I think Social Search and Social Media works and my attendance at a concert tonight at The Cutting Room on West 24th Street happened purely because someone invited me on Facebook – I looked at the invitation, liked her music, and attended.

I wasn’t disappointed – I had a great time and Nikki Shannon and her band played very well - and I got to meet her and speak for a couple of minutes.  I was in a room with total strangers – there wasn’t anyone that I knew – but I felt I was still “invited” and it turns out the PR Person is one of my Facebook friends.

So … Social Media Works – it really does – the problem might be – can you get enough people to see and interact with the content – any content?

But I would not have come had I not liked her music – so it’s all about “realness” and Art.

While visual art, painting, and music are both similar and different, one thing speaks to soul, genuineness – and she has it – I could feel it.

Why I decided to listen, why I opened up, maybe it was the power of Social Media – it can do that – if people want to listen, want to see, want to listen.

Maybe we’re Early Adopters of Social Media, or I am, anyway – and there’s a good post about it in Social Media Today

“…

While the increasing mainstream coverage of tools like Facebook and MySpace may be a sign that we’re moving beyond the introduction stage and into the growth stage of social media tools, from my perspective we’re still at a point in social media when everyone is learning. That’s especially true in public relations. PR has been around for a long time; social media has been around for just a few years.  I think we’re early in the lifecycle.

We have a bunch of new tools to experiment with; I think it’s up to us – the early adopters – to work out which ones are useful and how to use them.”

I don’t know how to paint  – I don’t even know what I’m going to paint half the time.   When I got to my studio nothing inspired me except a view from the window – so i painted it and forgot about anything else I might have done.

 

Had some emotional issues I was working though – all this work that people want me to do (Search and Web Analytics work – double booked, triple booked) it’s all I can do to sketch 30-60 minutes a day, at leisure, and come into my studio for 4-5 hours, once a week.

There was a pull to be descriptive (which I avoided); stay with what you know, what you can do (I’m speaking about myself here) – no one cares about the details of the plants and the outdoors.

Having said that – I reasoned that Artists work needs to evolve – an artist finds his or her own vocabulary…right?  So my work, based on this line of reasoning, is successful to the extent I developed my own vocabulary and merged in with 2D design fundamentals in my painting. 

The images also have meanings, but like I said, I avoided being too descriptive because I want to convey feelings, not a literal image.

But that got me thinking about something else that’s been bothering me.  

A couple of months ago I interviewed Ben James of Rivers Run Red for my Webmetricsguru.com blog and came away not liking what I heard about Rivers Run Red Second Life Analytics – based on concepts of judging an in world island event as successful based on success metric defined entirely by for the project.    Why won’t that work with metrics? 

It works with Art.  

But I found the idea of letting a client define success entirely in their own terms, while acceptable for Art, does not work for me in the world of Web Analytics.  Why?   I think I know why.

With Art, at the end of the day, I believe your evaluation an object, and the things that go into it.  With a Second Life Island project your evaluating a process – not just a end result – even if it’s an event.   To evaluate a process, you need objective standards – your metrics should be able to be compared to some standard – or to others that are doing something similar to what your doing.

But with Art, no such comparisons are needed, because the Artist’s work is evaluated against itself – did the Artist create their own vocabulary – and did they express themselves well within the range they’re capable?  If so, they’re successful – if not – they need more work.

At least, that’s my thinking today. I’m off to see Olan’s show now in the West Village, which I’ll have footage of later.