Let’s try a more longer blog post update style, more along the lines of Hipiers style.
I’m so busy in my daily writing life and my family life that a daily personal blog isn’t that realistic.Truth be told, I may offer my help to others on their social site writing and upkeep for businesses, but when it comes to personal social sites, I’m not a huge fan. The most active people seem to be the idiots anymore. More trouble than they’re worth to deal with. I’d rather go walk the dog for 1/2 an hour than spend the time reading their stupid words and responding to them.
Sometimes you get these people in business accounts, especially active ones. But by using tact, such things can be turned around in the business’s favor. Thankfully, most people are smart enough to not be fooled by idiots.
As a writer, what burns me the most is idiots who can’t be bothered to educate themselves well enough to spell, yet are willing to spout out lines of rubbish to speak down onto others. Today I looked at a thread retaliating against a comment. The comment was one the writer should have kept to himself and just ignored the first writer. They just do it for attention, which they got.
The commenter is a well educated writer. The ones attacking him are not, and the worse I’ve seen of the bad spellers so far. I’m pretty sure every other word was mispelled. It was exceedingly painful to read. Not because of what they said, which would have been bad enough. Because the horrible writing was like fingernails dragging down a chalkboard.
Social sites were designed to share things with your friends and family. Alongside that, it’s a wonderful tool for a business to connect with their prospects and customers. When done right, it’s like a community.
Mostly, personal social sites are done wrong.
- Let’s discuss everything we disagree with and alienate our family and friends by calling anyone else who disagrees a bad name. (This does NOT promote good feelings from your reader. Most of which, they’ll keep to themselves if they’re wise.)
- Let’s rejoice in bad things happening to others because “they deserve it.” I’m not talking about people who did acts of atrocities…every day folk. (Why would you? Why? We could do with a bit less hate. And even if your friends are silent, they very well may just unfollow you so none of your posts and comments show up. Way to lose your following there.)
- Let’s push our causes onto our family and friends who are wanting to connect with us, and not our causes. (And wear them out by doing so.)
- Let’s push our political views onto our social site, citing multiple times a day things that are wrong and what we HAVE to do about it. (Who cares if someone on our list hates politics and needs to “shut things out” for a few moments.)
- Let’s push our religious beliefs onto our social site. (I know pastors who are friendly with this and can manage just well without calling someone else a sinful disgrace who’s going to burn in hell. Too bad, more of us cannot. Okay to express your beliefs as a way of sharing, not okay to belittle others for their beliefs.)
- Let’s set up conditions on how our friends and family should act on their own profiles or threaten them with unfollowing or unfriending. (If you dare post your political views or religion or if you dare not respond to any of my posts and not show you care, I’m done with you!)
- Digital equivalent of chain letters: hated them in snail mail, hate them in email. Definitely hate them in social site. No, I don’t believe sharing this will make me lucky, or mean that I don’t believe it if I don’t share it. It’s actually insulting to tell me what I do or don’t think. I prefer to read actual updates about YOU, or useful, verified information for daily living, writing, and business. Cute animals is good, let’s just not overdo it, okay?
I tend to keep my mouth shut and just click to “unfollow” such individuals in my news feed. I don’t unfriend them. I don’t publicly threaten to either unfollow or unfriend.
Keep in mind that often what you like and comment on also gets shared to your friends, just as if you shared it. We used to be able to turn this off, but facebook, in that all too familiar genius way of theirs, must have taken that ability away. I couldn’t find it.
Such a shame. I’d like to not have my friends comments show up on my threads. Sometimes those comments reveal more about our friends than we like and we find ourselves in the awkward situation of not knowing if we want to call this person a friend any longer.
Wrestling with this issue now.
Sometimes I’ll comment on someone’s post. But mostly not. I’ll only comment on private groups for my business and my own pages most of the time. The private groups only show up for members.
I tried to find a way to only see actual posts from one very busy friend on my end instead of her comments and likes too, but did not. Haven’t unfollowed this friend because she likes, comments, and posts really interesting stuff. I may have to unfollow here though. Seeing all her likes and comments is way too time consuming!
Who I thought was a good friend did unfriend me after threatening to see too much she wasn’t interested in or to unfriend people who didn’t respond to her posts. She spent a lot of time whining about her troubles and lived off of the attention it gave her. I was sad. Still sad to think about it. But let her go along her way silently…for she said NOTHING personally to me before doing it. Still, it was her choice, and I respect that.
Now, I did unfriend a lot of people when I switched to having a private profile. But I contacted each separately first, and invited them to join me on my pages. Some did. I did this because there was a lot of bad family news coming that I had to make sure only close friends and family saw. And my list was too large to manage properly.
Since then, I just unfollow when the wrong stuff comes up in my feed. For me, it’s racists remarks by those too close to me to unfriend, causes being shoved in my face too often, politics, the few people who can’t be bothered to learn how to spell correctly, people who talk down others, bickering with one another, etc.
Lately, I unfollowed someone who openly threatened to unfollow anyone who talks about politics or religion on their profile.
Right. Okay. Gotcha. She didn’t say forcing these topics on one another…she said talking about it. Big difference there. Out of respect I unfollowed her, since I do consider her a friend. But she has a habit of verbally blasting some things I love periodically, and gripes about little life’s events isn’t something I want to see every day either. She’s a good lady I have on my list to check out once a week, and I watch her on twitter too.
Another friend I need to consider unfollowing for “being mean” in comments. This way, I can check my friend’s profile and those comments won’t show. Minimize the damage done to my thoughts.
Now, I just have to remember to go through my list once a week or so, and visit their actual profile pages to catch up. Something I do for some people I’m not even friends with.
