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Some Thoughts on Social Media

For those who don’t remember, the social media 10-year Challenge was simply posting photos of yourself currently and from 10 years ago. It was a popular Facebook and Instagram thing in 2018, and there’s a reason for that: that’s about the time that Facebook got critically popular (even if launched earlier). Instagram itself launched in 2010 before being bought by Facebook a couple of years later. I guess ten years is a good interval to put out some thoughts on social media.

What I learned was that ten years of it was probably enough! Ten years of photos, rants, videos, sharing memes, sharing political opinions. I mean, did any of us think this was something we’d have to pursue forever?

11/28/11, Jim Arnold with Movember mustache

Jim Arnold in 2021 at the Pacific Ocean in NorCal

I had to ask myself: What has it gotten me? How has my life become better because of this? Because of all the precious time I’ve spent on social media?

Social Media Good for Author Presence?

To be honest, I mainly see a presence on social media as an avenue for publicity, ultimately resulting in curiosity about me sufficient to result in book sales. I don’t have much concrete evidence of that, although the concept is sound.

Perhaps that sounds selfish – but then again, I am under no illusions that I’m not the product on a service like Facebook or Twitter, where my data is being sold to advertisers. So for me to have loftier ambitions is really kind of silly when then entire enterprise is exploitive, right?

Yet I’ve never gotten over what I see as the lack of Integrity on social media and the ease of being an asshole, and of calling people names. I’m guilty of this myself. It’s so easy, when you’re behind a screen, to be a boor. (Especially on Twitter, I find.)

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Should I Ditch Twitter?

How hard would it be to give up Twitter? I call people names there, usually Republicans, led by Donald Trump or his surrogates. Maybe they deserve to be called names, but I tell you, even at age 66, soon to be 67, I still hear my mother’s voice telling me “don’t call people names.” That was good advice then and it’s good advice now. We were raised to be kind and decent.

Otherwise, I don’t scroll Twitter looking for information or to follow anyone in particular. There’s just too much there and I’ve always found that just daunting and basically uninteresting. I’d rather read a professionally edited newspaper I trust. That’s enough.

What About “Meta?”

Instagram would be harder because while I get almost zero comments or likes or anything on Twitter, I get more dopamine hits from Instagram. Although, still, it’s not a lot compared to true social media butterflies. I find my presence there low stress, and there’s not much animosity. So for now, I’m keeping it.

I recently rejoined Facebook for the author publicity reasons – I read a book on promotions that insisted a Facebook Page was a very good thing for authors, so I have one now. It’s only been a few months, but I find that Facebook itself is kind of boring these days and prefer looking at the photos on Instagram.

Still I really wonder about the opportunity cost of social media and is it really a worthwhile trade-off: there’s so many other things I could be doing, including fitness activities, piano playing, more writing, even. Work, certainly. Pursuing sex and lovers. Interacting with pets and animals. Cooking delicious food. Seeking more love in the world?

Those are some of my thoughts on social media, but the conversation’s not over. Stay tuned.

Reasons Why I Rejoined Facebook

How embarrassing.

There I go with my anti-Facebook Manifesto, all righteous and everything, and now here I am telling you I’m back.

Go head and snicker. Surely, I deserve it.

Not that I still don’t think it’s generally a pretty bad idea, but here’s the deal kids:

basically everybody is on Facebook, and unfortunately, many of them are using the message protocol there as their de facto email. I don’t like it, but there you are.
I know many people and have lots of family in far away places. I’ve lived in San Francisco, Milwaukee, Palm Springs and have many friends on the East Coast as well. It’s unrealistic to keep up with them in person and this is really just the path of least resistance (especially for a lazy person).
I miss getting invited to things. Facebook has become the way people invite you to parties, events, personal meetings, etc. and I was missing that big love! Not that it can’t happen in other ways, but. . . see first point above.
Honestly, there were a couple of personal relationships that really blossomed in real time due to Facebook, and now those have waned. That’s the thing I liked most about this social media journey, and I want those people back in my life on a regular basis (and it wasn’t just virtual).
I do need the visibility. There’s still the remote possibility that people will look for staff or, heaven forbid, find out about books on Facebook. Again, like I said in my Manifesto, people don’t go to Facebook specifically to find books or writers, but the impression could be made. It could happen.

So I’ll rejoin, after all, it’s free. Still. Sort of. Though it’s not an equal trade at all. This time around, I’m going to try to:

“friend” or accept as friends only those people I know and like in real life.
avoid politics as much as humanly possible, though my fingers may get itchy.
I’ll just ignore the gross pictures of your food.
I’ll still share stuff, but hopefully this will be highly curated and mostly stuff from here (the blog) that I’d like to see distributed; I know Facebook will try to thwart that as much as they can, because they’d like to make money on wider distribution.
Will only share the barest minimum of digital assets — meaning photos, in particular. Naturally, I’m on Instagram as well, and Facebook owns that, so. . . any suggestions there?

