Fear of Commitment: My search for the perfect platform, Part II
Confessions of a Platform Impostor
Confessions of a Platform Impostor
This is a follow-on to an earlier post I wrote, Fear of Commitment.
In 2005, when I was a social media consultant (though back then there really was no real name for this work), I was asked to create buzz on MySpace (yes, MySpace) for a new influencer service that enabled widgets on MySpace pages. I had to reach out to numerous MySpace stars and convince them to try the widget, thus exposing their audiences to the widget and growing adoption.
I wasn’t a big user of MySpace, but I was a blogger, and I understood the fundamentals of social influence. Very few digital influencers were getting paid back then, so marketers had to approach them with the promise of increased audience or influence, which really was the only currency at that time.
Even then I knew that this project was daunting. Why would a MySpace star agree to adorn her precious page with someone’s promotional flotsam? I worked with my client on ways to make the widget customizable for the few superstars that would take it on.
Since 2005 influence has only become more complicated. Brands have entered the fray and are wielding their own influence. But each platform is different and holds its own intuitive laws of shareability, acceptable editorial/advertorial quotient, and coolness.
I have also realized the inherent conflict in my status as an “early adopter” of media tech with my challenge of embracing all new platforms early and understanding their complexities, when, quite frankly, I don’t want to. While some of my colleagues will figure out how to willfully commit to developing proficiency, I noncommittally acknowledge the platform like I did Rollerblading when it became hot in the late ’80s, watching folks glide past me in followers, boards, episodes, curations and audience.
When Twitter blipped on our radars in 2007 (I recall that year at SXSW; everyone was tweeting each other), I waited almost a year before begrudgingly setting up an account, not sure exactly when I would use the service, but afraid I would miss the polemical grumblings of the digerati if I didn’t. I was already staying up at night trying to make a dent in my RSS feed and was afraid of adding another wave of content to my essential reading. But I appreciated the additional promotional device for my own content, as blog trackbacks were generating little to no traffic for me.
While Twitter became addictive for most bloggers, it remained this ephemeral source of content, too hard to capture before more of it washed over me (don’t even get me started with Snapchat). I became one of the millions of passives who accepted new followers, clicking over to the service on the occasions I received personal notifications. I retweeted posts; I proved I had a pulse; but not much more than that. Certainly I didn’t offer up content made for Twitter. I was no Mindy Kaling.
I appreciated Chris Sacca’s recent deep analysis of Twitter’s usability issues; for years I struggled as a passive user of Twitter. A native of the media world I understood its importance in the collective digital conversation, but the difficulties I had with referencing content or following threads, and my refusal to embrace serial Tweeting I kept to myself. Even when folks like Jason Calacanis declared Twitter as THE tool for the media elite (use it or be irrelevant), even at BlogHer conferences, when Tweets overcame blog posts as a way of chronicling the event in real time, I could not integrate frequent Twitter interaction into my life. I couldn’t understand why someone who wasn’t specifically called out in a thread would want to read about someone’s 2a.m. burger binges. And I was OK with getting news in less-than-real time.
I was an early adopter of LinkedIn and Facebook but didn’t embrace them until much later. These platforms were one-note utilities that, similar to Twitter, I begrudgingly responded to when I was called to on email. I never actively sought friends or followers until years later, when these platforms also became curated content feeds, and when it became clear to me that (similar to blogging) proactive output meant better input. Just like I had set up RSS feeds years ago, I needed to follow the sources I would likely read or want to be updated by.
I cannot claim to have had any prescience of the hotness of either platform. I simply saw, over years of passive use, that I had amassed strong, relevant communities. Now, I am active on both, as a consumer, curator, and creator of content. It only took about seven years.
Pinterest, on the other hand, was a definite lean-in, and one only made possible by my maternity leave in 2010, during which time futzing around with a new platform meant strictly for eye-catching aspirational design ideas was even possible for me. Once I went back to work I stopped pinning or even looking at boards until I saw, in 2012, how much traffic the BlogHer Network was generating. By then there were rising stars and a lot of misperception around how to best use Pinterest. I dove into this platform via a business interest, though find myself pinning on occasion, when I happen to be browsing personal email, or on a weekend, when I’m likely procrastinating from doing some household project and see a really gorgeous door.
