Challenging Conventions
Seth Godin was writing about four basic rules of challenging conventions and one of the important rules is that you’re supposed to call it out when you’re challenging conventions.
Talk about it. Often, a new convention leads to conversations. People need to teach other about the ideas in your product or service, or complain about it or debate it. Again, no point changing the convention unless what you want is people to talk about your new convention.
I think about that when I think about this website. Because a few people have commented to me that when they arrive here it’s not absolutely clear that it’s a website for a musician or a songwriter or whatever it is that you want to call it.
And that’s true. I intentionally designed it so that it wasn’t like a traditional band website The focus is on the things that change and the things that change are the writing either through the blog or through Twitter.
There are a variety of thoughts, as with everything, that pulse through me about this stuff and I am not completely decided. Essentially, there are two schools of thought – one espoused by me (ed note: then, sir, not technically a school, no?) and then the rest of them, the other.
The other says that people don’t have the time to figure out who or what you are and that your job is to be one thing and be that one thing very very well and in a way that is understandable and predictable and easily digestible. The other says that you can try to be more than one thing (like a blogger and a songwriter, an executive and an artist, a man and then also a woman) but that that dilution blurs your brand, blurs your self in some way, and that you ultimately become less focused and less tangible and less specific. So, in the retail world, they tell specialty retailers to be very very specific. You can’t be both a store for your mom and a store for you. You end up being nothing.
So, the argument here is, there is a formula for band websites. The formula is that you make it all about the music (what little you may have that you want to share with everyone) and that you have a news section and if you have a blog you call it a journal or something and you make it a distraction from the main part of the site and maybe you update it once in awhile but not really and not often. Also, don’t say too much about yourself. Don’t reveal. The website is essentially for branding. There shouldn’t be much to do there or at least not a lot of reasons to come back repeatedly. The main purpose of the website is to evoke mystery and give away some music and perhaps portray yourself in some kind of outfit with eyeliner. Don’t say too much. Don’t analyze.
And there is a lot about that that I actually agree with. I do think that art needs mystery and I do think that everything shouldn’t be explained and that the mystery is part of what makes the story compelling.
Now. On the other hand.
On the other hand, the majority of those arguments about being very easy and very digestible and very identifiable feel very old to me. And they feel like they’re referring to a very specific older version of a music business with a very specific older template for production, distribution and revenue generation. For attention capture.
Now, I think that if you are going to put in the time to have a website you may want to consider giving people a reason to come back. And because, as it stands right now, the web is a place that is primarily textual, you may want to consider writing something. And if you are going to write something, you may want to consider putting what you’re writing front and center so that people will find it and that Google will find it and that, essentially, it will be found. And so, I am a big advocate of putting the blog front and center and then updating it regularly.
But the problem is that people stumbling upon the website may not be so sure what the whole point of it all is. And, even worse, they may think the interesting thing isn’t the music at all, it’s the blog, and they may start writing about the blog more than they write about music. Like some people have recently written about Ed Droste’s Twittering and giving that a couple of sentences in place of writing about the music itself.
I see all of these arguments visually. Like layers of translucent paint and we are flying through them in some kind of computer-generated animation like we’re flying through a house that someone is trying to sell. And at the bottom, at the bottom of all the paint is the ultimate color. Meaning the point. Meaning at some certain moment you have to make a decision and decide whether you want to do what everyone expects you to do or whether you want to try something different.
The Web is about human connection and it is about many-to-many. I guess, for me, that’s the distillation of all of these arguments. I could be traditional, and throw up some weird picture, and not tell you anything about myself, and treat the website as a branding mechanism to communciate one way. Or I could unlock the real power of the Web and use these tools to engage in an ongoing conversation with whoever will have me. With people in Twitter, commenters on the blog, people on the mailing list. I can engage. I can communicate.
Ultimately, I feel like I’d be misunderstanding the Internet if I just stuck up a website that was rarely updated, that I was using to try to force feed some obscure mysterious brand to people. I’d be a cliche And I don’t want to be.
Plus, I just have too many thoughts. And if there’s no money in this thing anyway, which there isn’t, I’d rather have some fun. And it’s simply more fun for me to express some of these things and let some air out of the balloon than walk around and act like nothing is going on when every once in awhile something is going on.
Make sense?
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guy misterioso
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theflyingchange
