The Coffee Shop Test: Why Your Social Media Is Failing

0:00what's up instagram what's up facebook what's up youtube happy friday patrick art storefronts here back with another friday rant for you on just some things that i'm seeing out there in the digital world let's just say as it is trying to market and grow an art and or photography business not easy not easy there's been some very interesting trends already in 2026 and i suppose the good news

0:40in that is like there's nothing new under the sun right there's nothing new in the sun i think as we closed out in 2025 like one of the things that i was continually ranting about is how important story is in your art what's up loose cannon how important it is for artists and for photographers the artist can no longer hide behind the canvas the photographer can no longer hide behind the lens banged on about that all year last year and i think broadly what's changed in 2026 is number one i believe 2026 is

1:13going to be the most remarkable year that any of us have lived through in our entire lives the technology that is coming out what ai is capable of and what it can do is just it is mind-boggling on levels i don't think you any human can even wrap their head around the pace at which it's changing okay and you can either be the glass half full guy i'm a glass half full guy or you can be skynet has been activated terminator is coming to get us the matrix whatever whatever your doom scenario is but in the meantime we have creative businesses and we need to get them growing right we need to

1:44get them moving in the right direction and as we closed out 2025 we started talking about how important story is right i've long said on my podcast in blog posts that i've written in in any live session that i've done that i think one of the most common misconceptions about how art and photography how creations are sold is that those creations are sold on a pure meritocracy of the quality of the creation

2:15okay what do i mean by that what differentiates one piece of photography from another selling the one that does versus the one that doesn't what differentiates a piece of art from selling the piece of art that sells versus the piece of art that doesn't has very little to do with the actual caliber of the work itself and that's a crazy thing to say that is not that is that doesn't make sense to most of us right you're like wait a minute why did i practice art why did i practice photography

2:46why did i practice making my creations the last 25 years to get as good as i am i'm very good at this i've got 10 000 hours a la malcolm gladwell in this are you saying that doesn't matter patrick no i'm not saying it doesn't matter it's very very important it's very very important for repeat business very important for a lot of it but it's not as important as the story and i've been playing i was playing van gogh video a bunch on here recently and i think it's very very relevant because everyone knows van gogh most people have some semblance of this story but the long and the short of the story is

3:20a deeply troubled man yes a talented artist yes a prolific artist yes created a tremendous amount of work when he finished his work he would write a story about the work he would send the work to paris he lived out in the countryside in france his brother lived in paris he would send it to his brother in paris his brother had all of these pieces of work piled up in paris attempting to sell them his brother died left the widow with a young child the widow attempted to sell van gogh's work had multiple gallery

3:52shows way back then in that era whatever a gallery show looked like probably not different than today none of the work sold sunflowers didn't sell starry night didn't sell that painting of the bed didn't sell none of van gogh's work sold and when you look at that you're like wait a minute back then after van gogh died what do artists and photographers love to say oh i'll be famous upon death because you know there's so many stories of artists becoming famous after they've died why didn't van gogh's work sold sell back then he had died he was dead there his brother's widow had

4:29his entire body of work and had a gallery show and no one bought anything they saw those paintings and no one bought anything so what changed in the van gogh story to go from work that wouldn't sell in a gallery to arguably one of the top three most valuable art collections on the planet his brother's widow who had the collection published a book of his letters all his stories how he thought what made him tick who he was his vulnerabilities his frailties the fact that he was

5:01such a broken human that book got published and everyone that looked at that work before and didn't buy it immediately bought it and that in the story doesn't need to be any more profound than that it's that van van gogh's got the best work ever right it must have just sold because it was so good no it wasn't a meritocracy on the quality of his work no one cared it was getting to know him getting to appreciate his story seeing the paintings with the story that fundamentally changed everything it fundamentally changed

5:32everything for van gogh and my position is i believe it will fundamentally change everything for artists and photographers 10 years ago 50 years ago 100 years ago today in the next 10 years you guys have got to start telling your stories fast forward to today though in 2026 and we as content creators okay are faced with one of the most extraordinary most groundbreaking most unexpected unexplainable

