​"Knowing the evolution of the drum kit will elevate your playing. Understanding how and why this instrument has affected music and continues to do so will enrich what you are doing today." - client Daniel Glass

​"You can come to our show and lose your mind because it’s OK. Cowboy Mouth is your rock and roll safe place. No one is as crazy as the guy playing drums onstage." - Fred from clients Cowboy Mouth

(photo: Alicia Neely) 

"We don’t just play exactly what’s there or what we know. Sometimes you want to go outside the box and have fun when you’re on stage, and the crowd can feel that. They can sense it, and they enjoy it as well." - Sam from clients Big Sam's Funky Nation

​Create posts for yourself and your followers. Don't create posts for the platform. 

Unfortunately a lot of people do the latter. They post with the goal of pleasing whatever algorithm runs the social media site they are on. And when the algorithm changes, they change their content to please the new algorithm. 

I have seen content that makes a site's algorithm ridiculously happy, but that does nothing for the person posting it or the person reading it.

"Improvisation is so much more about the ability to be in the moment, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to come from nothing. Every bit of improvisation comes from a source. It comes from inspiration. It comes from an idea. And the best improvisers are ones that are able to make substantial ideas come alive in the moment." - Nick of clients Time for Three

​Social media stats really don't tell you much.

With social media you can theoretically see how many people saw your post. (I say "theoretically" because you don't know if they are giving you accurate numbers or not.) There is even the eye candy of the total number of likes and shares.  

And while it is somewhat better data than you get from, say, a magazine ad, it is still just eye candy. There are so many people out there who, when they see content that they like, don't do anything. They don't click like, they don't comment, and they don't share. Why? Because they don't have to. They grew up in a world where, after you read an article you liked, you put the magazine down and that was the end of it. Maybe you mentioned it to a friend, but you did not document this communication in any way. 

No matter what the platform is, the total number of likes you get for a post is not an accurate measurement of the number of people who read it and liked it. And it is definitely not an accurate measurement of the number of people who read your post and thought about it.

Social media, blogs, and such are incredibly powerful and valuable ways of communicating with your audience, fans, or customers. However, there is no good way to measure any of it yet. 

​Occasionally I will look through online articles and blog posts about social media marketing. They usually have titles like "10 Ways To Get Amazing Facebook Numbers!". It is a style stolen from vanity magazines that have headlines like "5 Tips For Driving Women Wild!", which sounds like it was written by someone who has restraining orders against him.

I find a good test for these articles is to compare them with someone's social media you admire. For instance, I think the gold standard for social media is Humans Of New York (HONY). When I compare HONY with what these articles suggest, they never match up. 

The articles say "have calls to action", "ask lots of questions", "do live video regularly." HONY does none of this and their engagement is far above the pages I see using these tactics. HONY posts quality content consistently. It is straight forward, but it's not easy.

"It’s my own personal plight to never settle. I don’t mean that in a negative way. It’s the personality of me and I’m sure of many people, but there are no laurels to sit on." - client Taylor Dayne​

​"The biggest difference in my process with this new record is that I made a strong effort to document all ideas as they became available. When I'm coming out of the shower or driving in the car, if a musical idea came into my head, I would immediately sing and record it into my phone. If I'm sitting at the piano and happened across something, good or bad, I recorded it. I learned from Allen Toussaint that there are no bad ideas but only that some ideas work better than others in certain situations. So having more ideas than you need is a good thing. I tried to do that." - client John Papa Gros