I'm sitting here waiting for the Benadryl hammer to club me and lollygagging in an effort to put off having to untangle a mess of cords and wires in preparation for packing up the computer. It's dusty and dark behind the desk and with my luck, a spider lurks back there, just waiting for me to reach my chunky hand back in there in an attempt to unplug a cord and then it will pounce! As I sit here and procrastinate, I've been thinking a lot about the days I'm going to be away from the internet and pretty much all forms of social media including Twitter and Facebook and wondering if it's really that big of a deal?
When I started blogging it was back in the spring of 2005 after finding out I was pregnant with Gaby. She was a baby that I'd been told would never happen. Ever. Chemotherapy was supposed to have left me with around 25% of conceiving and then my obesity made my chances of getting pregnant almost nil. Well, leave it to me, Fertile Myrtle, to beat the odds! Gareth and I were still in the midst of U.S. immigration and we were traveling back and forth across the pond once a month at that point. Actually if I think about it, he'd already received his Green Card in April and was still interviewing for jobs over here. We were also trying to sell our home over there and Gareth didn't want to leave his job until he'd secured one here on this side of the pond. The surprise pregnancy quite literally added a sense of urgency to the situation.
So I started a blog to keep everyone up to date -as our families are scattered across the globe. Over time it morphed into something else and I discovered this "community" out here. Eventually the evolution of my place in the blogosphere grew to include Twitter, and placing ads on the blog. I started pimping posts on Facebook too because...well, because everyone else was doing it and all those "in the know" said it was what I should be doing. Rarely would a new post hit the blog without being pimped out on Twitter and Facebook. God forbid someone not see that I had written some new drivel about the boring minutia that goes on around here.
I don't know that I've ever really gotten the "hang" of Twitter. I mean, I use it and catch up here and there, but for someone like me, whose middle name is "verbose", it's really hard to have any sort of meaningful conversation with people I would genuinely like to connect with, on a HUMAN level, in 140 characters or less. Just the same, I got caught up in the folly of social media and began to feel like I wasn't pulling my weight as a blogger if I wasn't tweeting at least once a day, on Facebook and connecting with everyone else. But that's the thing...looking back, I don't know if I was connecting or not.
What happened to just being able to write and get by on the merits of my writing and not on how adept I am at Social Media Marketing?
What happened to posting something and coming back after a few days and feeling satisfied with my efforts because they were good and not because they'd gotten me higher stats than previous posts?
Somewhere along the lines I began to focus on the numbers rather than the quality and I don't like that. I enjoy writing. I've done it my entire life. I have a book coming out soon (don't ask for specifics because I'm hesitant to give info out on the blog as I've been accused of pimping my book for hits and vice versa) and it's not based on my stats or hits or pimpage through Social Media Marketing. My book is part of my heart and soul. Writing feeds something deep within my soul and my soul - even into the deepest, scariest places, feeds my writing. The end result of that needs to stand up on it's own merits and not on whether or not I have an adequate grasp of all this damned social media.
Don't misunderstand me...I enjoy the back and forth banter on Twitter from time to time and reconnecting or staying connected with people on Facebook. However, I don't want whether you read what I write to be based on how wonderful a marketer I happen to be...because lets face it, I'm not. I want you to read my blog because you enjoy it, or something in my words touches you, hits a note with you, makes you laugh, cry, or reaches out and touches a part of your soul. It's why I read your blogs. I don't read you because you happen to be on some A-lister's blog roll or because someone else tells me I'm no one unless I'm reading you. Your words pull me in and keep me coming back and that right there is what I want for this silly little spot of mine on the web.
I'm hoping I can get back to the core of what made this so enjoyable for me in the early days, once we're settled in the new house. It wasn't so much work back then and it didn't feel like a game that I had to play to win. I want the relationships I form with my readers, both long-time and new, to be genuine and based on mutual friendship and not whether we're members of the same social media hierarchy. Does that make sense? I'm not knocking the blogging community, I just think I need to shift my focus...or hell, I think I need to get some focus period, rather than being so damned caught up in the game.
I honestly think if I started worrying less about my stats and how often I'm pimping posts on Twitter or Facebook, I'll be able to focus on what's important...the words.
