100 Days Social Media Black-Out: A Post-Mortem

Although my experiment has ended, the experience continues to ripple through my work habits, personal life and discussions with other authors. If you’re not familiar with the experiment, be sure to peer into my 100 Days: Social Media Black-Out Archives.

Several authors have come forward and told me that they were having the discussion about what social media was worth to them. A few of them, who are highly-visible, talked about the negative side effects of being too accessible, too.

Why am I telling you this? Because these conversations brought up a few, interesting points. The accessibility issue may be causing normally “sane” authors to act insecure with knee-jerk reactions or worse…sneaking doubts into the work itself. The sheer bombardment of information — both positive and negative — can be overwhelming, which is what happened when I wrote on the subject of insecurity and writing. Add opinions and snarky comments on top of that? It’s clear to me that information overload has its effects.

When I first heard the idea that being connected all the time allowed feelings of insecurity to flourish, it made all kinds of sense to me. I could even see how that played into my misplaced belief that I needed to be online for my audience, which was taking the focus off of my work. Being hyper-connected doesn’t work for me, so I’ve since figured out a better way to manage my time to focus on what’s important.

Since I first talked about my experiment, a few other authors have hopped offline to see how the lack of connection would affect them, too. Check out The Juggling Writer for Christopher Gronlund’s experiences. The kick-off post is entitled: The 50 Day Social Media Break.

That’s the key, isn’t it? When it comes down to it: there are no hard and fast rules about social media. You have to engage on a level you’re comfortable with. Community pressure, more so than what you’re doing right or wrong, is what drives social media gurus, experts and articles. The tools themselves aren’t all that important, except for the level of interaction. It’s your role within those interactions that creates a flurry of opinions and would-be facts.

Unfortunately, I feel this is something businesses, publishers and other professionals are still learning. The dollar signs people see when they talk about social media are starting to fade, as older, more relevant and direct forms of online marketing come back into style. The attitude is shifting from: Must be online twenty-four seven to monitor branding. To: Who cares if people are talking about your business? Guess what? People don’t necessarily want you listening. Sometimes? They just want to talk without fear that someone else is snooping in.

‘Course, the irony of that is that social media tools are still public, which is something even users haven’t quite figured out yet.

Another thing I feel a lot of us are missing, is that there is no such thing as one, grand online community anymore. Think “micro-communities” and “suburbs.” No doubt, one online community differs from one author to the next. An audience may be perfectly fine with the occasional “buy my book.” Another? May be pissed off the author even brought it up. This, moreso than any Tweet or message update, is why the people that are hyper-connected (myself included at one time) talk about the rules in an authoritative fashion. Some of those observations could be pulled out on a higher level because there are some good insights to be gleaned from them. Some of those comments are complete b.s., like when people say “You have to…” When that happens, replace the “you” with “I have to…” and you’ll better understand where that speaker is coming from.

Social media is a sociologist’s dream, really, because this is an example of peer pressure at its best and worst. We’re talking about tribalism here, not online marketing, which deeply affects creative individuals in different ways. (See: Tribes and Our Role as Writer for my take on the subject.)

I, for one, am happy with the rules I’ve established for myself, because I’m no longer a slave to the tools. That, to me, is more important than the “right” or “wrong” way to Tweet. To do that, I had to remove myself from the tools completely in order to figure out my “role” in the tribe and what I’m comfortable with. That may not be the case for you, but for me that’s part of what has been so incredibly fascinating about watching social media to begin with. Hmmm… Though I’m beginning to think my childhood aspirations of becoming Indiana Jones-esque are really shining through.

🙂

[My Guest Post] More Insight on Social Media Blackout at SFWA.org

Wanted to pop in today to mention that, for my July article at SFWA.org, I opted to provide the results of my 100 day social media blackout and give readers additional insights I didn’t write about here.

