At The Whitney Museum | NYC 2015
Two years ago I worked with the very smart sisters of Braid Creative, Kathleen Shannon and Tara Street. In their Personal Branding ecourse (which runs for the LAST time on Thursday! Sign up here!) there’s an exercise where you invite different aspects of your own personality (represented by actual people) to a make-believe dinner party.
P.S. If you know me, you know it’s make-believe since I never cook or “entertain.” When I lived with my roommate Courtney, I was tasked with answering the door and pouring the wine. That’s about as “dinner party” as I ever got. Having people over feels crowded to me, and not just because I live in a small apartment. I like to go to dinner parties, though. Small ones. Where you can actually talk to people.
TMI?
Anyway…back to my amazingly awesome not-to-be-missed fake dinner party.
My guests were Sofia Coppola, Charlie Kaufman, Amy Sherman-Palladino, Stefan Sagmeister, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Todd Selby.
Many writers.
Extremely talented.
And, as my friends at Braid said, “odd geniuses” and/or “lone geniuses.”
Definitely a guest list of people I’d be more likely to be friends with rather than part of my client roster.
Recently I read some fabulous creative business article or book (that I thought was written by the super talented Paul Jarvis – he assures me that it’s coming soon) – about how your friends may not be the target audience for your work. When I look around at my terribly interesting and incredibly talented table of pretend dinner guests, I don’t really see me helping them with their brand storytelling.
Not that the two never meet.
The Ladies at Clinton St. Bakery on the Lower East Side | NYC 2015
I’ve had plenty of clients and employers who were at the time or later became close friends. I’ve started thinking more about this recently because I’m planning the kind of articles and books that I’m going to write to help the clients that I’m most interested in serving. My dinner party guests might love flipping through the beautiful images that made up the majority of content on my website last year, but my clients may only need to see my photo art direction skills in small doses or if it’s directly applicable to what they’re hiring me to do for them.
While it’s important for visual creatives to share things that inspire us and our work, we have to be willing to experiment and get more comfortable with stepping outside of our normal brain space to intentionally create content that will help our clients.
Sharing what inspires us is just one type of content – one part of the picture of who we are, what we do, and how we can help our clients deliver the most kickass goat rentals this side of the Cascades…or whatever it is that they do. A content marketing plan also has to provide helpful articles that are relatable to the services or products we offer.
We have to keep in mind that our ideal clients, the ones who can truly benefit from what we can create for or teach them, might not be sitting around our cool-yet-cozy dinner table. Like it or not, sometimes we have to “get out” more.
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