6:05difficult to wrap your head around difficult to process difficult to grok situations ever in that situation succinctly is the fact that this technology by which i mean ai and its various different facets doesn't matter if you're talking about how it writes how it codes how it solves problems how it researches how it how it does science how it does photos how it does video how it creates art right we are now in a period of time in 2026 especially okay and yesterday two brand new models just dropped a new one from gpt and a new one from anthropic i'm both on the same day okay and

6:42what we face as creators today in 2026 trying to grow our brands trying to sell our products trying to get people to follow us get on our email list participate in our sales campaigns and purchase our work so that we can feed our families as creators is we're facing one of the greatest existential crises of all time period end of sentence and what's really interesting about that crisis is nothing by the way nothing on one of these that you see on a screen is real anymore nothing is none of it every single solitary

7:21bit of it can be fake everything the image the video the person talking about it the person pointing at the work the house that they live in the cars the trips that they're on or not on the text the type all of it we are moving to a time where a hundred percent of anything that you consume on a screen you don't know if it's going to be real i don't know if it's going to be real or if it's fake that is a norleyan existential crisis that is something none of us have ever had to contemplate

7:54before in the slightest okay in the slightest and so i think you gotta you have to take stock of that you have to come to terms with that and you have to say okay i can't prevent that i can't stop that i can't change that what do i do what do i do in that modality right what do i do in that modality and it's interesting so there's this guy brian chesky and he is the founder of airbnb okay now obviously if you own airbnb you're a bit conflicted in giving this type of a speech right

8:25because what does airbnb sell they inherently sell things that are non-ai they're real things in the physical world but i think i think he gave this speech like a couple of weeks ago or maybe it was even a month ago now i don't know but i want to i just want to play it i'm gonna i'm gonna share the screen and i gotta get the sidebar out of the way let me share my screen i want all us to watch this quickly let me make sure i can try to make it as big as possible all right it's the best i can do the term is artificial we are now living in a world as of last week with the video content where

8:59you cannot know for certain i mean there could be digital like fingerprints that this is real but we're gonna live in a world where it's not clear that you're seeing what you're seeing is real in other words now anything tell you won't be able to tell and i think that's maybe the point of it that in the future if it's on a screen it will be artificial or it could be artificial and so you want to ride a trend or you run the opposite of a trend and the opposite of artificial is real the opposite is you want to ride a trend i.e you you want to do what everyone else is doing

9:35or you want to do the opposite of the trend i think that's really powerful green is the real world and so i think that the real world will not change that much in the next three years i think we're going to basically create this digital world staring at a screen that's highly artificial it's going to get more and more immersive and there's going to be a physical world you're going to have robotics but other than robotics people still drink wine the same way all that stuff is going to be very very similar now a lot of robotics and replace a lot of jobs people aren't going to be driving cars in the future we actually i don't even actually need to watch any more of it but i think

10:07i think his point there is is is really really powerful right where as a result of all of this technology okay and i promise there's a point to this whole rant as a result of all this technology as a result that ai can generate anything it can generate the art it can generate me as a talking head so i don't have to do my job anymore i can generate my podcasts fine i'm a creator and a content marketer for a company you guys are creating products we're trying to sell we're not so different we're in the same boat right and so if everything on the screen is no longer real right

10:40it all can be manufactured what are we as human beings going to end up doing what are we going to end up craving in his point and obviously it's self-serving because what does he sell he sells the things that's real you booking an airbnb and going on a vacation or something but for us as creators the buttoned up polish campaign fancy edited videos coiffed hair perfectly tailored suit great design stuff anything that looks super super polished is not real it's just not and this trend has been

11:19swinging this way for a while even pre-ai right like there's a reason you know you look back at this last presidential election cycle right this last one with trump and it didn't matter whether we were talking about the political aspect of the game or whether we were talking about what's been going on with like all these ceos various different companies before what would trump she was running against harris what was trump or harris what would they have done they would have gone on abc news or nbc news or