Door 5
Door to a house on Puig de Missa.buff.ly
I have a thing for doors. And gardens. And quilts.
Pinterest has the distinction of being the first platform I’ve ever used with no intention of creating or promoting content. It’s a filing system for me, a catalog of sorts. It’s my one pure view of a platform from a user’s (vs social strategist’s) eyes. It also lies dormant until infrequent periods of excess free time or aspirational need (i.e.: Maternity leaves or home renovation projects).
Instagram I am trying, but not truly embracing. I begged off when it first emerged as a platform, and even after it was acquired by Facebook and became a platform we engaged as a business. I felt that I saw plenty of images on FB, and I wasn’t much of a photographer. And I still have yet to create criteria for what makes an image suitable for FB, vs Instagram, or both. Recently, on a business trip to Europe and after a few glasses of wine, I started taking selfies of myself in different angles of light and experimenting with filters. Perhaps there is hope.
Regardless of platform I believe it’s always important to have a point of view, or set of rules, for who and how to engage. And with Instagram I still feel like I’m crashing a Grateful Dead Concert for the tie-dyed T-shirts — for the appearance of being somewhere versus for the experience of being there — and with little of the natural curiosity I had for blogging or Pinterest. Though I think I am steadily improving.
Medium is another platform I embraced on my (second) maternity leave. I had almost entirely abandoned blogging at that point, but had two seconds to rub together during naptimes to browse new platforms. I didn’t post to Medium then, it was still so new, but I kept watch. And, as evidenced by this post, I’ve moved my “longer-form” publishing over to it. (Quotes around longer-form because my work is nowhere near as long as my first blog posts used to be. Somehow, after all that exposure to Twitter, Facebook and visual platforms my attention span and ability to write long-form has completely contracted like an old, dessicated rubber band.)
At some point I will write about SnapChat, Meerkat/Periscope, and my foray into intriguingly revitalized podcasting, but finding “mojo” is mission critical. And until I get a mojo there’s little point.
The problem with committing to a new platform — hypocritical to my own business advice of just participating — is that we must honor the organic rhythms of these (wo)man-made, virtual creations. But these rhythms are forged by our collective use. Someone’s got to agree to get in front with a shovel and dig into new territory.
Therein lies the rub: The best users of these platforms are counterculturalists, urban artists creating despite the desolation of the neighborhood, making delicious concoctions with unnatural ingredients, making the artificial into authentic works of art. Basically they are people who see something in a new platform that others can’t. And there’s an element of luck there, since we can’t all be in the right place, at the right time of a platform’s genesis. They tell the truth in a vacuum. They make real stories with the end product of a tech entrepreneur’s business plan. These are the people any media tech founder needs to weed out.
The best platforms are reactions to the times in which they were born; not simply calls for attention. The print industry — and its shitty business model — was screaming for blogs to make publishing accessible and enable creative meritocracy. The platform’s compatibility with search engine algorithms made blogs easy to find.
And now, with the ubiquity of Facebook and distributed content models, only platforms that play with others and remove the Web 2.0 frictions of editing, formatting, and actively embedding links will survive. Portability is key. Automated attribution is a must. Those that make us work too hard, or expect us to transition our attention away from incumbents are asking too much.
My hesitation to take on new platforms is on one hand practical — I don’t have the time to commit to it; perfectionist — I don’t have the time to be great on this platform; and honest — I cannot pretend that this is the way I want to speak with the world. It’s that last consideration that is the most important. Some platforms become too ubiquitous for any of this to matter; we can go in an out at will. We’re not drawn to check our analytics on it constantly.
Eventually I hope to fall into a rhythm and patience with my online identity. I will be comfortable with my proclivities and see the landscape for what it is — an invitation to travel and perhaps even to stay a while. But only one of these places will be home.