Transparency is hard.
I love getting the opportunity to talk about social media strategy with lots of great businesses and help them implement ideas and strategies that will not only help them grow their reach but translate that reach and community into real dollars. But regardless of whether your goal is a great sales volume, a larger community or more engagement one of the pillars that a good social media strategy stands on is transparency.
And it’s a lot easier to preach it than to practice it. I get that. There is a lot of vulnerability letting anyone peek behind the curtain.
“What if someone doesn’t like what they see?”
“What if someone steals my ideas?”
“What if my competitors learn about our strategy?”
“What if people think we’re not any good at what we do?”
Right. Transparency is hard. But how many of us are really committed to showing our communities, our friends, our followers, what we’re made of? How many of us REALLY are willing to ‘get naked’ and let people see what goes into making our business run or our art take shape?
It’s scary. But I firmly believe that transparency adds a tremendous amount of trust and more importantly value. 37 Signals has a helluva business with their book Rework– telling people who they are and how they run their businesses. They aim to out-teach their competition.
So I’m going to run a little experiment in the spirit of transparency, and see how many of those fears are realized. As some of you know, I’m a part-time musician and have been writing songs and performing original music for over 10 years now. At present I’m in the middle of making a new solo record in the home studio and I had this idea to just show anyone who cares, a peek behind the curtain.
So, the other day (of course, the day the Tumblr crashes and burns) – I started a quick Tumblr on the project – The Flood Sessions. I’m hoping to document through text, photos, videos, and just random musings, what goes into making a record on the cheap, on your own and doing it really really fast. I’ve been through something similar live-streaming the recording of a single that MODUS, a band I played in, was putting out. But this is a bit different.
I’m hoping to share drafts of songs in the works, unedited lyric sheets, photos, and videos throughout the process, in the hopes that people will do the following:
- Give a shit: At the end of the day I’m hoping the music gets heard. Will ‘giving pieces of it away’ before the final product is finished hurt the interest in the final version?
- Engage: Will people leave comments, constructive or otherwise on the things I post? I’m particularly interested in what types of content resonates with people and what the threshold for engagement is (ie – how in depth or unique does the content need to be to capture someone’s interest)
- Share: Can interest in the record grow outside my existing circle of friends, followers and listeners?
That being said, if you’re curious, I do hope you’ll take a look at the Tumblr page located HERE. I’ve currently got a handful of videos and will be posting content each time I’m able to sit down and work on the record.
If you’re also so inclined, I’d appreciate it if you check out some of my existing music here, and if you like it share it.