Remember, too, that online marketing and e-commerce both have high learning curves. What you see/read online is often the free version of advice marketers provide to open the door to paying clients. The web changes often and dramatically — social media moreso. One, little change and that entire community you’ve built on Facebook could disappear. This? This is yet another reason why your website is more important than any other tool in your promotional arsenal. — SOURCE: The Results of My 100 Day Social Media Blackout at SFWA.org

I feel that this experiment achieved my goal of opening up the door “to” talk about these sorts of things and understand its value. Since I have a professional background in online marketing, I knew what to look for, which definitely helped shape my insights.

With the debut of new social media tools like Google+, an author’s relationship with social media will not only evolve, but shift and fracture depending upon how many audiences — personal and professional — we have. In terms of priority, though, while I like the tools and missed a few of my online pen pals, I know what benefit it has in terms of reaching new readers.

After all, the best way “of” reaching new readers is to write another story… 🙂

Learning How to Let Go: Social Media Blackout Results

For my closing post in the series about the results of my 100 day social media blackout, I’d like to talk about one of the best side effects of this experiment. And that is? Learning how to let go.

As I mentioned in an earlier post this week, I talked about how I was hypersensitive to people using exaggerated personas on social media to sell their books. Today, I’d like to point out that you, too, may be hypersensitive to things online in the form of comments, articles and headlines.

In the grand scheme of things, what is a bad comment worth to your life? Your business? Would you let a crappy review ruin your day? How ’bout a headline that you never clicked through?

Forums, mailing lists, comments, etc. are going to incur negative comments along with positive ones. The more popular you are, the bigger your business is, the chances of less-than-ideal comments increase. It’s not necessarily a sign of progress, it’s a sign that you’ve attracted the other end of the bell curve.

Having worked with as much data as I have, I normally don’t care about the one comment because I treat them as outliers. What I look for are patterns as opposed to the one-off snarky remark. Yes, I’m human — not an android — so comments made by people who obviously didn’t read through an article or have a knee jerk reaction based on a crappy assumption get under my skin.

But not as much as before.

I now feel that a good social media strategy — whether it be personal or professional — needs to include periods of black out or times when the social media/community manager is not online. The idea of constant connectivity and notifications might sound like it’d benefit you, but after this experiment I’m finding that it will actually hurt you over the long haul. Why? Simply because you run the risk of overreacting the more connected you are. You become, as I did with personas or as others have with comments, hyper-reactive.

The consequences of being hyper-reactive aren’t always good. Sometimes, people feel creeped out if they make a complaint and you’ve magically commented on their Twitter feed or Facebook page. Other times, it’s “expected” that you do. Other times, your comment may come across as talking down to that person or be overly sarcastic.

The other toll that this takes on you, may be in your writing. Timing is important to social media, but for articles? That aren’t ephemeral? It can really chip into the way your prose flows on the page and what words you use. This is especially true if you “trick for a click.”

I’ve often mentioned to companies and individuals that the best way to manage expectations is to have a social media or community policy. I cannot stress enough how important this is for everyone involved in a social media profile. I cannot. If someone is obligated to log in offline or respond to something twenty-four seven — that needs to be clearly stated because the other side of that? Is that monitoring also comes into play and that takes time. Perceptions can ruin relationships, so having these things in place before disaster strikes can help facilitate better discussions and positive expectations.

For many reasons, if anything this experiment has taught me that there is value in being offline. Like anything, having a good perspective requires balance and the ability to let the small stuff go. Without that, well… that’s when you may find yourself as frustrated with the tools as I was.

Hope you enjoyed the coverage of this experiment and the results.

Prioritize By Value: Social Media Blackout Results

So yesterday I talked about how all signs pointed in a positive direction during the one-hundred day social meida blackout. Today, I’m going to bring up something I saw in action: the need to prioritize by value.

When you’re working in a creative field, it’s not like being on an assembly line. You don’t constantly produce every minute you’re in front of your computer. Some writers, like myself, often research, plot and think without ever touching our fingers to the keyboard. Others are different. When I do write, I write very quickly and a lot all at once. Even then, I don’t write the same way for every project all the time. Sometimes I have to change location. Sometimes there’s a broken plot thread that I have to address, so I move on to another story in the meantime.

