Fun with social media

I’ve been playing with some new (well, to me) social media stuff, largely because of my job, but also because it’s fun - plus needing to know about all this stuff for my job helps me justify the time and energy spent on it all.

After some prodding from Amber Rhea I joined Twitter back in June and have been really into it. I use it to let people know what I’m working on, but also to give snippets of info about more intimate stuff that I don’t necessarily have the time/energy/inclination to blog: from the naughty, to the mundane, to the sad.

I created a Facebook profile after following along with Susan Mernit’s experiences. I haven’t entirely figured out what purpose it will serve for me personally, though I suspect that I’ll try and maintain my page as a kind of inner circle way of finding out what people I’m keen on are working on. This contrasts with the approach I take to MySpace, which is essentially that I’ll add anyone whose page doesn’t make my browser crash and who doesn’t sexually harass me after I’ve said no thanks (these are actually kind of lofty standards for MySpace). So far my favorite thing about Facebook is all the applications, especially that I can add apps in a way that effectively makes my page an aggregator of the social media stuff I’m up to: Twitter, Stumbleupon, and Del.icio.us - plus the iRead book app makes me happy in the learny parts.

MySpace, on the other hand - ugh, it’s such a clusterfuck, and I feel like I’ve had a page there forever. But I do feel like it’s a necessary evil for promoting my shit and connecting with people. Although for me Google is the go-to place when I want to cyberstalk, er, I mean research a person, I’ve been surprised by how many people seem to use MySpace as the first go-to place to find me (and other people, I assume). There is a decent number of folks who message me after searching for me on the site, and then myprofile becomes an intro to all the other webaction I’m rocking. This alone has convinced me not to shut down my profile, and makes it almost worth dealing with messages that ask me to chat or are from guys who want to drink my bath water (true story). I pretty much never get email messages like that anymore, it only seems to happen on MySpace. Maybe I should just start writing back things like “Don’t you know who I am? I am (in)famous and you are like the buzzing of flies to me!”

I’m also messing around a bit with the whole social recommendation thing, which I think I’m just beginning to understand a little better. I signed up for a Digg account about a year ago, and this week I’ve tried to muster some interest in it. The thing is, I just don’t like Digg. I think it sucks, it’s totally a boy’s club (and I am pretty comfortable in boy’s club situations, having worked in the sex biz for 6 years), and it’s ultra competitive. The race to post something first, to comment quickly, all that stuff… it’s stressful and lame and I just don’t really care. Also, reactions to sexually related material tend to be not awesome. That’s not just sex stuff though, it’s really everything - I mean, I like a like dose of snark (even a heavy dose), but the whole mean-ness thing just doesn’t fly with me.

Stumbleupon, however, I just adore. Part of this is because it’s got a basic bloggy format that makes sense to me, and it’s got an easy-to-use tool bar so I can thumbs-up thumbs-down stuff without surfing over to the site to do anything, plus when I discover sites there’s a pop-up for me to write a review in. In a way, Stumbleupon is kind of a personalized BoingBoing, but I think the thing I’m most fascinated by is the fact that it seems much more international than a lot of other sites I’ve played with. That probably has something to do with the structure of the site, but it’s cool to look in my visitors sidebar and see that recently people who live in Wales, Serbia, and a dozen other faraway places have dropped in on my page.

There are also two (maybe more) porn-specific social recommendation sites, Stumbleporn and Socialporn, which I haven’t amply explored. But they are on my list.

In my own blogging life, I just haven’t really cared about landing my posts on social recommendation sites, though I know the lust for diggs is what drives a lot of blogging content. This just seems ridiculous to me, partly because I know that people who like top ten lists or blow job tips or vapid sexiness aren’t going to be down with my overly-analytical self. And I don’t really care. I certainly don’t feel sad that I’m missing out on all the abuse that is par for the course with that kind of traffic. I would prefer that the right eyes see my website - the search term “audacia ray” has for months been the #1 search term that brings people here. I much prefer a relatively low-traffic blog with a quality readership I like interacting with to bursts of hits from people who don’t really care or get it. Also, I see my blog as a piece of the puzzle, and I don’t want to transform it into a money making machine - it’s my thinking/talking place, a supplement to my book writing, movie directing, art show curating, magazine editing, appearance making, and event organizing.

That said, I do think a presence on these various social media sites is valuable - I can already see a slight increase in traffic from my Stumbleupon page, and I know that traffic is going to the PEEQ as well. I’m not totally shy about marketing myself and my employer - these things are important, I need to be noticed, the PEEQ needs to get visited and engaged with. But there has to be some social value to the whole operation as well. I know I can’t be totally selfish with the links I recommend, that’s pretty transparent. So, I write/post/link to a lot of stuff that isn’t self serving, and it’s not a chore, because I really am engaged with this stuff, I really am obsessively clicking around the dirty parts of the Internet.