Antisocial Media

Based on Mike Stackpole’s recommendation I picked up an interesting little book by Gary Vaynerchuk about promotion (and other things) called Crush It!. I expect to write up a review of it in a day or two, but I will say I recommend it for anybody whose job involves a lot of tooting your own horn (like, say, writers). One of the things Crush It! recommends is creating a Facebook “fan page” alongside of your own personal “profile” page.

I admit, I’m still a little stumped as to the reasoning behind this setup, but I’m nothing if not adept at learning-as-I-go, so I went ahead and set up the fan page and invited a few folks to hop on board to get it started.

This, combined with a snarly LJ post from Vince (who is always cranky this time of year, poor guy) got me to thinking about how very intimate people’s relationships are with their social media of choice. Like the recent backlashey reaction to the iPad, there is a lot of very personal reaction to social media outlets. Vince hates Twitter with a passion, even though it’s just as happy to leave him alone. Other friends of mine are very proud of the fact that they’ll never, ever have a Facebook page and relish telling you all about it.

For myself, I’m a longtime LiveJournal devotee, although there are times when it’s a troubled relationship at best. As such, it does sorta pain me to see people flock from LJ to Facebook or wherever, or even just flock to Facebook after having ignored LJ for a decade. But the thing of it is, it’s not the platform I care about, not really — it’s the people on it. I’m a communicator and a storyteller, and there’s no point in talking to an empty room! So if people are on Facebook, I’ll post to Facebook. If people are tweeting all over, I’ll become a big ol’ twit! Or at least, more of one than I already was. My personal posts will stay on LJ, because that’s where I’m comfy … but there’s no reason for me to exclude my friends who happen to be on other platforms.

With the ready availability of plug-ins that alert everybody and their brother of a post no matter what the media, it’s particularly pointless to avoid a message stream. As soon as I hit “publish,” this post is going to show up on my website, my LJ, Twitter, and Facebook automatically. And I know for a fact I have readers on Facebook who aren’t on LJ, readers on Twitter who aren’t on Facebook … and few if any people subscribed to gneech.com’s RSS feed. But they all get the message.

That’s the key: connecting with the readers. Removing degrees of separation. If they want tweets instead of status updates, tweets they shall have! There’s just no good reason not to.

-The Gneech

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Originally published at gneech.com. You can comment here or there.

Invisible iPad!

Well, the keyboard came today, anyhow.

…

…Curse you, late April!

-The Gneech

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Originally published at gneech.com. You can comment here or there.