Bringing this back around to the topic at hand, after being off of social media for so long, I wound up restructuring my time without even realizing it. I was, in a sense, performing the same consulting tasks I’ve done for other people based on the value or the activity’s pay-off — financial, emotional, etc. — to myself.

In this way, when I got back online, I was able to manage not only how much time I spent on it, but whether or not I could learn how to use Google+ or care about the latest “fail” or “trend.” That information is still valuable — especially for content creators that rely on that information to be relevant. While some trends are important to me, the micro-trends that happen hourly or daily are “here today, gone tomorrow.” Since I am not writing about trends, if I come across them I take them into account. If I don’t? I’m not missing anything.

Although I’ve been writing from my perspective, I recognize you’ll have a different idea about all of this than I will.Check out an article on ApexBookCompany.com called: “Beaten to death on the social network.” It’s a different perspective on this, but I think you’ll find it interesting.

Bump in Stats: Social Media Blackout Results

I don’t have a ton of time today, so I won’t be able post a ton of graphs like I wanted to, but I did want to talk about the fact that all of my stats: e-book sales, RSS/web traffic and social media followers (with the exception of Twitter) went up.

  • My RSS feed subscribers increased by twenty percent.
  • My newsletter subscribers increased by fifteen percent.
  • My overall traffic (comparing the same time frame to the previous) went up by ten percent.
  • Book sales for Paths of Storytelling, which was a collaborative work I contributed to, hit a milestone sales status on DriveThruRPG.
  • Book sales for non-new releases like The Queen of Crows continued to trickle in.
  • My Twitter followers decreased overall by 50 followers whereas my Facebook friends increased by 125 (combing personal and the fan page I set up).

Combined, what this data tells me is that the conventional wisdom holds true. Content is valuable and to get more “out of” your content — you need to watch where you put it.

Before I went on this blackout, I said that it’s not a good idea to put content that is archive-worthy on Twitter or Facebook. It’s better to house it on your own website because then, by owning the content, you draw people back to “your house.” You’re not partying in someone else’s mansion with your own crystal. To me, these stats prove that. Content is worth something.

The Twitter followers could have gone down either because I wasn’t engaging people in conversation or Twitter updated their spam filters. I’m assuming Facebook went up because the way their algorithm works? You only see a fraction of the people you’ve friended anyway and you have to keep futzing with the controls to get your view working right. Not to mention, the abandonment of a Facebook friend takes more effort than a simple “unfollow.” In some ways, FB is harder to maintain once you get into it.

The other thing this tells me, is that now when I figure out a cost/benefit analysis for the work it takes into increase social media followers versus website visitors — I can better assess what’s worth the effort and what’s not.

Monitoring, measuring, accessibility and analyzing social media are a few of the hidden costs of being ON social media. (With or without e-mail notifications, you still need to know the trends to stay relevant and sound genuine.) But, like research for an article, it’s a cost that can be taken for granted.

Then add the money statement on top of that: List three reasons why I am using these tools.

Here’s mine BEFORE the blackout:

1) Connect with readers

2) Network/Communicate with industry folk

3) Touch base with family and friends

Here’s mine AFTER the blackout:

1) Be a part of the community

That’s it. Why?

Because no one is “just” one thing. As much as people whine and moan about hearing what someone had to eat or listening to them talk about their illnesses or grandmother’s community or stamp their feet about the so-called rules of engagement… it wouldn’t be social media otherwise. You can’t build networks of people and expect them to follow all of the social rules that typically don’t incur negative results.

Now, if you started charging people for being trolls on the other hand…

I think the interesting thing for many people isn’t figuring out what they want to get out of social media, but how best to interact within the neighborhoods they feel most comfortable in.

By the way… I was curious to see if anything changed, so I was watching my Twitter stream on my second monitor today. Three fails. Oy.

I have to tell you, even though I knew intellectually what was valuable and what wasn’t, I didn’t really feel comfortable sticking with my own advice until I removed the tool I was abusing myself.

Next Posts




Looking for Monica’s books and games that are still in print? Visit Monica Valentinelli on Amazon’s Author Central or a bookstore near you.

Archives

Back to Top