I wish I would stop nagging me to join my social network

/ Scott Nagele

I admit it. I’m a naughty author.

Despite truckloads of sound advice instructing little guys like me to use every incarnation of social media to our advantage in promoting our books, I don’t have a Twitter account. I am often confounded by Facebook; I don’t understand the usefulness of Pinterest at all; and I don’t even know what Snapchat is.

I wouldn’t have a LinkedIn account except some people who have helped me out with my books invited me to become part of their networks and it didn’t seem right to ignore the requests. Does anyone else find it odd that they could invite me to join their networks when I wasn’t even signed up to the service?

My network is very small. I don’t really get LinkedIn. I guess it’s kind of like Facebook except people comb their hair for their profile pictures.

LinkedIn is spooky to me. It’s the haunted social media. I seem to have two versions of my profile on their servers somehow. Depending upon which browser I use to access the service, I either have the profile to which I added all of my jobs, education, and writing projects, or I have an abandoned-looking profile with little more than my name and a silhouette where my picture should be. It probably even has cobwebs, but I run away too quickly to check.

The camera makes me look 10 years younger.

The camera makes me look 10 years younger.

LinkedIn sends me lots of emails asking if I know certain people. That was merely a minor nuisance until they started getting freaky and asking if I knew Scott Nagele. For those who skipped over the tittle of this blog, that’s me.

I want to tell them I do know Scott Nagele, so quit asking me, but I don’t know how to do that without connecting to myself, which is not something you want to be caught doing beyond the teenage years.

Besides that, I have an eerie feeling that if I were able to tell them I know Scott Nagele, I would get a follow-up email asking, “Really? How well do you really know Scott Nagele?” I’m not prepared, at this time of my life, for that level of electronic soul-searching.

Maybe it’s the ghost of my phantom profile trying to contact me from beyond the Internet. “Know thine own self, lest ye turn to a dead, faceless profile like me.” (In that drawn-out, remorseful, ghostly moan.) (Oh yeah, and rattling chains.)

On the other hand, it could be my (barely) living profile trying to contact the graveyard profile through some sort of séance, using me as the medium. Either way, I’d like to be left out of it. I don’t go in for this kind of jiggery-pokery and I’d prefer it if my profiles would just leave me alone.

I’m afraid they won’t though. I fear worst will come to worst. Therefore, if you will give me a moment of privacy, I may need to connect to myself.

P.S. Click the “About My Books” tab at the top to see what I’m supposed to be talking about all over social media every day.

17 thoughts on “I wish I would stop nagging me to join my social network”

  1. I am SO with you on your skepticism about the so-called advantage of being socially networked. I don’t really like any of socials much, but LinkedIn is probably the worst of the bunch. I wish I had never answered a colleague’s call to “join their network” (when I was not a member either). It seems the joining gives LI access to your FaceBook and email account – and every email they can find linked to those accounts. So THAT means you don’t even have to join for LI to get access to your email. (Btw- even people whom I KNOW don’t even like me have supposedly sent an email asking me to network on LinkedIn.)

    The worst? LinkedIN equals e-pharmed in, equals waste of time spent deleting – and deleting – and deleting. LI contacts are the source of most of the e-marketing spam I have to delete or set a bazillion individual filters to trash. I guess there is some spam-rules loophole that allows “networked” individuals to email at will and it does not fall under the same constraints – despite the fact that I’ve tried telling the worst of the offenders (repeatedly) that I do not want their daily newsletters.

    WHATEVER you do, don’t join any groups. Not only does it logarithmically increase the spam factor, you then *also* get email notifications of what every member of the group posts on the LI playground. And you won’t believe what you have to go through to UN-link.

    Some time ago I set my blog to auto-post on LinkedIn (somewhere I have no patience to locate) and don’t want to lose whatever few visitors that generates, but I’m close to doing so anyway. It’s truly scummy – anything to increase page views. Follow the money.
    xx,
    mgh
    (Madelyn Griffith-Haynie – ADDandSoMuchMore dot com)
    – ADD Coach Training Field founder; ADD Coaching co-founder –
    “It takes a village to transform a world!”

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      • Yeah – it was late here, you touched a nerve, and I went a little nuts – sorry (but you should have seen my e-glut!). I think push marketing is as rude as showing up to a formal dinner party without an invite. TV commercials are bad enough, but what if you couldn’t turn them off, even if you didn’t continue to watch the shows? That’s LinkedIn in a nutshell. At least FaceBook marketing stays mostly on its own patch.

        The latest WordPress “improvement” has made me testy — especially since I’ve turned off various push notifications four times since they initiated them (I’m thinking they turn themselves back on any time I clear cache and cookies).

        I actually did a Monday Grumpy Monday post on e-glut after I wasted 6 hours over a 3-day weekend attempting to clean out my in box [DAILY email? Get a life! (and leave mine in peace)]

        In my opinion, you were wise indeed to avoid the headache!

        xx,
        mgh

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  2. PS. Pinterest is a graphics only format that is only useful from any sort of book-marketing standpoint if you have a few graphics on each of your articles to pin to your [virtual bulletin] “boards” in hopes that your followers will like them and repin – and that their followers will check you out and follow you too. Pins auto-link back to the generating article. I do get visits from Pinterest, btw – and my followers in both environments grow steadily tho’ slowly.

    HOWEVER, repeatedly pinning your book jackets won’t do it – nobody will repin, and Pinterest will eventually close your account for “spamming” your own boards.
    xx,
    mgh

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    • See now, MySpace sounds like the perfect thing for me. It sounds all comfy and cozy, like I can be involved in social media and still be left alone in a relaxing cocoon that is completely MySpace. And it’s a bonus that it works so well off my AOL account.
      And I’ll take a red A over a white whale any day.

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  4. Haha!

    I can’t think why I initially joined Linked In, but I did. It proceeded to send an invite to anyone and everyone I had ever contacted through email anywhere for any reason and it was quite embarrassing!

    On the other hand, it could be a good networking tool, though I am retired and don’t have a whole lot of interest in the job opportunity emails they keep sending me! 😉

    Good post. Too funny.

    Glad to meet you. Thanks for the visit to my page.

    Ann

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