When the planet is your stage

One of my favorite posts a while back was: Who makes me? Can I make you? Nah.

Where we have a much better situation now thanks to the web where you really primarily have to perform, and people all over the planet MAY be interested, based on what YOU deliver.

But how do people all over planet Earth know about any particular person? And that's where promotion of some type is required. Best is word-of-mouth where someone notices something you have and tells someone else, especially excitedly. And that can sweep the globe.

Happened for me with plenty of things, like note have 100+ countries global reach annually from my open source project Class Viewer. All I did was put it up on a site called SourceForge back in 2004. Others did the rest.

But that's just one thing. I like to keep at least three things pulling attention from 50+ countries from at least 3 continents annually, which I do, and more, but that's a baseline I've arbitrarily chosen. And includes this blog which managed 50+ this year.

Yeah am kind of spoiled by attention but humbled by LACK OF MONEY, which is lots about my paranoia of money people, I guess. Am working on it. But the attention draw is the objective reality I experience, proving my ability to interest people like YOU all over our planet. Is cool.

So how can someone like me maybe appear to matter much to promotional reality?

In my opinion you have folks who are under-promoted, often by their agencies or whomever is in charge of their marketing. Where often is country focused. Like organizations who still struggle to grasp how the web has changed things will have a global act, tied up in relentless national based promotion.

Or even worse, you can have a person who can be global who is trapped in city by city promotion because of Old School management.

Someone like me notices, and puts up a tweet, or a pin, or whatever and just like that--that person or group is GLOBAL. And if step up to that plate, whoosh!!!

(Oh yeah notice, no money required and is the best kind of promotion really.)

If they are NOT under-promoted then is just one more fan thing. Which to me is more fun. I prefer when just feel like one more happy fan among MILLIONS versus thinking, wow, I helped someone whose agency is clueless.

Brilliant acts being under-promoted is a modern weird, which I think should go away as we all get more used to modern web reality.

As people learn, you have people get to their level on their own faster and faster and it is all about YOU. Does help to do things to get noticed, of course, showcasing what you do best, and proving you have what it takes to deliver, day after day, or night after night--preferably for years.

Really it's also about you if you are letting some person or organization only promote you in a city or something dinky when you should be promoted in 20+ countries. Or 50+ countries. Or over the entire freaking planet.

You need to have web sense.


James Harris