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 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
It’s all about reach, yes. I can understand some “sales resistance” to new social platforms too. Someone entrenches themselves on, say LJ, accumulates a fairly big network, and over time that wanes as people start paying more attention to Twitter, Facebook, et al. It then requires more _work_ to keep up with folks you used to have all in one place. So now there’s two things people are naturally resistant to. :)
Actually, I’m finding it’s a bit easier to keep up with various things when not everybody is using them. 2-3 years ago, LJ would take me a good while to browse through a couple hundred entries if I missed a few days. Now, it’s a couple pages. I follow others’ thoughts on Twitter, poke around here and there, and it seems a bit more task-oriented rather than “Oh gawd, a huge slog of LJ posts to go through.” I actually feel more connected with folks.
Also, I’ve started to comment on people’s blogs whenever possible. Talk about more work than LJ. ;) Thank goodness for things like Google Reader. I feel it’s a bit more rewarding, although I cannot pin down why.
Well it’s nice to have you here! :)
-The Gneech
[…] to my post from the other day, there’s an important difference between Twitter and blogging that isn’t immediately […]