11:50debate right what wouldn't they have done they would not have gone on joe rogan or why am i blanking on all the podcast names you guys know all the rest of the house all the downstream podcast hosts they went theo vaughn or why am i blanking on all the names i don't know it's friday it's been a long week that's happening and now what are all the ceos of companies doing okay they're not putting out a polished press release anymore they're not having a short news conference in front of the building they're going on these podcasts where they can be on for an hour where you can't selectively edit

12:24things where it's not faked where there are no cuts maybe one short little ad read but the whole situation is just very very real okay you can paper over a lot of things in these little short snappy media bits quick cuts edits clean editing beautiful retouching and all of that and people are over that they're over that we've been fed that for a long time as media consumers and no one trusts it anymore and that was the trend even before ai now with ai coming in the only thing

12:58that we humans want to see the only thing that we humans are going to know like and trust are the things that are real okay are the things that are real and we talk about artists photographers trying to sell their creations okay and i was running the webinar at the beginning of the week this week and somebody asked me like i'm i just retired and i'm going to get into my art business and i've never been active on social media and all of my friends tell me that like it's just a huge waste

13:31of time that you post things on social media they don't get any likes or comments and shares no one sees anything no one buys anything and why would i do that what am i going to do right and i've heard that refrain for so long for such a long period of time and it actually infuriates me because you don't need to be social media sophisticated okay you don't have to be a practitioner you don't have to share what you had for lunch okay and you don't have to be a kardashian and have the cameras follow you around 24 hours a day either but you have to be real you have to be real right and what do most

14:05creators do artists and photographers especially artists love hiding behind the canvas the photographers love hiding behind the lens we know everything about what it is that you do you create art you create photography you create creations and we know very little about who you are what's your story is there anything real about you and the analogy that i always give because it's so important is like if you and i met for the first time at a coffee shop and this is to me right now especially

14:41in 2026 this is the one sentence this is the one way that you need to think about your social media output and really i i'm going on a tangent here but this pisses me off it has nothing to do with social media you guys i hate social media i could care less about social media do you know what it has to do with this it just has to do with this okay go outside those of you that live in a warm part of this world okay or go indoors somewhere that you live somewhere cold today and for a minute keep this in your pocket okay and go to somewhere where there's going to be some people and have a look around

15:15how many people are actually in the real world doing a real anything versus how many people have their face glued to this thing looking at it it's staggering i walked my dog a few minutes ago every single solitary other person exercising or otherwise had their face stuck in it the workers some guy that was installing direct tv had his face stuck in his phone he wasn't doing his job it's like that is what social media is it's just figuring out how to get your creations in the place where everyone spends the most time so it's not even about social media but i digress the one sentence

15:52the one sentence okay the one frame the one layer of focus that you need to think about you and i meet at a bar i like beers so you and i meet at bars for a beer okay or you like coffee you and i meet at a coffee shop to have a coffee okay we sit down we strike up the conversation it's you and i talking right you and i talking right to one another and i introduce myself and you say oh hey how you doing my name's arun hey arun patrick nice to meet you yeah great to meet you

16:27so what do you so what do you do for work arun and arun goes yeah i'm an artist and i'm like that's awesome arun yeah i actually uh uh you know it's funny you say that i run the marketing department at a company that helps artists that's really ironic um where are you from arun and then arun goes i am an artist and i'm like that's great arun where where do you live these days where you do all this art in a room goes buy my art it's amazing and i'm like casually drink my drink and i'm like that's weird that's really cool arun so what are you doing here i'm here to let people know that i'm an

17:03artist that i have art for sale and that what i primarily do is art and just so you know next friday i'm going to be selling some of my art at a little bit of a discount so why don't you come back and buy some that would be a really weird conversation that would be an extremely strange conversation okay i would be like i'm trying to have a conversation with the rune here who i just met at this bar at this coffee shop i'm trying to get to know this guy and all he says is art art or a variation of art okay you would never do that in the real world so why are you doing that on social

17:41media ask yourself honestly why are you doing that on social media how one-dimensional of a human being would you be if every single solitary interaction you had with whoever which is what social media is all you talked about was one thing all day long you'd be pretty one-dimensional it would be pretty boring i would never get an idea of the entire package and yet if i go