OK, so now it’s Arnold 0, Zuckerberg 1. Don’t know how long I’ll be back, but stay tuned.

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The Reasons I Left Facebook

Yep, I retired from the Facebook like-athon on January 1, my one and only New Year’s resolution this year.

Two weeks later, so, how’s it going? Do I have regrets, do I have posting or “liking” withdrawal?

Have to admit, there’ve been a couple of times when I wanted to “share” something, like a thought about a movie, or the weather, and there was no one to “share” it with — something I would have just typed into the Facebook “status update” box.

What I find most odd about that is how quickly my mind was trained to “share” my life in such an artificial way. It’s kind of frightening. Five short years is all it took and I’m that digital lemming!

So, actually, the world did not really need to know that the wind is knocking over plants on my balcony, or that isn’t it funny that two closeted gay actors both have lead roles (as straight men) in “American Hustle” (you figure it out), or, whatever else it was I was thinking about that particular day.

This is the last message I posted on Facebook, as a sort-of explanation to “Friends,” both the real kind and the Facebook kind:

Facebook Friends: With the New Year, I’m going to be signing off Facebook. My decision is a combination of wanting more of my focus to be in the offline (real?) world as well as crucial privacy and business model concerns (Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t need to be making any more money on my digital assets, thankyouverymuch), as well as wanting to devote more time to my own social media outlet, my blog (jimarnoldblog.com/blog)! I’ve tremendously enjoyed all the banter, throwbacks and flashbacks, sharing and reconnecting and hope to continue doing so—just not here. Those who don’t have my contact information already can find it at the blog. Thanks for keeping in touch, and have a great 2014.

A lot of bloggers and others have posted their own reasons for leaving social media, specifically Facebook, and I’ve been influenced by those. Some of my favorites are here and here.

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These are my own top reasons for leaving Facebook, in no particular order:

I really, really, really don’t want to see pictures of your food. I mean gag me, OK? I don’t know why this grosses me out so much, but it really does. Why would you think this is interesting to anybody? We’re lucky to be living in a country that (at least so far) is not starving.
Facebook connections are not real connections. They’re not real friendships. Real friendships involve messy interpersonal actions over time. Anything virtual keeps that human messiness at arm’s length, and I find I want, I crave, the messy. Bring it on.
I began to realize I was presenting to the virtual world a highly curated version of myself, hoping that it would somehow be attractive and acceptable to a large number of people I hadn’t really met or known in the physical world. This is probably pathological. I had to stop it to remain sane. (or at least somewhat sane)
The vast majority of my 800-ish Facebook friends were/are people I had maybe met once or twice. A lot of them turned out to be oversharers, and I found myself finding out way, way more about them then I ever dreamt possible. It was lazy; you click here, you click there, you see an old photo, you find out their politics. Truthfully, this seemed like creepy stalking to me. I supposed that others probably did it to me. Eeeewww.
I read a book. It’s called “Who Owns the Future,” by Jaron Lanier. He presents the idea that way things are going in the digital economy, it will only be those who own the biggest computers (the Facebooks, the Googles, the Amazons) who will make any money in the future and the rest of us will basically be serfs, fighting over the scraps. The trade that’s presented to everyone on Facebook is that you can use the service for free, in exchange for handing over digital rights to your life and your data. This is not in any way, shape or form a fair trade. The only way Facebook makes their money is for you to give them your data. You need to be compensated in some real, monetary way for this above and beyond access to the service for free. Would you like to stop giving Mark Zuckerberg your life?

Facebook increases isolation, rather than alleviating it. By comparing myself to the highly curated versions of my Facebook “friends,” I often felt worse about my own circumstances rather than better. I also could not say one more time to someone in real time, “Oh, yes, I know you on Facebook, we’re Facebook friends!” I mean really, how lame is that?
Time’s a wastin’. I would frequently fall down the Facebook rabbit hole, reading all sorts of links, especially to political articles, etc. I’d look up and wonder where the hour had gone, without a lick of my real work getting done.
Marketing my books on Facebook was a fool’s errand. I found this out, that people on Facebook aren’t interested in reading books, for the most part. Sure, if you’re Stephen King or Anne Rice or someone like that, it might be cool to have them as your “friend.” But I found that in my case, nobody was looking for books to read on that particular platform. My time is much better spent writing the next great book, or possibly interacting with readers on a site like goodreads.com – which is specifically for people who like to read.

I’m sure there’s more, I’ll probably add to this list. Why would you leave Facebook? Or do you love it?

Here’s another for me: name-calling. I noticed it was really easy to get caught up in comments to posts, particularly bickering, partisan political ones. And how easy it was to fall into cowardly, obnoxious name-calling. So I may have called S. Palin a c*** on Facebook. Somewhere, if there is a heaven, my dear mother would not be happy. And honestly, I don’t want to be that guy who calls people easy vulgar names on social media. (Even if she is a c***.)