I keep telling myself to unfollow everyone except business associates. That’s truly my daily read. But I do have a few friends who post awesome content, and wonderful cousins with social site finesse I’d like to see daily still.
Facebook’s the worse, so the above is more geared for it. LinkedIn is getting there too. Which is crap. That’s supposed to be more professional of a network, but everything gets ruined at some point it seems. Twitter’s not too bad, as it seems the follower varies from being more picky or the feed too busy to see the riff raff.
I’m working on my own goals. This is what I’m aiming for in my content:
- Informative: I write coffee. I write business. I write fiction and non-fiction. This stuff, and if I know someone who’s actually following me and listening is interested in a topic, I’ll share it.
- Positive: No griping. No airing the dirty laundry. My dad recently passed. I shared his information for family, and I shared pictures as a way of remembering him. In a positive way, not “crying on shoulders” in the virtual sense.
- Good news: Tired of how all the news reported has to be bad. In all my channels, I’m working on promoting things to be happy for and about. Even thought of making a magazine of nothing but happy stories.
- Fully read and researched: If I pass it on, I read it and researched it. RTDA (Read The Damn Article) Too many people share something just for the headline and don’t bother to see if the information is true. Same for memes. Research the words claimed in it FIRST!!! OMG, this drives me nuts. I used to call people out for this all the time.
- Useful: Something people listening can learn from or use in their life. Or learn about me, in the case of close family gift ideas, without having to actually ask me at last minute.
- Sharing: sometimes a few of us are sharing information about something. Or showing off our creations. (I tend to use my pages more when it comes to facebook for this. To allow my followers to choose what topics they wish to show up in their feeds.)
My main twitter is more of a catch all, as is my google plus. But I do have side accounts for more specified categories of interest. Useful for me because of advertising efforts.
For years, when books are at full advertising runs, I get a good baseline of 10,000 people I share to. Not much in the grand scheme of things, and poor results did have two authors thinking I didn’t do my job. I told them. They didn’t believe me. One even said I hadn’t done one thing.
Well, glad you noticed the 20 hours a week I spent at promotions.
Anyway, water under the bridge. And all the other authors were happy and grateful. Made it worth the effort.
Speaking of authors and promoting, I discovered one key thing. Potential readers and current readers truly don’t care to hear from the publisher a lot of the times. They really want one on one attention from the author.
One on one is a loose term. Best thing I can think of is write a blog where you write to your reader as if you’re writing a personal letter to that person.
Out of all the authors I was honored to work with, one stood out. She spoke to her readers personally via her facebook page, and she made efforts to attend local festivals several times through the year. I’m talking ones where people from all over the world attended.
She nutured her author network on a personal level.
We learned to work the advertising attempts together. I’d run an ad, or social site post campaign, and she’d back it up on her end. This increased response greatly over me doing it alone as her publisher. And made a slight increase in response over her doing it alone.
Still, more often than not, I’m going it alone with the book advertising these days. Not so bad. Now it’s time to concentrate on my own writing and stop helping others with theirs, for the most part. Now it will be both the writer and publisher pushing the books.
Speaking of…I know I have it down and I had it planned for publishing The Key of Wendom in March. Obviously, that did not happen. For health reasons and technical mishap with the cover artist, it is delayed even more.
This is unfortunate, and hopefully will be rectified before I’m forced to make some hard decisions on the covers I need with this series. The artist is a very close friend so he has been getting extra consideration.
I am changing gears with what order publications will come out this year to accomodate him, but brainstorming some things to do until then. Can’t comment, since I’m still brainstorming. But something free I can give people to fill the time until the releases actually happen.
I’m now a verified copywriter. I’ve been a copywriter for many years, but only became “verified” this week. This means a company wanting to make sure I’m actually trained as I claim can actually click something to verify my information. Or they can actually call the institution and hear it from a real person. Next week I put those logos up for potential clients to see.
This is a huge milestone in my career for me so a big deal. Happy.
Personally, I have a few other milestones I’ve achieved. Namely, I lost 8 pounds in about the first 15 weeks of the year, and my blood pressure is down to normal. Just last November it was so amazing high I’m surprised I wasn’t sent straight into the hospital. And I haven’t had normal blood pressure for many years.
There’s still some milestones on this journey to make, but I’ve got a good start now. I need to do more biking, and try to do more walking. (another hidden condition is hindering me and hope further treatment won’t be necessary for it)
After this weekend, I’ll pick up the pace and see what happens.
Tomorrow is my dad’s birthday. This year we lost my father-in-law first and then my dad. Rough start.
I’m going to spend dad’s birthday with Mom. Hopefully it won’t be too sad.
As I write this, I see our neighbor’s 10 year old sitting on the porch reading a book. I always like seeing that. We need to encourage our kids to read more, write more, and learn more.
Here I’ll take my leave. Be back sometime. Not sure when. I have a ton of websites to update and a bunch of copy to take care of after the weekend with Mom. All that will have to come first.
Be well.
More ways to keep touch with me:
My personal writing website Serenity Myst, where I post updates in the news as they happen.
My twitter account, where most of my blogging is directed towards, and I do share from my other twitter accounts to this one as they happen @dianacacy
My facebook pages:
Author Page @writerhawkins http://fb.me/writerhawkins best for updates from me personally
Marion Margaret Press Page @marionmargaretpress http://fb.me/marionmargaretpress updates for the press I run
Tempest Myst Page @tempestmyst http://fb.me/tempestmyst updates for the game inworldz that I’m in
Coffee and Biscotti Page @coffeebiscotti http://fb.me/coffeebiscotti updates on my coffee site
Copy Confetti Page for some reason, this does not qualify for a username…just a page I sometimes share useful links for business owners and copywriting.
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