Chicago Bass Ensemble

I mentioned in a previous post that I’ve been reading Jonathan Fields’ book “Uncertainty” and taking some learnings from it. One of the tools he recommends for overcoming the fear that comes from facing uncertainty is the “creation hive,” a group of interested individuals who can give you interim feedback on your projects, goals and methods. (Marty Cagan of Silicon Valley Product Group has a similar concept.)

I realize that this blog, my twitter activity and the occasional e-mail I send to the CBE mailing list are all efforts on my part to build a kind of feedback hive for my musical efforts. It’s why I long for comments on this blog. It’s why I’m excited to see something of mine retweeted, and it’s why I mostly limit my tweets to musical topics.

So I admit that I had hopes, when I sent my last e-mail, of picking up a few new subscribers to the mailing list, a twitter follower or two and getting someone to make a comment on any one of these blog posts.

After sending the e-mail, the first response from the world was the usual couple of unsubscribes. That’s natural, someone realizes they are ON a mailing list and decide they want off. Okay, no problem. Beyond that? Nothing.

No e-mails forwarded. No comments. Maybe one new twitter follower. But not even the usual handful of “hello, great to hear what you’re up to” responses from geographically distant friends. Net-net, I think the result of this “campaign” was negative growth.

It’s somewhat disheartening. But it’s not time to give up. It is time to realize that this isn’t easy, and that’s okay. The reward of building a hive will make he hard work worthwhile.

My next steps:

• Try buying some ad traffic (Google occasionally offers some credit to try out Adwords. With concerts coming up, I do have something to promote, so why not try it?)
• Do some more commenting on other blogs, where appropriate, with polite links back to my blog.
• Reach out on online forums–for instance the professional bass players group on LinkedIn–to solicit hive-like input and feedback.

Stay tuned (and comment, won’t you?) to see how it turns out!

This entry was posted on Friday, November 11th, 2011 at 8:38 am and is filed under Getting It Done, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.