(~4 minutes to read)
What’s your take on the “ample supply” of pictures of funny kittens, cute puppies and fluffy bunnies that are doing the rounds on social media?
Opinions likely span the entire spectrum, from “Jail the kitten posters” to “We need fluffy bunny pictures everywhere, and I mean everywhere!” Who knows—the spectrum may be even wider!
My blogs recently celebrated their first birthday, an occasion that didn’t receive any recognition whatsoever. Not a sausage. It’s okay—I wasn’t expecting any! The reasons are obvious: I haven’t done much (if anything) to make my sites “sticky” to the search engines. My plan has always been to populate the sites with enough readable content to interest a variety of tastes, and then start smearing it with honey (or some other sticky substance.)
That time has come. So armed with a copy of Kristen Lamb’s Rise of the Machines—Human Authors in a Digital World, I’m now planning what’s needed. Assuming that she revealed all (or the most potent) of her “secrets” in her book, all I have to do is follow her book step by step by step; right?
Worry ye not—I know that’s not true. But given that I found Kristen’s blog easily, and I found her book easily, and I bought the darned thing, she must be doing something right (that’s litotes, I believe), so I’d be doing both her and myself a disservice if I didn’t heed her advice.
And that’s where the pictures of kittens/puppies/bunnies come in.
Or might.
Turns out that to get “out there”, you have to embrace social media—FB, Twitter and the like. (Why is that such a surprise to me?) And since both FB and search engines in general like pages with images on, the written word gets demoted to little more than an embellishment.
It’s said that a picture’s worth a thousand words. Online, it seems that a picture’s worth a thousand “Pick me!” points.
Kristen Lamb makes frequent references to kittens – twelve in all. So; taken literally, her advice seems to be, “post pictures of kittens with your great writing and you’ll be a hit with millions of kitty-loving tweeters and FaceBookians.” (BTW, what is a Facebook citizen referred to as?)
Okay—maybe that’s a tongue-in-cheek observation. I’m smart enough to realize that (a) she almost certainly doesn’t expect her readers to take everything literally, and (b) one person won’t be right about everything!
While much of what Lamb writes makes perfect sense, some of it flies in the face of other “expert” advice out there—blogging/tweeting/posting frequency for one. There’s also advice out there that suggests people who use the word “maven” should be avoided, whereas mavens are one class of friend that Lamb recommends you encourage. I hope you see the double dilemma there for me.
Disclosure. I’m not outgoing and gregarious. This means that (among other things,) I can’t initiate conversations or new topics at social gatherings. Overlay that handicap on a person poised to let himself loose on social media, and you’ll witness the equivalent of a racing greyhound in his open trap with no mechanical hare to chase.
Another huge handicap is my cynical opinion of networking. Too many people do it for the “what’s in it for me” payout, so in order to not be put in the same pigeonhole, I shy away from networking. Result—I have no network.
I am, however, a good listener. But in the social media world, listening is invisible, and therefore pointless unless I indulge in active listening; I haven’t yet determined how well-received empathetic interjections would be in the “conversations” of complete strangers.
Back to those kittens.
I’m allergic to cats. Itchy skin, runny eyes allergic. But I do find them cute. What I struggle with is the compulsion of so many people to use lolcats and the like as a conversation facilitator. It’s probably fear of the unknown, if truth be told—after all, people talk to complete strangers on the street or in the park if there’s a cute puppy to pet! I did once hear dogs referred to as “chick magnets”, although the dated terminology suggests it was either a long time ago or it was a creep that uttered those words.
I guess I could look upon kittypix sharing as the virtual pet equivalent of petting someone’s puppy on the footpath. (A bit like the Tamagotchi craze in the 1990s.)
Having taken a quick look at some of my writing heroes’ Twitter pages, I see very few infant animal pictures. Neither Charles Dickens nor Samuel Pepys nor Samuel Johnson nor Mark Twain, nor Terry Pratchett appear to have embraced fluffy bunnies, nor have Christopher Moore or Jasper Fforde. I was unable to check on P.G. Wodehouse, and I strongly suspect Alan Coren is being impersonated. Douglas Coupland has a few pictures and videos of critters (birds, dog), but no kittens (recently).
So if Dickens and co. can maintain such a following from their respective graves without the need to post feline images, it’s possible that I, without the handicap of being deceased (for the time being), should be able to find other “bait” for my work.
Okay—there’s that small question of the difference in writing talent between them and me.
We shall see.
In the meantime, let me leave you with a quote on Mark Twain’s Twitter feed (so surely he must have said it…) “Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.”
What would he have thought of “social” media? I suspect he might have appreciated my quotation marks.