 I wanted to introduce myself in a more in-depth way and say that like all the success that I've had which is minimal honestly but it's all been pretty much stuff I wasn't paying attention to while I was doing it and so like because I have been asked to speak at conferences I've had to like go in and examine my choices and this is me trying to sort through that and explain why I made the choices I made which I think have served me really well and it has three brackets of things. So the first thing that I wanted to talk about with connecting with people via internet is knowing the lay of the land. You have to know whenever a social media site comes up and whatever your business is or for me it's just my name you have to claim it immediately even if you don't plan on using that website take it now the second it's available to you because that is just like the first step to making your life easier. I think it's important to note that each site has its own language and they're like the easy ones like on Tumblr you blog stuff and on Twitter you just out reply people but there are more intricate languages within each of these things like Tumblr is not okay with you talking about Facebook don't do it you will upset everyone and then if you're not like complying with the rules of the website then you might as well not be on there because you want positive reactions not get out of here you don't belong. So I think that also speaks to the different types of people that exist on each site like Tumblr is a really specific type of person and I get along with those people really well but also YouTube has a specific type of person and Twitter and you kind of have to play to each group of people it's your job to speak to them on their turf the way they want so the pictures I have below are the same post on three websites it's about how I accidentally dyed my hair purple trying to make it less of an orangey blonde and on Tumblr I got like you know 20 something I don't really know what the number is and on Twitter I got like a few responses and then on Facebook I got 180 comments usually I'm pretty happy with like 20 comments like that's a lot that's a successful post but for some reason Facebook was just all about my purple hair and it's all about learning what makes each group happy because now I know the next time I shave my head go straight to Facebook I think it's really important to have a voice on all of these websites for me I make sure that anytime it's supposed to be my voice it is I've had like an assistant before or I was like yeah just like promote that show and then I look at it and I'm like that is atrocious why would you say it that way having a voice and and being like a clear person with a personality that doesn't change or you know you can change a little bit but don't like sound like a robot be a human and I think I wish my little pictures were better but those are screenshots of Taco Bell which is a corporation but they have one person running their Twitter and that person is brilliant they're killing it on social media a year ago the conversation about Taco Bell was about the quality of their meat and right now it's about how hilarious they are and how they're interacting with people they have relationships with other social media heavy hitters a friend of mine named Tyler Oakley they have him host parties they have him do videos and he spreads the word the gospel of Taco Bell and no one minds he's promoting a major company and everyone thinks it's really cute and fun and silly and he like goes there at 2 a.m. and he's like wow tacos and everyone's like yeah tacos I love Taco Bell Taco Bell is just a fast food restaurant McDonald's could have done this Burger King could have done this but they didn't they're not smart enough to give themselves a personality a voice I being a musician and you know I I don't have like political views that I display everywhere and I don't like my voice is just kind of silly and then also please buy my music that's my voice but I found a place on tumblr for my feminist voice and I talked on tumblr and only tumblr I didn't put this anywhere else about an interaction I had had on Facebook someone that was very upset about the way I dressed and that I had shown cleavage in a picture and that my music is wholesome and my image is wholesome and that I had taken that away by showing the tops of my boobs and I was infuriated I wrote back to him I wrote it a blog entry about body shaming and body policing and how it's not okay and it is not the responsibility of women to dumb themselves down or cover themselves up for the sake of men because men are people too and have self-control and respect I posted this on tumblr it got more posts than any sort of music promotion I've put up on tumblr more reblogs more likes and people have come to me and told me they found me through that feminist blog chain through other feminist people that they follow and had no idea that I was a musician except for this rude dude talking about how my wholesome music was being ruined by my chest and a quote I made in my message back to him which was I have boobs and morals and the two have nothing to do with each other it became like a rah rah sys boombah for feminism on tumblr and so I gained fans through like a totally unintentional but self-expressive way my next pillar of social media is reaching out once you're on these sites and once you've got something to say and you found your voice you have to interact you have to find other people and involve yourself in that community and it can be with your fans and I make a really concerted effort to respond to people on Twitter and Facebook and I do a lot of it but there's also other people that are on your level like if you're a business you can reach out to other businesses I reached out to Rivers Cuomo from Weezer because I knew that we were playing the same festival and I actually called out to my Twitter followers to have them ask him to play with me and he responded yes and then that kind of led to one of the most embarrassing moments of my life which I then published on YouTube and that's the crowd for Weezer another fun anecdote from that show is when I got on stage to soundcheck which was obviously useless the crowd started chanting someone in the front row was like what's your name and I was like Julia and the crowd started going Julia Julia and I was like I have never felt more cool and then that kind of died after a little bit and they started chanting ice cream ice