Tips on Social Media from Digital Hollywood

Graphic by Grapplica via Flickr

Had the opportunity for Jim Arnold Communications to attend the EPPS (Entertainment Publicists Professional Society) One Day Conference in conjunction with Digital Hollywood a while back (May, 2011) at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey.

Most of the panels I attended were on the how-to of social media marketing for entertainment products, to which I add the book category, because they are definitely entertaining!

Here are a few tips I gleaned from my day in Marina del Rey, in no particular order, re-posted from prior Jim Arnold Communications blog (and still very applicable one year later):

1) TIP: Many, if not most – or all – journalists are on Facebook and Twitter. Friend them on Facebook, follow them on Twitter. Good way to build a social media “media” list.

2) TIP: Use Twitter to find niche audiences – even more effective than Google – using hashtag (#) searches to find interests.

3) TIP: sometimes you can invite controversy on the web. For instance, if you know that there is some opposition to your book (or whatever product it is) this can be a good thing, as it stimulates a conversation, and as such, publicity.

4) TIP: Making your video go viral – what helps, though there is no universal formula – is the definite WTF factor. Also, when you need to bump up numbers a quick and sure way is to find something with cute, furry little animals (a winner every time!)

5) TRANSMEDIA definition: this is storytelling across different media – with each media type giving up something different – different information, different twist – about the story. If it’s the same message just going out on different media, that’s defined as MULTIMEDIA. The TV show “Lost” is a great example of an entertainment property that used Transmedia very successfully.

6) TIP: People are using Twitter for Customer Service requests, complaints, and recommendations – as in, trying to avoid phone trees and automated systems, people have found they get better and quicker results Tweeting about the problem.

7) OTHER GENERIC TIPS for Social Media:

Have a demographic you are trying to reach, rather than “everyone”
Think about the words you use in blog titles and tweets, as they show up in key word searches
Do optimize your links – that means, use links that are reputable and popular
Do have a strategy for your social media
For Twitter and Facebook, use separate accounts for business and for personal
Social media is about a conversation. Therefore, comment on replies/posts to your Facebook pages and respond to your tweets
Social media is also all about sharing information, so encourage it
Limit yourself to a single call for action in any particular post or tweet

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I hope these are helpful. I’m going to incorporate most of these into my own work ASAP! What are your best-working tips? Add them to the list in the comments.

New to SEO? Another good link.

Technology Provides an Alternative to Love…

Photo, Sebastian Anthony

Link to Jonathan Franzen – Technology Provides an Alternative to Love.

Well, it’s less messy. Or just delays the inevitable?

I enjoyed Jonathan Franzen’s insight into the phenomenon of “Liking,” particularly as it applies to Facebook.

Even as we (and me included) wholeheartedly enjoy social networking and enthusiastically “like” our friends’ photos, tastes in music, articles, etcetera, at some deeper level we truly do understand this is no substitute for real friendship.

In all honesty, my Facebook “friends” now include probably more people that I’ve never met than those who I actually have. And of those – I’m like most people, in that I only consider a few true “friends.”

But, social media and networking IS useful. I’ve found out more of what’s going on, as in events happening. I’ve been invited to more parties! I’ve gotten a lot of fashion tips, always helpful. Lately, I’ve received tips on finding apartments – and in general, when I pose a question to a Facebook “group,” I receive worthwhile information back.
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I’ve unfriended (defriended?) a few people, mostly (I will admit it) because their politics didn’t agree with mine. I figured there was so much right wing bullshit being thrown at me everyday from multiple sources in real life, I sure as hell didn’t need it from Facebook “friends.” So indeed, “my” social media will reflect the mirror.

I want to read Franzen’s “Freedom,” but haven’t yet. Anyone have an opinion? I hear it’s wonderful.

Unemployment 12/22/09

I finally got around to “cleaning up” my facebook page to make it more attractive to those recruiters who I’m sure will google me before considering me for any kind of further interaction, such as a job interview. I tried to remove the questionable fan pages and ultra-left organizations I joined all with the hope of someday rejoining the great capitalistic machine, if for no other reason than to pay rent and eat. Or eat and pay rent. Hopefully both. I have to say I’m a bit saddened at doing that, and it also feels like every deletion, every edit is like a vanilla processor – blander the better. Do you viagra on line have management dreams to reap corporate rewards and better pay packets? If yes, you need to make a safe and cost effective deal. Dry needling levitra generika A westernised concept which relies on the presence of trigger points and is a method of conflict resolution where rather than punishing the perpetrator, he participates in the resolution and is asked for suggestions on how to fix the problem. The first thing is treating male erectile dysfunction is diagnosing the factors leading to ED. cost of cialis For men it is soft viagra tabs difficult to multiple-orgasm, but females are popular in this behavior. I always thought the best job hunting advice I ever got was to just be yourself, because a boss/employer is either looking for a person just like you, or they’re not. So it doesn’t make any sense in trying to be something you are not. So why did I remove this great photo of me with the green towel on my head? (It was my St. Patrick’s Day costume, not the best I will admit, but it was what I had).