18:16to a great many social media accounts especially the people that tell me patrick it doesn't work there's nobody on here the algorithm is trained against me it was great 10 years ago but everything's broken now that like i i hear that and i'm like stop it stop being so damn one-dimensional okay understand that is not how this works it's never how it's worked okay it should be the inverse

18:47when i sat down with the rune in that coffee shop it should be 90 what he does and then i should be banging on the door to get that last 10 out of him that that seems like a more interesting way and my position is that art sales at a macro no different than the van gogh analogy maybe they're 50 50 maybe they're 60 40 maybe they're 70 30 or maybe they're 80 20 either way they're not 100 art is what sells art nobody wants that all day long okay nobody wants that you don't

19:21want that you don't want anyone else to do that to you art sales are either 50 50 50 50 the personality of the artist 50 of meritocracy on the work or they're 60 40 70 30 or 80 20 the personality of the artist and if you are not putting okay hello to ireland my name is patrick shanahan by the way clearly not italian so love ireland anyway if you are not putting and again i don't care about social media i mean on this where you get the eyeballs on this if you are not having a conversation on this

19:55where you are not one-dimensional you cannot just post about your work and you cannot just post about your process and you cannot just post about you unveiling your work and you cannot just post about your work being unveiled on a wall all of those are great post types okay all of those are very helpful right but they're not enough they're not enough for you guys to get the type of engagement that you are looking to get they are not enough for you to get the likes and comments and shares that you need okay they are just not they're not we need to know who you are we need to know what makes

20:31you tick we need to know what makes you interesting we need to know if you're a dog or a cat person if you have pain in your life you've got to share a little bit of that if you're weird be weird be you everyone else is already taken right and it it seems so simple when you hear it all and it seems so simple to say and yet almost no one does it right because we think based on this bs social media world that we all see that everyone else is perfect and everyone else is perfectly stitched up and

21:04everyone else is in great shape and they don't have any flaws and they don't have a weird family and they don't have skeletons in the closet and they don't have baggage right biggest bunch of bs ever every single solitary one of us is a broken human being every single solitary one of us has scars every single solitary one of us has skeletons in the closet and to tie it back together to that earlier irish comment is george bernard shaw irish i gotta ask google it's irish or english anyway george bernard shaw playwright said everybody's got skeletons in the closet the key is to make them dance

21:36the key is to make them dance right when you guys start telling more of your story okay when you start explaining why you create the things that you create the the pain okay the suffering the ups and downs the unfair world the getting kicked in the teeth the drug and alcohol issues the whatever it is the trials the tribulations your life you have no idea the admiration you're going to get the

22:06connection you're going to get that people are going to be like oh my gosh it's like that for me too it's like that for me too the bond that creates is so much more powerful okay so much more powerful than just your work alone in the mathematics of it i mean i don't want to go from story to mathematics though yeah and so diego diego here in instagram you guys all can't see this comment but i can i think that my story is not worth telling right that is the lie that we all tell ourselves

22:40everyone has a story that is not worth telling and diego i just released a podcast episode where i pulled up a bunch of the stories of famous artists that went absolutely richter in their careers that were in the most boring towns in the world that had nothing going on that lived with their family that never got married and that barely even left the little apartment okay and a ton of them are now famous because the reality is is that all of our stories are interesting every single solitary

23:15human being and it's not to say some stories are not more interesting than the others of course they are but we all have the story to tell and there's a tribe online okay that is interested in the one that we are telling because they've lived a very similar life in you know in addition to that the mass of this whole thing you guys the mass of this whole thing are really really easy you want to win on this thing right it's really easy to win on this thing there's maths okay and the way that i like to think of it is like if you just think of the phone on instagram as the biggest freeway in the entire world

23:49there's not like four or five lanes right there's five million lanes on this freeway okay and what happens is is that when you create content on instagram on facebook on linkedin and pinterest on nexon whatever tick tock blue sky threats don't leave anything out the algorithm is what puts you on the freeway okay and the algorithm looks at your work and it goes it looks at what you've posted and it goes okay i know what this is this is a painting okay of sunflowers i'm gonna pick this and i'm gonna

