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I’m sure I mentioned it before, but this is the year I try to boost my own professionalism because I want to be taken more seriously. This has got me thinking about a few things that have kind of steamrolled, so I’m going to try to cover them as best I can. So bear with me.
When I set out on this adventure of publishing, I thought I should reveal my true persona from the outset. This did attract people and helped me gain a lot of support that I wasn’t getting from other corners. Unfortunately, there was the downside to this. I’m not a 100% positive and happy person, so problems arose when the other side reared up. Only a handful of people can be friends with everyone and I’m not one of those mutants of mankind. I have issues and abrasive parts of my personality, so I have to hold those out of the spotlight. At least until I reach a level of success that means I can be as eccentric and kooky as an escaped lunatic.
Professionalism really is hard to maintain because you want to let people know there’s a living human being behind the books. Yet you don’t want to let the readers so far in that they think they have a decision in the story. Some distance does need to be maintained or one plot twist will cause drama. This is probably why so many authors have PR people since these incidents spill into the public arena and can take a chunk out of your professionalism. Those of us inside the indie author world know how these things work, but an outsider (most readers) won’t have any clue beyond the author’s public actions or those taken toward the author. That brings me to:
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This train of thought immediately brought me to the ‘joy’ of social media and how we’re no longer private creatures. Our lives are out for the world to see thanks to these sites and this happens whether we’re on there or not. All you need is a friend who loves posting pictures and you’re on there. Whether it’s a family gathering, a friend’s birthday party, or the background of a kegger that someone posted on Throwback Thursday, you’re probably on Facebook. You can demand it gets taken down or make a rule, but I’m finding that most people who do this are rather unwilling to agree.
I’m singling the big one out here because that’s where most of my grief has come from. I have several things set for privacy and ‘friends only’, but someone can share those things to make them public. People post things to my wall to be funny, but some of them are rather crude and awkward. I’m not always given a choice if this thing goes live or not. I’ve had friends tag me in embarrassing pictures that I’m not even in, but they think someone looks like me. There have been so many public fights on there that I’m starting to believe that the only purpose of Facebook is to tear friendships apart. Disturbing thing is that I’m seeing people claim that fights on social media can’t be held against them off-line. So they get into a vicious political debate with a sibling and believe that conversation cannot be used against them during the next face-to-face.
There are many days that I think social media is a hindrance to professionalism. People get fired for what they do on there even if it doesn’t have to do with their job. Sad thing is that without Facebook, I wouldn’t know about pregnancies, weddings, engagements, divorces, graduations, and most big events for friends and family. I would drop it if I didn’t have that, a few people I chat with on there, and the author page. So I have to make rules for myself to keep it clean:
- Keep things basic and use friends only for personal stuff.
- Avoid all fights. Block and unfriend anyone that decides to start such fights with me.
- Act with professionalism even on there because one never knows who is watching.
- I cannot control the actions of other people.
Do you have any social media rules?
