Psychology, Marketing, and Guesting
Good morning readers. It's a bright winter morning here, just above freezing and getting warmer, which means the snow is going away. I may enjoy photographing snowflakes, but I don't want the snow to linger for long!
I've been a busy lady, so I have two articles up for you all, one my regular column for writers at the Mad Genius Club, and the other a special guest post at Sarah Hoyt's blog According to Hoyt.
The 80/20 Rule
I think most of us are familiar with the eponymous rule, so often cited in business. My take on it is something along the lines of 80 percent of the effort makes 20 percent of the work get done… anyway, I saw it cited in a Goodreads article that drew me in with the title, and their take on it reminded me that it’s been a while since I talked straight-up marketing. “The rule of thumb for online marketing recommends spending 20% of your online time talking about yourself and 80% of it talking about other things”
Now, the article was purportedly about what readers want from Authors, which is why I clicked through to read it. What it was, though, was an article about how Goodreads would like authors to act on their site (i.e. A lot more interaction with that site) rather than what readers are really looking for from authors. That’s pretty simple: more books.
On the Psychology of Friendship and Social Media
I ran across a paper the other day about the correlation of social media and self-esteem. The study was conducted on people who posted a photo, and how they felt when it got a lot of ‘likes’ versus few or none. The results were not terribly surprising, but still interesting when teased out into a statistical analysis of the human reactions to one another. The takeaway from the paper: “we also predicted that having a sense of purpose in life – or a “self-organizing life aim that organizes and stimulates goals, manages behaviors, and provides a sense of meaning” would moderate the effect of likes on self-esteem.”
So, having a purposeful life means that one’s self-esteem is less contingent on external validation. Not that the external validation of one’s social media connections ‘liking’ one’s curated glimpses into one’s life means much. Unpacking this more, we start to see that a ‘like’ or even the slightly more effort of choosing an emoji that more nearly conveys a real reaction to a photo, is worth something only if we consider that the viewer could have scrolled on by without the reflexive tiny ‘click’ of a mouse. So little energy, so little time… and yet we give that power. We crave the flood of validation and the emotional rush it delivers to our brains, so we spend far more time and energy on creating just the right photo for our social media connections to get the maximum possible reactions to it. There are people who make a career out of this. It’s not hard to prove my point – google ‘Instagram Husbands’ for ridiculous articles about the travails of the man behind the camera catering to his needy partner while she poses and pouts.
I'll be back tomorrow with a Vintage Kitchen recipe. Today I'm off to enjoy the family, clean house, and get some cover design work pounded out. I might even find time to write!