Last week I received an email from a Patricia Martin who was apparently trying to spread the word about a survey of American Life and Culture she had recently released. I get a lot of these emails but don’t often feel the subject is relevant to my blog. This time it was. What I liked about the survey results is that they are written to convince people to involve culture in their business whether it be in regard to employees, part of their customer relations or both. The format is easy and quick to read and every page has a “take away” for that section in the margins.
Since I had been reading about the feeling that the youngest generation of arts professionals didn’t have a good work ethic in the Americans for the Arts leadership salon, I was encouraged to read the following and hoped the methodology of their survey made it true.
“We found some 60-year-old bloggers held the same opinions as 24-year-old poets: they are willing to work hard in their creative endeavors. Content creators say they spend a lot of their time producing and spreading their creative expressions. They don’t spend time gaming online.This may be because creating original content is demanding—as is mastering and maintaining a social network online. Creativity is time-consuming. The time demands of a creative life, no matter what age a person is, require allegiance to one’s art.”
Other sections talk about this group valuing education and living within one’s means. I understand that there are always going to be at least some people who match these descriptions. I am hoping the percentage of those embracing these philosophies is high. I look around and it doesn’t seem it is so. We hear all about how young people are using social media technologies to spread the word about their passions, but I haven’t seen it yet. Or rather, I haven’t seen it done effectively.
The cast of the show going up in two weeks has Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube pages set up for the show. I have been keeping an eye on them and except for the Youtube page, none of them are very well developed. This isn’t a case of their approach not appealing to me. This is a matter of there not being even the most basic content on the pages to make people interested in the performances. The twitter page more or less says “going to rehearsal tonight” over and over again. They are handing out flyers with all the social media page addresses on them but there is nothing there to see. My hope is they are actually handing out the flyers we printed up with information about the show along with them.
It is said that very few people create online content and the majority consume it. I suspect that just like everything else in life, there is only a small percentage of those producing who have the capacity to create something worthwhile. The idealism of the millions exercising their creative powers doesn’t hold up to reality because a lot of them are playing video games rather than investing the time to hone their skills.
Perhaps I haven’t come across those dedicated to becoming effective because they are off working on getting better.
Joe,
Glad you found items in the study useful. Your experience is not unique. Our conversations with execs at places like MySpace and Ford Motor were revealing. When they created content that put their brands at the center and encouraged people to add content, their social media extensions were ghost towns. When they gave existing content creators (bloggers, tweeters, FB users) interesting content or “hooks” they could use to feed their own content demands for their social media platforms, activity shot up. Does that clarify things a bit? As with all studies, we had to pick and choose what to highlight. So it seems more detail on a situations like yours might have proved more helpful. Thanks for the feedback. Really helpful.
Best,
Patricia Martin
It’s been my observation that sites like Facebook, YouTube and so on have created a class of faux creatives. While there are doubtless many creative people using these sites as creative outlets, I think far more are propped up (and pimped up) by them. They have little or nothing of interest to say and they say it badly. Twitter anyone?