{"id":15536,"date":"2010-02-16T10:57:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-16T15:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/hameblog\/2010\/02\/16\/fans-vs-conversation\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:50:17","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:50:17","slug":"fans-vs-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2010\/02\/16\/fans-vs-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"Fans vs Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"clear:both\">I just read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/film\/2010\/feb\/15\/overweight-filmmaker-banned-southwest-airlines\">a Guardian piece<\/a> about film director Kevin Smith getting removed from a flight for being overweight. Apparently he &#8216;tweeted&#8217; about the event, and his 1.64 million followers went into a lather on his behalf, forcing the airline to make an awkward apology.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear:both\">The weight issue aside&#8230; <em>1.64 million followers?!<\/em> Wow, I&#8217;m overwhelmed at having over 800 on <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hamishmacdonald\">Twitter<\/a>. I&#8217;m grateful that so many people can put up with my smatterings of thought and my show-and-tell moments with creative projects, and I hope they get something halfway useful out of it in return, if only some entertainment.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear:both\">&#8230;And I&#8217;m hyper-conscious of how I use outlets like Twitter, so I try to stick to some fundamental rules:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<ul style=\"clear:both\">\n<li><strong>Don&#8217;t stray too far off-topic <\/strong>from writing, bookbinding, and publishing. If it&#8217;s likely to offend people (like complaining about the Pope&#8217;s upcoming trip to the UK, a recent temptation) <em>keep your yap shut<\/em>. That&#8217;s not what people follow me to hear.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Be nice\/don&#8217;t be mean. <\/strong>Yeah, I might get in a clever wise-crack, but ultimately I&#8217;m the one who winds up looking like a dick.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Don&#8217;t recycle too much <\/strong>of other people&#8217;s content. If something&#8217;s really fascinating or would be missed, sure, I&#8217;ll repost\/retweet\/rewhatever it, but I know I &#8216;unfollow&#8217; people who do nothing but root through others&#8217; bins and reuse what they find.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Don&#8217;t be too self-promotional. <\/strong>For every piece of content that asks people to do something for me (like read about me or my work, look at something I&#8217;ve made, or consider <em>buying<\/em> something I&#8217;ve made), I have to provide three more that are entertaining just in themselves, or that provide something useful to them.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Be human\/don&#8217;t be a show-off. <\/strong>It&#8217;s great to have an outlet for cheering about my wins, but I realise from my own experience that the most compelling posts are often those in which someone admits a limitation or a mistake. If all someone ever does is crow about their greatness &#8212; well, they don&#8217;t really need my attention, because they seem to be able to give themselves plenty. But when we share the <em>whole<\/em> process, there&#8217;s room to learn from each other, and to feel more empathy.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"clear:both\">So those are my rules (which, until this moment, have been mostly unconscious), and they seem to be working to keep people interested in what I&#8217;m up to, and keep me from annoying them too much.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear:both\">And these are the operant words for me: <em>what I&#8217;m up to<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear:both\">Facebook is truly social media: for me, it&#8217;s about real-world relationships. Twitter is about people who are involved in the same things I am, who are way out in front with them, or who are just starting to learn about them. It&#8217;s a &#8220;community of interest&#8221;.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear:both\">One of the great features of Twitter is that it breaks down so many barriers: if there&#8217;s someone in your field you admire, there&#8217;s a good chance they&#8217;re on it.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear:both\">But this is where it gets dicey: When you&#8217;ve got 1.64 million followers, you&#8217;re not in a conversation anymore, you&#8217;re in a star\/fanclub arrangement. There are people on Twitter whose work I like, and some of them write very funny or clever things on there, but whenever I&#8217;ve wavered and added them, I soon end up unfollowing them, because I find myself in one of those icky, non-reciprocal situations. You know you&#8217;ve fallen down that hole when you reply to one of the star&#8217;s messages, hoping to catch their attention and feeling miffed when you never get a response (yet another silly Internet waste of emotion I&#8217;m better off without, like message board arguments).<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear:both\">So my big, ultimate rule with social media is that I&#8217;m only interested in two-way conversations. By that same token, I want to be available to the 800 people who&#8217;ve been so generous as to give me their attention. (I just can&#8217;t believe they actually stay with it; even odder to me is that so many remain silent.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear:both\">Maybe there&#8217;s a point of diminishing returns where you can&#8217;t actually keep up with it (say, 1.6<em>3<\/em> million followers). So what then? Do you leave? I&#8217;m not sure.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear:both\">It&#8217;s not that I think those people shouldn&#8217;t be on Twitter, but&#8230; well, I think celebrity entertainment is spiritually radioactive, so I guess I&#8217;ll never understand what people get out of it. At that point on Twitter, you&#8217;re not conversing, you&#8217;re <em>broadcasting<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear:both\">Hey, it&#8217;s wonderful that a broadcast platform is now available to anyone with a computer. And that platform can grow without limits, whether because of empty famousness or meritorious content. As AJ Leibling said, &#8220;Freedom of the press is only guaranteed to those who own one.&#8221; Well, AJ, now we all own one. But I&#8217;m much more interested in the power of the &#8216;net to deliver real, accessible experiences and conversations than yet more closed, hyper-mediated ones.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear:both\">There&#8217;s a lot of pressure on creative people these days to be a &#8220;brand&#8221; and to use social media as a marketing tool. We get tons of advice about how to constantly work the system in the hopes of selling more books (or whatever <em>tchotchkes<\/em> we&#8217;re hucking on our sites or Etsy or wherever). On the one hand, it&#8217;s brilliant to be able to reach your audience directly. It closes that loop of being understood and appreciated for our work, yet it can become such an obsessive time-sink that we end up spending every moment desperately trying to keep that beach ball of attention in the air &#8212; so much so that we neglect to create new work.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear:both\">It&#8217;s a tricky balance, and I haven&#8217;t figured it out yet. Case in point: it&#8217;s time to turn off the computer and go make dinner&#8230; Just as soon as I post a link to this on Twitter.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>&lt;<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>p&gt;<br class=\"final-break\" style=\"clear:both\"><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-content\/uploads\/posts\/1165\/fans-vs-conversation0.jpg.webp\" alt=\"\"><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just read a Guardian piece about film director Kevin Smith getting removed from a flight for being overweight. Apparently he &#8216;tweeted&#8217; about the event, and his 1.64 million followers went into a lather on his behalf, forcing the airline to make an awkward apology. The weight issue aside&#8230; 1.64 million followers?! Wow, I&#8217;m overwhelmed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15536\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}