This is Part 4 in my ongoing series explaining my experiences going from a relatively unknown writing schmuck to an Amazon best-selling author. Today's post is about the ugly, annoying, nasty side of LinkedIn. Also why people are idiots. This is the third (and final) post about my LinkedIn experience, so if you haven't yet read the first one, you should probably scroll down & start with the Jan. 4th blatherings.
I don't mean to bad-mouth LinkedIn, BTW. And I don't want you to think I've abandoned it. In fact, just the opposite is true. I've become more active on LinkedIn since my excursions began.
And yet...
So there I was, at the very top of this crazy post that had 18 months of running commentary and over 3,700 comments... and I had just promised myself to scroll through them ALL and connect with all those authors.
The first page wasn't so bad. People were saying it was a great idea & posting their Facebook links. Every once in a while someone would mention: 'Hey John" or "Hey Jennifer, your link is broken." Nice stuff, you understand? But LinkedIn doesn't have the tag feature that Facebook has, so many of these comments were clearly going unnoticed.
By the third or fourth page, people were starting to have small conversations with each other. Things like how to get the link working or explanations that they'd already "liked" that person from some other venue. Again, still pretty nice. But it was kind of annoying because it took my computer a good 5 or 10 seconds to load the next 5 comments, and many of them weren't even links to people's Facebook pages.
Then, I saw the first re-post. Someone got smart enough to realize that some people were working bottom-to-top instead of top-to-bottom and probably would never reach the top. So if they re-posted their link, it would be at the bottom (the most recent comment) and far more likely to get noticed.
Talk about a snowball rolling downhill, it instantly became uber-popular.
All of a sudden, every fifth link was a re-post. And it quickly became really annoying b/c my computer took another 5 or 10 seconds to load the relevant Facebook page... only to discover, yup, I already 'liked' that person. Thanks for wasting my time.
Then it turned into every third link. Then two or three in a row started cropping up. It wasn't long before I'd scroll through whole pages and only see one or two genuinely new authors to connect with. I was starting to recognize their pictures, which helped in not bothering to re-click their links, but in addition the occasional conversations from earlier were also starting to take on a life of their own. I was going from annoyed to frustrated.
Suddenly these side conversations were turning from "Hey, here's how I can help you," into "Hey jerk, why do you need to be a screen-hog? Let the est of us play too, ok?!" (Alright, it wasn't quite that bad, but definite tones of anger and jealousy were evident).
By the end of my first night scrolling through 18 months of comments, I had made it through 8 months and was nevertheless feeling pretty good. I'd already begun to see my Facebook numbers increase, and two or three people were even chatting with me in private messages. Very nice people, on the whole. Very interesting. But it had been an exhausting 6 or 7 hours, and I needed sleep.
The next night I jumped in with gusto, intent on finishing the whole thing and getting "caught up!" as many people were frequently posting. I had only 10 to go. I could do that.
No. I couldn't. You couldn't either.
As time went on, it seemed, each month collected more and more comments, most of them useless or re-posts. I did spend another 6 or 7 hours that night, but I only got through another FOUR months. And what was worse, I was starting to notice how many people had no idea what they were doing. (The idiots I've alluded to several times).
These people could't get their links to work (just copy from the page's entry bar and paste it here... how hard is that?)
These people couldn't find somebody's name on their list of likes so clearly they MUST be lying about actually clicking a little button so why not bitch about THAT for another 2 and half weeks?
And when it was pointed out that a Facebook "like" coming from a page (ie: your author page) rather than your personal account (ie: your real name) for some reason doesn't contribute to Facebook's LIKE-COUNT, it got even MORE complicated. Some people apologized, but most just complained, whined, and argued. This wasn't what I had wanted to get into. I just wanted to network with other authors.
Yada yada yada, you get the point.
Day three... repeat of day two.
Day four... repeat of day three.
Except I still wasn't done because I was making more and more connections on Facebook and having more and more nice/fun/interesting private conversations (one of which was actually pretty awesome... more on that next time), which of course was taking more and more time away from my progress through the LinkedIn post.
I think I finished on Day 6 in an eyes-blurred, balls-to-the-wall, 10-hour marathon that took me through the night and well into the weekend.
Yay for me. I had done it, and my Facebook numbers, connections, and general status as an author was growing.
It was a bit disappointing for yet another reason, though, because I'd probably only gotten a return of half the people I'd taken the time to 'like' and send a polite private message to.
*humph*
Oh well, perhaps they're busy this week. I'll probably hear from them in a few days.
This turned out to be partially true. Many more did straggle in over the next week or two, and even today I'm still getting the occasional person (more than a month later, mind you) who is responding to the message I sent back in mid-December. But a solid third of the people I connected with have still unequivocally ignored me.
*grrrrr*
I was tired. I was frustrated. And even worse, I was feeling pretty guilty that I hadn't done a bit of writing in a whole week...
[Ever notice how that 'guilty' thing keeps coming up? It's almost like there's a theme here.]
... and all in favor of basic marketing. Ug. Is that what the life of the modern day author is going to be all about?
Answer: Yes. Yes it is. You don't have to do it all at one time like I did, but unless your name is Rowling, Grisham, King, or Steele, you're going to be doing your own marketing as a writer.
There's one more thing I want to tease...er, tell you about. By the time I got done with all this, I had gotten to thinking that there must be a better way to do it all. And there is. I know because I invented it.
:D
But next time I think I'll tell you about that one awesome private conversation I had that ended up changing everything. Of all the hours and all the frustrations I'd done, I would do them all again if I gained only ONE connection, but it turned out to be as useful as this one.
Satisfyingly yours,
-K.
ps: Words written since last week: Astonishingly, yes, I actually wrote new words!! More than 1300, in fact. I've been revising my newest novel lately, and most of the time all I'm doing is deleting/ changing/ & moving. But yesterday I happened to come across a section that needed a new character. So I wrote new words! Go me! (He's nasty, too. Exactly the kind of guy who would troll LinkedIn feeds to annoy people. Actually, come to think of it, he's much worse than that).
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