One of the greatest challenges I have with marketing myself in today’s environment, is that I have no desire to be famous. Not even “internet famous.”
While I do want to be known and respected, I don’t particularly care about working to maintain the attention of a large number of people I’ll never have the opportunity to meet and who, consequently, will build a version of me in their minds based solely on my online presence. I’m also not particularly fond of the tactics of today’s attention seeking marketers and “influencers,” and therefore adopting these self-indulgent activities feels antithetical to who I am.
This puts me at somewhat of a disadvantage since so much of today’s marketing is about building a fan base, and becoming popular.
But I don’t want fans.
Fans and followers are a one-way relationship. The nuance of a message gets lost in the game of telephone amongst people who only know a caricaturized version of you. The problem with fans is they can only know that version of you because you’re too far away.
As the fanbase grows, the demand for content increases, and as the frequency of content increases there is less opportunity for depth. So, consequently as the fanbase grows, the message naturally becomes more general to appeal to the growing fanbase and to keep up with the growing demand for media and content.
I cringe because my peer group (marketers) too often embraces this shallow relationship while framing it as depth, as if a broadcast to their fans in aggregate is a surrogate for developing a one-to-one relationship at scale. They call it community, yet they don’t care about the individual people in it, so much as they care about the attention that group gives to them.
I find no joy in working for the attention of a mass of people I’ll never meet. I find greater enjoyment and comfort in small, more personalized experiences, and more entertainment and value in the thoughtful and well designed content.
But you…YOU are real. YOU have sat down with me. YOU and I have shared coffee, conversation, and personal stories. You know what I go through, and I have seen some of what you have been through. And we didn’t share with one another to get each other to click LIKE, or so that we’d leave a comment to feed our respective need for social validation. We didn’t share each other’s story for the attention of strangers.
My plan is to figure out YOU, at scale. And by scale, I mean the maximum scale this approach can allow. Because after that, I can’t focus on YOU anymore, and I’ll have to worry about fans.