Indie Writers & Social Media - Part 1

David Shaw © 2010

The Worst of Times

The writers at a recent seminar wanted to know how to use social-media to sell their wares. Later at a gathering of journalists a woman complained about the low word rates paid to freelancers, and said she was going to start a blog.

She didn’t know that less than 10% of blogs have a livable revenue stream. Blog revenue runs around $4 per 1000 readers per publishing cycle. Some well known blogs only have 20,000 readers.

As Dickens might have texted today to his followers on Twitter, “This is an awesome time to be an indie writer. Not.”

Let’s deal with the “worst of times” first. I’ll write about the best of times in a follow up, because there is opportunity here too.

We live in an age when tremendous forces are combining in ways that make the immediate future unknowable. We can only read the tea leaves and poke the chicken’s entrails, without the help of the fumes-sniffing Oracle at Delphi. Please, give me back sailing ships, sealing wax and slow communications. (Yes, the Oracle was high.)

What we see in our cups is commoditization of nearly everything. Globalization, Moore’s Law, gross speculation in financial markets, outsourcing labour, the open-source movement and other factors are making everything made of bits and bytes a commodity. And, with a commodity you can only profit through volume sales, aggregation, or specialization in a high-value niche market.

Add the web to this mix and it turns established business models inside out. Coming to our rescue is the latest superhero, social media. Not.

Money for Nothing, Chicks for Free...

Everyone thinks social media is the road to riches. Every time I run into one of the below claims, I'm reminded of the guy in the store watching MTV in the hit song Money for Nothing by Dire Straits.

• The guest on Breakfast Television was explaining to the host how he became a multi-millionaire selling wine on FaceBook.

And he had written a book to prove it; and all we had to do was buy his book and we, too, could become millionaires. I never bought the book, but I guarantee that if you did you wouldn’t find a single solid clue in it about how to use FaceBook to sell product. If you really want some clues, go read Wikinomics and the Long Tail, my favourite books in case you haven't noticed.

But you still won’t be able to use FaceBook or some other social media because they’re not sales tools, they’re promotional tools. That’s a big difference.

• The presenter at a seminar was prattling on about how he had three degrees of separation from President Obama.
  

So what! At one time I had two degrees of separation from a past Prime Minister. I figure there must have been at least 30,000 people who could say the same thing.

• Another presenter at a high-tech seminar was extolling LinkedIn and explaining how he spent several hours a day working his network.

He said, just imagine, if you have 100 people in your first level and they each have 100 people, and they each have 100 people, well, Holy *** Batman, you would have one million people in your third level. Absolutely amazing! Hello? How many hours a day will it take you to work your third level?

• FaceBook is larger than any television network

With more than 400 million members, that's true. But...suppose your market is young women in the USA aged 25-34. Using data from late 2009, there's a bit more than 23 million men and women on FaceBook in that demographic, and women run around 56%, so your 25-34 demographic is around 13 million. That's a long way from 400 million. And we haven't even looked at any Spanish-English or other language splits.

In comparison, American Idol pulls around 29.8 million men and women per episode. All to say that you should always analyse any claims about anything.

Anyway you can’t manage these large numbers manually. If you’ve read any of my previous articles, you know that I don’t discount the network effect, but I argue that the software has to run filters to make meaningful connections.

It’s different if you’re a local masseuse or pie maker or pub, with a few hundred loyal customers. Then, you can use Twitter or some other social media as a promotional tool for your sausage links.

For example, the Avant Garde bar in my town uses a simple email newsletter far more effectively than most nightclubs use FaceBook. The Mercury Lounge is a slight exception; its social director knows how to use FaceBook very well but you still won't find a FaceBook login on the club's web page. There's no cross-promotion to create the buzz I've written about in previous articles.

Ultimately social media is a marketing tool, not a sales tool. Even as a marketing tool, it can only be used to support an existing brand. It cannot be used to develop a new brand: the average number of friends on FaceBook is around 110; the average number of followers on Twitter is 10. That's not brand territory.

From a sales perspective you could spend hours a day working your network and never convert a single person to a sale outside your family. Never mind reaching your third level.

Next Time

I'll write more about a social-media strategy for writers in a multi-part follow-up: watch for Indie Writers & Social Media – Part 2 coming soon to a pixel screen near you.