Social networking sucks…time

So, today? Not a good day. The weather is cold enough to require me putting on jeans, a sweatshirt, and socks. My legs are useless and I'm needing a cane to get around the house. The pain in my legs is making me irritable, so I'm having to work hard to avoid snapping at people. And I'm groggy even hours after being awake, which only adds to my irritation.

Probably not my best time to blog. Still I wanted to talk about both Neil Gaiman and Warren Ellis leaving Google+ QUICKLY because they couldn't sort out real friends or contacts from the flood of people they didn't know. And the friend finder on Google+ is also useless.

These are paid writers looking at the social software setup and they're saying the exact same thing I've been saying: "This isn't going to work for our needs." And it doesn't. It's not a flaw now that all the riffraff has been let in, because Google+ already has these flaws right at the very beginning.

I said this before but I want to point it out again. I don't want to use social software to talk to complete strangers about my love of a TV show. I don't care if strangers want my opinion on which is a superior band, Interpol or MGMT, and most of the status updates I put out, I do so because someone has told me, "You need to share your hobbies. Nobody will care about you or your stories if they can't identify with you."

Well, I've been at this social sharing thing for almost two years now. I've got a whole lot of followers, but you know what I don't have to match those numbers? A whole lot of sales.

You know the rules of social sharing? I mean the rules about how you share other stuff besides your product, or that you have to engage other people about topics that interest them, or that you need to share other peoples' links and causes to show that you're a good member of the community.

All this will do is bring more people trying to sell you their stuff. No, trust me, I've been following the rules right from the start. I'm still happily RTing WebLit folks even though I left the WebLit community. Not because I want them to RT my books, but because it's the "damn decent" thing to do. But, that extra karma does not translate into sales from the other followers, or even into extra traffic to my blog. There's some people who only read me through Twitter. And while that is kinda cool, it still doesn't address my core problem with the service or its browser based cousins, which is to say, it does not find me new readers for my stories.

I can't really see that there's much point to any social network when most of the people I know use it to bitch and complain about other people. On any given day, the mood on my streams may become so hostile and nasty that I have to shut off the browser and Tweetdeck. And mostly, people complain about normal behavior and act like it's some terrible thing. Yeah, I get rough days too. I'm having a bad day now, but you can't find anything in my complaints about my neighbors on my social sites. I do what I do and let them worry about their own lives. But a lot of you people prefer to whine in a passive aggressive way, so your sociopathic friends online can like your whiny ass comments. Which validates your anti-social whining, and makes you think "Hey, I'm not so bad."

It's all gladhanding. More to the point, it's useless reinforcement of negative habits and it doesn't accomplish much beside giving people a place to vent. But, considering how often vents go public and result in public humiliation, job loss, family in-fighting and/or attempted murder, I don't think this method of using the social sites is a good idea. It isn't, but it is in fact the most popular use for the site: collective whining.

And, although some of you may think I'm being petty and greedy for saying this, I would much rather use the social sites to bypass all the self-published wannabes and just look for readers. Because the wannabes all talk about supporting each other, but they all mean the same thing: "Buy my book. I won't buy yours, but thank you for supporting me, sucker."

Which is why I have never done the rah-rah indie bullshit. I support indie art, yes. That's my personal choice, and I choose who I support with finicky discretion. But I don't expect reciprocation from the artists I support. It's nice if I can get another writer to read my stuff, sure. But I hate "You buy my book and I'll buy yours" arrangements. How about "I'll buy your book if it interests me, and you do the same" instead? (And that doesn't even work for bands or artists working with graphic media.) And instead of making this proposal, I'd much rather find readers who might want my stuff. And for those people, sure, I'll be happy to talk about Teen Wolf, indie music and vampires. I'll share their stuff and lend support to their causes, absolutely. But I'm more likely to want to help because these people are buying my books. I've already go my incentive for wanting them to stick around, yanno? And that's called customer service, something I can totally give to people paying my royalty checks. (Well, technically, I get direct deposits, but you get the idea.)

But there really isn't a way to just find readers on any social network. I can't go on Facebook and run a search string like: Reader +likes fantasy, dark fantasy, zombies. (That won't work on Google or Twitter either.) I should be able to, in theory, because the system is tracking people who like reading, dark fantasy, and zombies. But the search system won't let me search for people in that specific way that I need as a writer. Instead, it will only let me look for other writers who I know by name, or for other people I used to know and want to look up.

Don't get me wrong about social networks. I like hanging out on them when the mood of the stream isn't running more on piss and vinegar than milk and honey, but I've never not had the feeling that I'm wasting my time on any network. Yes, even my beloved Twitter. But at least there, I admit I'm using it to waste time. So in that regard, yes, it serves its purpose.

But it's no bustling market of readers. I have 900 followers, and only a tiny handful of readers. I have an even smaller number of superfans, and even those folks can miss my promotions under the flood of other people they follow. This is not a great business tool. Its not a great marketing tool. It's a time suck that lets me procrastinate when I'm not in the mood to do real work. So I go chat online and pretend that counts as work.

Social networks are great for goofing off. But they don't improve productivity, connectivity, or generate mega sales.

Final thought. Over on Facebook, lots of people like Amnesty International. Liking it is easy. However, very few people actually donate to the cause, and breaking down the ratio of actual donations to likes, it turns out that for Amnesty International, they make about 9 cents per like. And that's a good cause that more people should support financially, but don't. If a good cause like Amnesty International cannot earn money from their social presence, what good can I hope to accomplish with my projects? I can collect only a fraction of the follows and likes that those guys have, and only a fraction of my audience will buy anything from me. So aside from wasting time, social networks are as worthless as an extra pair of breasts on Jabba the Hut.