COMMUNICATION SKILLS
Taming social media
- More authentically engage with social media platforms
- Build a profile to connect you with those who matter and help you productively disseminate your work
HOW TO
Frankly, if you’re totally comfortable with social media, no need to read this: you’re probably a lost cause already. Social media, however subtle you may be about it, revolves around promoting yourself. If you have no qualms about that, if you’re a natural, you’re beyond salvation.
The various
business models behind social media platforms all involve some form of
addiction – to news in the form of stimuli, to groupthink, to venting, to
emotional reinforcement, or to metrics tallying your “following”. A massive
public built on this basis, which both produces and reverberates content, can
then be farmed out to advertisers as well as mainstream media, who buy access
to their audience by paying Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and others to highlight
their products.
The reason we must
play by such rules is that there is no other game in town. Your intellectual
output will reach its target audience, whether you like it or not, via social
media. If you snub the sport, you’re just piggybacking other people who don’t.
They’re your teammates, allies and supporters: don’t let them feel it’s all
beneath you.
For good reading,
people used to rely on reputable periodicals. These are under stress, as they
compete with a growing array of lower caliber competitors. They would go to
libraries, LOL. In the early stages of domestic internet, they would check
reference blogs, sign up to distribution letters or send personal messages to
each other. That was before we spent hours every day trudging through a slough
of emails. Now we’re in (let’s hope) a transitional phase, full of
inefficiencies: unable to cope with the profusion of publication platforms and
published content, we’re cutting back on old-fashioned subscriptions and
correspondence, and instead joining multiple social media platforms where we
follow far more people than we can keep track of.
This situation
makes for a very difficult public to deal with: if truth be told, we’ve all
become overwhelmed, impatient, impulsive, demanding and disloyal. Most of us
would snigger at the suggestion that you must sit down and read books, or
substantive articles, for as much as two contiguous hours on any given day. How
could we ever find time? Why, we already spend two good hours sifting through
social media just to assess what on earth we should be reading.
The positive view
is that, in this era of cacophony and confusion, everyone is in constant search
of guidance; of hubs, aggregators and authorities who provide cues amidst the
noise. We are all trying to figure out what to believe, what to block out, and
whom to trust in doing so. When you think of it, social media therefore
function like a massive, crowdsourced, muddled and endlessly updated compendium
of critical reviews. Content is voted up into a niche market, or voted out into
oblivion.
Find a style that suits your outlook, personality, and occupation
Our rapport with
information and analysis will no doubt continue to evolve, probably
dramatically, but for now this is the quagmire we must swim or drown in. To
stay afloat, it’s smart not to jump in at the deep end. Watch others while you
test the waters. You’ll have no trouble identifying who is doing a slick crawl,
making waves extravagantly, or just foundering. There are many different styles,
techniques and objectives, which also tend to differ on distinct platforms, and
getting acquainted with them takes time. Which is why you should start engaging
professionally with social media early on.
Once you’re in the
water, there’s no need to get ahead of yourself and do fancy things—but you
can’t stay still either. Keep moving, cautiously. It’s about finding out what
works best for you, what suits both your professional needs and your personal
inclinations. Perhaps the best advice you can use regarding social media is to
find a style that suits your outlook, personality and occupation, and from
their adapt to see what value that style and substance may add to the broader
ecosystem.
Regardless of the
quasi-spontaneity that pervades social media, it is nonetheless important to
formulate a basic editorial policy and self-impose it ruthlessly. It can and
should evolve, but it must be there in the first place, for two essential
reasons. On one hand, you must do like Ulysses, who had himself tied up to his
ship’s mast to listen to the mermaids without succumbing to their deadly charm.
Don’t presume that you are built to resist social media: nobody is, because
social media are built to be irresistible.
On the other, you
are expected, by people who choose to connect their feelers to your social
media avatars, to fulfill a certain role. That can be any number of things:
you’re part of the gang; you help relatives keep up with family issues; you’re
a recognized expert on some issue of interest; you’re a star and every smallest
thing about you is simply fascinating; you’re a politician and you’re made of
words; you’re a handy purveyor of feel-good, fake information; or you can be
trusted to trigger predictably satisfying emotions of some other kind. For sure,
it’s reductive to be pinned down in such fashion. Look at it otherwise: you
just have to clarify, for the benefit of others, what you’re contributing to
the pandemonium.
A solid editorial
policy is one where you 1) define your value-added, i.e. what exactly you are
giving others (beyond the kick you get out of speaking your mind), 2) set
boundaries you’re not willing to cross (e.g. telling yourself not to share
something you haven’t read, to sleep on your emotional outrage, and not to
indulge in pointless squabbling), and 3) leave a little margin of error,
experimentation and fun.
Meanwhile, make sure you’re clear about your endgame. If you want a massive following, lots of clicks and likes and shares and stuff, you’ll find better advice for that elsewhere. You even have robots who go get followers for you, and therefore robots who follow robots and end up bound together in timeless conversation in some forlorn burrow of the Internet warren. As you are on this blog, however, it is safe to assume that you are after a more humane and pointed discussion. You face, moreover, the following conundrum: how to push substantive content through the noise while not adding to it.
It is important to formulate a basic editorial policy and self-impose it ruthlessly
The trick is to
consider social media “friends” as friends, rather than poor sods innocent
enough to follow you. Their time deserves to be taken seriously; their comments
to be responded to graciously; their gestures of support to be returned. More
importantly, however, is the sense of “community,” which tends to be taken for
granted. Your output, typically, will circulate through a hard core of people
who genuinely follow your work and career, truly believe in you, and know you
quite intimately, even from afar. The people who spread your word are people in
a real, not virtual relationship with you. This “first circle” is critical to
reaching the broader public you may crave. Regardless of its size, it is your
true audience; treat it accordingly well.
Building diversity
into that core is more than desirable: by maintaining ties to people who aren’t
likeminded, you’ll move beyond an echo chamber. Scrolling down your social
media feeds must, to some extent, make you cringe; that’s a sign that you’re
still in touch with diverse constituencies. It also calls for some moderation
of your own input. If you can only be read by people who already share your
views, what’s the point of sharing them in the first place? Ideally, you’re
better off being the lynchpin connecting several small groupings than the
beating heart of a large, uniform crowd.
That means
accepting that the name of the game is a good conversation, not a monologue
that will transfix the masses. Your profile may scale up at some stage, if what
you have to offer meets a strongly felt demand—which generally occurs
haphazardly, when unforeseen circumstances suddenly place you in the midst of
things. Until then, enjoy the luxury of controlled public exposure.
Diving into social
media takes guts and a guide. Luckily, you’re full of the former, and for the
latter just ask around.
5 January 2017
Illustration credit: Theseus and the Minotaur by Sean Edward Burne-Jones on Wikipedia / public domain; I know everything; Christian atheist, and Speakers’ corner cowboyink by CGP Grey on Wikipedia / public domain.
