Never Decide To Write A Book Because You Are Pissed Off...

Written by Robert Bacal |

I've written something like 20 books (published) and hundreds of articles, also published, and I swear to goodness I'll have to live another 200 years to figure out how to manage myself to be a top notch writer. The good news is that I'm always learning, and making mistakes and I'm happy to share.

So, I'm goofing around on social media and getting angrier and angrier at the incredible levels of BS that are coming out of almost everyone's mouths about the great revolution and how business MUST get on board or die. Uh huh. Been there. Heard it. And I see the books pouring out saying the same things everyone is saying, and now I'm getting really pissed off.

I can do this, and what's more, I have something DIFFERENT to say that will actually stop people from wasting valuable resources on social media because of the overwhelming hype. Golly, there's no data even to support all of this.

So, I get serious. I'm going to write a book, called Giving the Business To Social Media... and I get about 50% through the writing (it's hard because the topic is huge and I have to research some of it), and then I realize that not only am I pissed off about the situation, but I'm also sickened by the stuff that passes for information, AND it's not fun anymore. I wade through spam on LinkedIn, and find out about Aunt Grizelda's guppy, on Twitter, and Facebook, Lord knows what's there, but it's just not fun.

And, now my anger is wearing down. That's the thing about anger. Unless it's about something really important that is essential to your values and life (like war, child abuse, that kind of thing), it's hard to maintain it long enough and at a proper pitch to last the entire process of writing a book.

Oh sure, you can get a good couple of rants from some self-righteous anger but a whole book, over months? Meh.

So, I figure. Ok. I'll first write a mini-guide, because I can do that faster, but I can say a lot of the same things as in the big book. And, man that's boring, and now my anger is just old and tired, hobbling around in a walker.

So, now I've shelved both, and I'm just finishing up a project on performance management about which I have written about before. I don't need to be angry to write about that.

The moral of the story, if there is one is that anger is only good fuel for short pieces of writing that can be completed faster than your anger can fade.

PS. The social media projects aren't shelved permanently, but just until I'm not so turned off by what I see on social media, and I finish some other writing project that don't require anger fuel.

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Social Media Peril

MicroThoughts

The biggest peril facing social media users and businesses has to do with trust. Anyone can be anybody they choose in social media since there are no even close to adequate methods to verify identities. The peril lies with users who, after interacting with someone they think they know, will believe they know them well enough to trust them as if they had known them for a long time. It's a dangerous situation on many levels, and I wish social media proponents would start educating people as to the dangers. Even if a person is who they say, we have no idea of the vested interests and agendas, and that's one reason to verify anything important heard via social media.

No Social Media Experts

There's no such thing as a social media expert. Anyone who claims that is lying, so hide your wallet. First, it's all changing almost daily for anyone to be on top of all of it. Second, there are literally hundreds of social media platforms, and nobody is conversant with all of them. Third, it's still all too new. Fourth, there's lots of opinions around, but very little good data to support the opinions. There are people who know a lot about one thing (like Twitter), or a little about a lot of things, but nobody knows a lot about a lot of things in social media. Yet!

Mashable no-no

In response to a Mashable article about how Starbucks supposedly used social media to bring one million people into their stores in a day:

This is just terrible "journalism". First, the giveaways brought the people in. Second, we have no idea how many people came for the freebies hearing on it from Twitter or not. Third, They could have pulled people into their stores with this promotion in any of a number of ways. This is not a social media success, anymore than having sandwich board guys outside of each store would constitute a success for loitering.

SocialMediaBust