24:25put it in the freeway lane of people that like paintings of sunflowers off it goes and depending on how many people that are online in that moment that love paintings of sunflowers and depending on how many likes and comments it gets it might go really down far down that freeway lane or it might only just go a little bit and stop your guys problem okay i want to say your guys artist and photographer's problem is 90 to 95 percent of the content that you're creating is all going in the

24:57same lane which is to the same people that have the same interests instead when you start posting these different things your story who you are what makes you tick what your hobbies are what you did to get the shot what makes you interesting the fact that your story is not interesting the pain that you have in your life your dog what you did last week and all these things that make you you that just takes you and put you in different lanes on the freeway okay it's like you're at the roulette

25:29table and you've got a bunch of different money on a bunch of different places in the board i've never played roulette in my entire life by the way i don't understand i can't but each piece of content based on what the algorithm determines what is in it is going to determine where you are on that giant freeway and you want to be in put you don't put all your eggs in one basket you want to be in a bunch of different lanes in a bunch of different times as if that wasn't important enough okay with ai everything has just gotten harder because now everything can be fake so all of us as human

26:04beings throughout this year of 2026 are going to be utterly totally and completely bombarded with this and more of that and it's going to get better and better and a lot of you guys have seen it already you're like oh my god that image that video i can't even tell if that's the real human was that a real news story did president trump just say that did someone really just say that was that was that a real fight that animal attack that we don't even know already you know what's going to all it's doing is like doubling in quality what used to be every six months like every six weeks it's going to be every six days so if you're not being the real you if there's no filter if like president trump or the

26:42ceos going on those long podcasts if there's just a little short two minute clip of you instead of the long form get to know this person understand who they are understand what makes them tick you're going to have a very difficult time with it it's going to be hard to get to know you it's going to be hard to bond with you no one's going to want to bond with you and you're like that's probably just fake and bad ai they're at least they're not even good at ai so you got to be you everyone else is taken as cliche as that is to sound it's so completely true right your work

27:16on its own is not good enough okay and don't take that personally van gogh's work on his own was not good enough right it wasn't the beautiful thing is once you get past the everybody knows you and likes you and trust you you can put out any work you want it's good enough because they're bonded to you just as much as the work right they're bonded to you just as much as the work on the podcast i should be able to pull it up i can't even pull it up whatever i don't get too many tabs open it's called

27:49the art marketing podcast it's a podcast i host i know a lot of you guys struggle okay with story tell with telling your stories right so we can leverage ai right and i think it's one of the most profound lines of ai too and a quick side tangent as i continue to promote the podcast shamelessly um we're not anti-ai we're just pro-human right ai is all well and good ai is great if it makes

28:21artists and photographers more efficient better at telling stories better at getting the word out there and helps them sell their art fantastic whether or not we like art that was created by ai or not created by ai i put that as a separate subject i know that's a charge subject i get that that's a separate topic ai is very very good at things that can help artists okay and i've been doing this for a long time i've spoken to hundreds of thousands of you out of a hundred thousand artists the number that have even one employee in their business is less than one tenth of one percent

28:54those are the facts on the ground right now you guys need help and ai is amazing for that so i'm actually very pro ai for artists and photographers and creators especially the small guys okay we need it we need it so in the last podcast episode i put out i created some prompts that you can use okay to interview yourself they will poke you they will prod you they will get you talking and they will help you save files that you can use to get better and better at telling your story to get better and

29:26better as being a human being and not just someone that just creates and creates art marketing podcast it's on spotify it's on youtube it's on apple podcast anywhere podcasts are found check that out and get ready because i'm i didn't even go through half my material because i just got ranting today and i've got to end this thing but you all have a huge opportunity to be you and tell your story this year if you do that in your reel the extra low that you're going to get on that content in contrast

29:57to ai which everyone is going to revolt against is going to be staggering and you don't get to carnegie hall without practice right all of us have got to practice being real okay being vulnerable not being perfect showing the scars and being okay with it and the sooner you do that the sooner your engagement takes off the more emails you capture the more people are going to be interested in your work so that is my friday rant i appreciate all of you thank you for staying tuned and listening

30:30and i'll see you on a future video a future life thanks guys