cream like so much more intensely than my name people are fickle that's a lesson so okay I'm gonna go to my cards now yeah I would say that all of this social media stuff and being really involved is the lowest bar it's the least you can do for me interacting with people on the internet spending a few hours on social media every day is the absolute least effort I can put in for the people that support my career they have no reason to just like Emily said if you build it they will come no just good music doesn't get found I don't have the right to a musical career just because I make music that I think is good there are talented people all over the world that make music and put their heart and soul into it and have never gotten paid a single penny for it I I used to not take music seriously for that reason I just felt like how could I possibly ask people for money when I make music for my own selfish reasons and it took a long time to reconcile that undeserving feeling so my first like real leap into taking music seriously where I realized I needed money for it was to make a studio album and I had heard about Kickstarter and I was like well I can just approach it the same way as I have with everything else just be really honest and transparent and so my Kickstarter campaign which I launched two years ago raised seventy seven thousand eight hundred and eighty eight dollars in thirty days my original goal was fifteen thousand and I think that that is because I was so honest and concise that is a huge like I could give a whole speech about being concise just be short even when there's no one hundred and forty character restriction on what you have to say just a twenty minute presentation is all you need you know I think that my campaign was successful because of all of the work that I put in with people before I launched it and then the way that I approached it it was called Julia Noons would be nothing without me and I truly feel that way I think of my fans as this unbelievable support system that I try to be deserving of every day and then I just made a really awesome album flash forward to present day I've just joined a website called patreon created by another YouTube musician named Jack Conti and he basically solved his own problem and inadvertently solved the problem for the rest of us who make a steady stream of content but had no real way of knowing how that was going to affect our monetary situations like if I put out a YouTube video and it gets millions of hits I know that I've done something good but I don't know necessarily if someone bought my album because of that one video or just how effective it was patreon makes it so when I put out a video right now as of yesterday there are 156 people collectively giving me $1200 you can use patreon for exclusive content but just like I try to give my fans everything they want I keep my stuff free and you only pay me on patreon if you feel like it and I think that type of goodwill is is like blatantly effective but I people get scared about like not requiring people to pay but when you have as close of a relationship as I do with my fans I think you can earn that trust with them without having to require money I wanted to close my talk I went so fast I want to close my talk by bringing all of this offline for me making personal connections is so much more meaningful and as a business it's so much more meaningful than any sort of social media and for a business I think that's going to like real-life meetings and coming to conferences and networking at these like party type deals for a musician it's simple it's just touring I actually just played a conference in California a few weeks ago and when I checked back from the previous year's conference to this year's conference I had played 125 shows so I really like playing live music and that's because of that connection that you get with the audience and I have found a new level of intimacy when it comes to playing shows in living room tours we have a host that volunteers to let 50 strangers into their home we sell tickets online and if you buy the ticket that's when you get the address so the night of the show only people that bought tickets only people that are supposed to be there show up and I play totally unplugged we do a question-and-answer session in the middle of the show and I stay after to take pictures we had a Polaroid camera for our last tour I signed merch give hugs and the relationships that I form with those people are for life I mean forget 35,000 Twitter followers I have 50 people in Boone North Carolina that cried with me about a song I wrote when I was 16 none of us are ever going to forget that night and whenever I come anywhere close to Boone North Carolina I'm going to see all of them again and I think that that connection is something that is so important to me that is hard to apply to business but you have to you have to think of customers as people because they have just as many thoughts and feelings as your best friend and I treat all of my fans like their friends I treat them with love and respect I have a short example video of what a living room show is like I assume you're talking about the ones with like the whole bunch of different layers take me like days of like editing and filming and putting out the same outfit I don't know why like I'm friends with the band Pomplamoose and they were always in different outfits in all of the different shots and like I don't know why that seemed like such like no I can't do that I can't put on clean clothes today one two do a flush sorry I'm being your mom right now there's no mics there's no amps or anything you feel like they're playing directly to you you totally just enclosed with the sound of the music and just like it was like chills and everything it's pretty crazy there's a lot more intimate and you could tell and feel your passion and it was really nice so I'm gonna end by quoting a mutual friend of mine and Emily's Stephen beer he once said that I have a love affair with my fans and I think that's really true I just try every day to be worth all of their love and support the way you would with like someone you're dating and I hope that you walk away with a new respect and love for anyone that supports your business be it a customer or a business partner or an investor I think it's so important to remember that they are people and that you need to also be a person and not like a promotion robot so promoting myself contact me after the show here all my stuff