I have not & will not open a Facebook account because I take serious issue with that company’s privacy (or lack thereof) policies, and I basically feel that a fundamental disrespect of and disregard for their user base is ingrained in the company’s DNA. I’m sure that for many users — indeed, for most users — Facebook is helpful, useful, and valuable. That doesn’t mean it ain’t evil.
But to be honest, a more direct reason I won’t traffic with Facebook is that I absolutely don’t understand social networking. I already blog (hi!). I email and IM and SMS and phone my friends. I belong to a few forums. (I don’t Tweet because if you want to follow someone 144 characters at a time, or whateverthehell it is, knock yourself out. I ain’t that guy.) So I feel that I’ve got a lot of ground covered.
I admit that some friend from third grade who’d be more likely to find me on Facebook isn’t connected to me in any of the above ways. But it ain’t exactly hard to get in touch with me on the web (Googling “Steve Boyett” and “Steven R. Boyett” gets you there pretty darned quickly, albeit from some different directions), and in any case, if my third-grade soul buddy can’t be bothered to look anywhere but on Facebook to find me, I figure he doesn’t really want to contact me all that badly.
So I don’t remotely feel the absence of Facebook in my life.
Enter Google+. I got invites and kind of shrugged, and then took one of them up and opened an account a few weeks ago. I figured, well, Google isn’t necessarily any more concerned about my privacy than Facebook, but they’re at least more transparent in what they’re doing with my information. A bit.
My misgiving is that Google’s motto is “Dont Be Evil.” Some people think that’s a very cool credo. It gives me the creeps. I mean, think about it. What does it tell you about a guy when has to tell himself every morning, “Hey, don’t kill anybody today”? Ya think maybe he kinda always wants to? Yeah, I think so too.
In any case, I opened a Google+ account and quickly ran across some friends & acquaintainces, current & from back in the day. But I find that I have nothing whatsoever to say on my own G+ account that I don’t already either say here or tell my friends. I find that I don’t give a gnat fart in a hurricane about adding “LOLZ — COOL!!!” to the pile of comments on someone else’s post. I find my day is in no way bettered by checking my stream to learn learn about the tasty egg sandwich someone in my circle just ate. In fact I find the whole thing an enormous waste of time.
I also find it kind of stoopid that you have to have a gmail account to participate in G+ in more than an “I’m getting emails about this” capacity. Does Google want to compete with Facebook or don’t they? I have a Gmail account and I check it about twice a year, largely because I don’t especially like Gmail. I think it’s ugly.
So mostly I log on to G+, look at the thing a minute, and log off. Maybe somebody can explain to me what I’m missing. But I sorta think that what people get from online social networking is utterly absent for me. And I kinda get the feeling my G+ account is gonna get very dusty.
I went ahead and added you. 😉
LOLZ — COOL!! 😉
I’ve been wrestling with the concept of social networking for a few months now. Not that I’ve but recently come to it, but everybody touts Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/YouTube/Google +/etc. as the way to promote your novel to the masses, and as a self-published author it’s apparently incumbent upon me to embrace these mediums and sell millions of books through them.
John Locke has recently joined the Amazon Million club, and he attributes his success to his Twitter strategy. This other guy whose name I currently forget (something Green?) recently had his unpublished novel hit #1 on Amazon due to his popularity on Twitter/YouTube/Tumblr.
Marketing. It’s not enough to write your book, you have to convince people to buy it, and the easiest way to do that is social networking. But what a time sink. I’ve decided to simply write more books and continue publishing them and let the body of my work be my marketing machine rather than spend countless hours Tweeting or what have you. My hope is that my writing is of sufficient quality that this will work, but if not? At least I’ll be spending my time working on my craft as opposed to learning how to craft the perfect tweet.
I certainly see the merit in that, and there are people who are interested in following you as a writer. But I also don’t want to spam my friends. The Me-Centric nature of this approach bothers me — if you don’t overtly use G+ as a PR vehicle but in reality are being social with the underlying intent of maintaining visibility and keeping yourself out there — essentially branding — it seems a bit disingenuous.
I have no problem with starting a Podrunner page, for instance; by definition it would be flatly doing all of that, and people circling it would do so because that’s what they want. In my blog I want to talk about writing (craft, business, technology, etc.), other topics that interest me, as well as highlight the process and availability of my own work.
But I simply can’t imagine anyone giving a shit about my car not starting, the great hotdog I just ate, what movie I just liked (or didn’t like), or any of that chunked soundbite-mentality constant self-proclamation that is all the barrage now. (If it was easy everyone would do it — hey, wait: everyone *is* doing it.)
That said, yes, you have to market your work. Of course you want it to speak for itself, but first you have to get it heard.