You know those times when you think about something really hard for a long period, decide that you are indeed correct and then act on it… only to find that months down the line, nobody else thought your idea held any water?
I had one of those a couple of years back when I decided that social media was not a good place for me, closed all my accounts and threw all my eggs into the basket you see here. I figured some other people might see my reasoning also - and there were lots of reasons, such as: twitter being useless for saying anything because everybody else was also talking at the same time every second of the day, instagram/facebook being run by people (ie: your ‘marketing partner on the internet’) that thought it was OK to let other people post some foul comments/videos despite what came out of their mouths to the contrary… that’s a hot topic this week for all the wrong reasons too. That’s just the tip of the iceberg for me.
Anyway, I stuck with it and kept on walking away but I never saw anybody else figure out the same thing (maybe I was looking in the wrong place) but yesterday - being as I’m on a book binge at the moment - I was catching up around the place and saw that Joe Hill had resumed blogging. I like Joe a lot - his comic book series Locke & Key is quite superb.
In his ‘returning to blogging’ blog post, he wrote this piece and I hope he doesn’t mind me grabbing a piece from it (he really won’t mind at all if you go buy some of his books) to illustrate the point:
“It can be my space or it can be MySpace; something I own or something that belongs to Mark Zuckerberg. I went with me.”
Bang on the nose - took the words right out of my mouth. Think about it for yourself. It’s not easy getting out of the cult/s and staying out. It’s baffling as to how you might be able to make a difference to what you’re doing without them but in all honesty, I don’t recall ever selling a book from a social media post. Working those socials until you die is neat for some people who can make it work and don’t mind being associated with them but it’s not for me… and hey… my friends know my phone number and my email address so I’m not missing out on that front. Hell… some of them even come round.
Read that piece from Joe. It makes a lot of sense. At some point, you really do have to stand for something.