THURSDAY THOUGHTS: Do I Need To Sell Out To Succeed? (Have I Already?)
On coping with cringe and criticism when trying to be yourself online.
Almost as soon as I moved to Singapore 15 years ago I started a marketing agency with my new best friend Simon. New country, new business, new opportunity - it was an exciting time. I was all over LinkedIn and did barter deals with the big marketing events to make sure our agency name was all over the signage and I had speaking slots to sell my wares.
In a couple of years we built a brand and, thanks to the quality of our work, a reputation, which continues to serve me now in my new entity Moore’s Lore Media. For a while I cultivated a persona as ‘the angriest man in advertising’, which allowed me to be provocative and contrarian and helped assuage my feelings of ‘selling out’. You see, you might not believe it from my LinkedIn profile, but I started out as a punk!
Back in the late 1990s I had dropped out of university and was playing in a band in London called Quarterlife Crisis. I had coloured hair, eyeliner and wore an inappropriate amount of PVC (is there such thing as an appropriate amount?). I had no more specific idea of what to do with my life than getting a job, any job, in the “meeja” because it was the industry-du-jour, no one wore a suit and there seemed to be a lot of parties. So, I made my way through children’s television to business journalism to digital media startups and eventually to my own agency. Always feeling alternative and independent and NOT a sell out until now. Why?
For those of you that follow me on LinkedIn or Instagram or, dare I say it, TikTok you may have seen a recent uptick in my posts and the introduction of new formats such as vlogs and it is - as the kids say - cringe!
It has taken me weeks, maybe even months, to get to this point as I have ruminated over one constant question with my wife, selected friends and even a TikTok specialist (shout out to Melissa at Oysterly!); how do I promote my writing without coming across as a total douchebag?
Previously I have hidden behind company names such as Click2View and Moore’s Lore Media which, for the first 2 years, was only me and even now is only me + 2. There was my previous Substack called Mooreish and, briefly, a musical persona known as The Lore - basically anything other than my name. But, it has become abundantly clear through conversations and cold, hard statistical analysis that any modest success I might have achieved on social or in business is essentially down to me, my name and my increasingly crinkled face. And I know why, and I have even advised other people why, it’s because people follow people. That’s why influencers, with no marketing qualification, strategy, team or budget regularly kick huge corporations up and down the Internet. Because people follow people and that means I’m gonna have to be me on the Internet. Just me. Not a company name or a publication name or a persona. Just my name, my face, my voice and, most consequently, my choice.
Previously, my golden rule was that I would only write or speak at other people’s request and in other people’s publications, podcasts or events. That way, I wasn’t foisting myself upon an audience, I was there by invitation.
And even when I have produced my own podcast, it has simply been a reason to invite other people to tell their fascinating stories to me, just as I have done with my recent series ‘The Business of Storytelling’.
But now, I am choosing to tell my stories about the value of being human, which is something nobody asked for so I’m gonna have to force it upon them to some degree. It’s just marketing, which I’ve spent most of my career doing, and I am clearly a gregarious and outgoing personality so why is this a problem? Well, as previously mentioned, I came of age in the ‘90s when ‘selling out’ was pretty much the worst thing you could do and that’s how it feels.
In her brilliant long read, ‘Everyone’s a sellout now: So you want to be an artist. Do you have to start a TikTok?, Rebecca Jennings digs out the following quote.
In his essay collection The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman defines the term “sellout” not as someone who sells something in order to get rich, but someone who compromises their values to do so. “This action was particularly bad if the compromised person was still doing the same work they’d done before,” he writes, “except now packaging that work in an attempt to make it palatable to a less discriminating audience.”
Chuck hits the nail on the head. The work is this blog; these longish, hopefully thoughtful, most definitely vulnerable posts about the value of being human in an increasingly inhuman world. But to build an audience I must package that work in an attempt to make it palatable to a less discriminating audience on other platforms in the hope of winning them over.
As part of that process I tried my first vlog the other day and it worked, it won me a couple of new subscribers. I tried hard not to come across as some douchebag podcast bro or mainsplainer and just share something that had happened to me but even so, someone out in the void voiced my worst fears via WhatsApp. They weren’t to know I was already anxious about posting and the message was sent in jest but it touched a nerve nonetheless.
So, what to do? They say growth comes from discomfort so I’m just going to have to be uncomfortable for a while because I think I have something worthwhile to say and I think there is an audience that will value it and as Rebecca concludes in her piece…
You’ve got to spend your time doing this even though it’s corny and cringe and your friends from high school or college will probably laugh as you “try to become an influencer.” You’ve got to do it even when you feel like you have absolutely nothing to say, because the algorithm demands you post anyway. You have to do it even if you’re from a culture where doing any self-promotion is looked upon as inherently negative, or if you’re a woman for whom bragging carries an even greater social stigma than it already does. You’ve got to do it even though the coolest thing you can do is not have to.
For all the words being written about how incredible technology is, we need a few words dedicated to how incredible people are and I want to be the author of those words, but if I want people to read them I’m going to have to put myself out there. Be kind, I’m a person too, not a chatbot.
See you Sunday, Nx