twenty years, all of that content I thought was removed from the Internet has been alive and well all of this time. After a cease and desist letter, my old site has been taken down, but you see how just because you are no longer sharing something, it may still be out there?
What were Yahoo Groups? They were basically email newsletters, kind of like a chatroom to your email inbox. You could have them set to arrive every time someone spoke, like a conversation, or a daily archive. I belonged to one that was about being gothic and liking arts and crafts. Talk about niche specific! We were targeting our audiences at the time without even realizing that we were social networking or in a niche!
From that Yahoo Group, I became a contributing writer for a very short-lived magazine, “Spooky,” a gothic lifestyle magazine. I bet you never knew there was such a thing! That paid writing position came as a direct result of talking to people in Yahoo Groups and directing them to my website. I’m amazing myself right now because I’ve literally just had these memories while writing this page!
Every little piece of your background really does add to the profession you have now, whether you realize it or not! And every little conversation you have online is networking, whether intentional or not.
Jumping ahead to the time of Facebook, I was another early adopter on that. I jumped the MySpace ship for it! At the time of its inception, I had returned to Northern California, still toying a bit with heading back to San Diego. At this time, I knew I no longer wanted to pursue film type acting roles, but stage roles were often done out of love. So how would I make money? Voiceovers! If you ever meet me, that’ll be the first thing you notice… my “distinctive” voice. That long story aside, I started studying up on voice acting, but at that time, much of it was still being done in major cities, like L.A.
I was now growing my roots in Sonoma and wasn’t really relishing that lifestyle. And lucky for me, this was about the turning point for the industry. Voice123 and Voices.com were newly formed and offered an amazing opportunity to audition and record jobs from home. A bit before that, I started a website and a blog, at this time I, of course, knew I was blogging. I was doing this with intention; to be noticed. I may not be in L.A., but I still wanted work and social proof (before knowing it was social proof) that I had the chops. I wanted to be seen as an expert before I even knew that was part of marketing.
My very first Facebook page was for my voice acting. It’s archived right now, but I can still have it go live when I want it to. I can tell you without a doubt, those online services matching me to clients was profitable, but at least 50% of my work came from chatting with people on Facebook. Having them aware of what I was doing and having them advocate for me without asking was getting me jobs! Social media has been very good to me!
I even won a year’s subscription to Voice123 by promoting my video on Facebook and getting everyone to rally around me by placing votes. That was one of those times I could really see the power of social media!
Read more in part 2
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2015/05/12/timeline-aol-through-the-years.html