What is a Small World?

How does one break out and benefit from more exposure?

“Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.” ~ Rick Blaine referring to Ilsa Lund, Casablanca.

Rick ruminates about how the beautiful woman, Ilsa Lund, happened to walk into his life when she walked into Rick’s Café Américain. Rick’s place is a small world. While there may by thousands of gin joints in all the towns and in this world, there would be only two or three such places in the town of Casablanca, Morocco. Her chances would be quite great especially since she needed to escape and he was noted as the person who could make it happen.

Sunrise in California

The concept of a small world is equally applied to the exposure a single person gets in a crowd of similar people. In the attendance crowd at a venue such as the historic gathering at Woodstock where upwards of 500,000 gathered for three days or the 80K crowd at Coachella there will be those who came for one particular reason or performance or another. All together they comprise a population of music lovers who have the time, money and inclination to venture out to the venues and experience the festivities. On one hand, the crowd seems to be highly similar but as opposed to the whole US population. On the other, within the crowd there are smaller pockets of interest in specific performers. The larger venue is the driving factor in getting all the diverse interests together.

The people there are members of groups who arrived together and constitute a pod of concert goers. Each of these pods can be thought of as a small world with similar interests. Collectively, they make up the Universe.

How this all applied to Twitter and product marketing is this. If each pods of attendees were the only ones to arrive, the concert would be a bust. If they did not communicate one pod to others there would be far less exposure to the venue. In the small world of NFT photographers and artists, we each are all disconnected pods. What is needed is: connection.

A shill-account on Twitter can promise to Tweet a person’s content to their randomly accumulated followers and the artist will make sales. The question is just how many of those followers they claim to have are really interested in what you as a photographer have to offer? Those accounts specialize in accumulating followers to make themselves look good and ostensibly effective. However, they don’t provide any guarantees of outcome for their fees.

Let’s look at Twitter users who have several hundred followers. I’m going to use the number 300 as an average. Because we all have been marketing ourselves in the same space, a significant number of them will be duplicated among the crowd. I will use a 50% unduplicated name uniqueness factor. So on the average we all each have about 150 unique followers. Now if a selection of 50 photographers agree to Retweet each other’s content, those RTs could be reaching 7,500 followers. This dynamic is powerful in reaching far beyond what any one account can do.

It is important to keep in mind that the marketing strategy is not to try to sell to other photographers/artists. Peppered in each user’s follower list is the few buyers and collectors who are the ultimate audience for our marketing efforts. More importantly, those buyers/collectors are highly qualified and have shown interest in buying for some of us. They are not random Twitter handles in a farmed list. They are watching what is presented. They are not asking for product to be shown to them like the Hollywood “cattle call” which gets hundreds of wannabee actors and actresses to show up.

My actions are not to RT everything which crosses my feed but I do RT the images which closely match my style and interests. If we all do the same, our content will get highly qualified targeted exposure.

Unless we do some activity like I described above we all remain isolated in our own small bubble world where we can’t break out and others cannot see in.

Post Script,
A small world encounter.

I chose the Casablanca example above as a good example of how one experiences the small world. Well…

I took a break before publishing this article and put the DVD in the player which arrive only today. It was the first disk of Season 2 of The Orville by Seth MacFarlane and in the opening of the first episode they were playing a vinyl recording of “As Time Goes By.” WHAT are the chances? Two Casablanca reference within hours of each other.

So there you have it. We exist in tiny universes and must do our best to break out of them into the larger space.