Category: Social media

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Finding my tribe again on Bluesky

Robin Houghton Bluesky profile week 1

Like many people I’ve been humming and haaing about moving from Twitter/X to Bluesky. This week it finally seemed to be the right time. So I secured my name, thinking that I’d set the account up properly at a later date. But the interface was so familiar, so similar to Twitter, that I jumped right in. I haven’t closed my Twitter account, but I have pinned up a message about having gone to the other place.

A while ago I tried opening a Mastodon account but I couldn’t get used to it and struggled to find any conversations there. Part of the difficulty of moving is that it’s a huge hassle, not to mention the fear of losing all your followers and followees.  Plus Lists – I have always found Twitter’s List facility really useful. Although many of my lists are surely in need of a spring clean, nevertheless I’d be pained to lose them all. Then there are followers and following of course – though I suspect a big chunk of them are no longer relevant. I’ve been on Twitter since 2007 and during my really active years I was following tech types, social experts, futurists, PRs and anyone internet biz-related, clients, competitors etc. These days I have different interests and different reasons for spending time on social media.  The serendipity of social networks has always delighted me, which is one reason I left Facebook about 5 years ago. Facebook just felt like a walled community/echo chamber with no prospect of encountering randomly interesting people or opinions. I remember someone saying years ago that Facebook is where you hang out with the people you went to school with; Twitter is where you meet the people you wished you’d gone to school with. Of course, Twitter has since then been wrecked. I’d given up on ever reliving the joyous early days of Twitter. So imagine my excitement at finding another place where I could start again.

But where to start? My first lifesaver was a nifty Chrome extension called Sky Follower Bridge. When you run it, it will show you which of your Twitter followers, followees or list members are on Bluesky, and an easy way to to follow them. This meant that within a few hours I was following a hundred or so people who otherwise would have taken me ages to find. Then the messages started – people who I thought I’d lost on Twitter, or in real life, old friends welcoming me… it was wonderful. I had become so dissatisfied/disenfranchised from Twitter, and now here was proof that the lovely universe of likeminds and generally interesting people were still out there, no longer blanked out by all the trash and adverts.

I posted a bit about what I was doing, including my updating the submissions spreadsheet. Boom! That got people’s attention. And now I’m looking forward to spending a small amount of time each day nurturing my presence there. Finding new people to follow, reading, replying and reposting. So far, it feels like fun. Fingers crossed the Bluesky momentum carries on building, and may it forever resist the combined devilry of force-fed ads, bots, trolls, paywalls and malicious takeovers. Come on in, the water’s lovely.

 

 

Angst/

At last, some (a)live poetry events

ancient juniper tree

Having missed three Hastings Stanza meetings due to a choir commitment, next month I’m so looking forward to workshopping with everyone again around a table and the odd cup of tea or glass of wine. We restarted face to face meetings last autumn, and after all the months of having to ‘meet’ online it was such a joy. Actual, live events are just that, aren’t they? (A)LIVE. The same goes for live poetry readings – there are two lovely launch events coming up: first John McCullough is launching his new book Panic Response (Penned in the Margins) in Brighton next week, guaranteed to be a love-in for his many friends and fans, then in June poet friend Sarah Barnsley has very kindly asked me to be one her support acts at an informal launch of her brilliant collection, The Thoughts (Smith Doorstop).

In between, there’s a Needlewriters evening coming up on April 14th. I’ll have the privilege of ’emcee-ing’ this one, and hearing the excellent Peter Raynard whose new book Manland is forthcoming from Nine Arches in July.

Online blues

Like most people I put up with Zoom readings and events when it was the only thing allowed, and I hadn’t realised how much I loathed it until I started to contemplate the horror of online poetry events becoming a permanent thing. The ‘Zoom factor’ is having a detrimental effect on my decision about whether to return to the University of York to finish my MA later this year: as long as there is any chance whatsoever that seminars will be moved online, I can’t honestly contemplate returning.

Ironic really: twenty-five years ago, as an internet newbie I was basking in the excitement of what the Web had to offer, online for hours every night (this was in the US, where it was free!) and making friends across the globe (yes, actual people – some of whom I got to know in real life). I then spent the best part of twenty years working in online marketing and speaking, teaching, advocating and writing books about the power (and brilliance) of the internet for business, for communities and for communication generally.

And now? After nearly three months ‘resting’ from Twitter, I’m wondering just how much I missed it, if at all. In two days’ time it will be my 15th anniversary of joining. But the reasons I used to love it have gone, and I watch it being slowly poisoned by human behaviour and commercial interests. However, having ditched Facebook several years ago (with no regrets), I’m not about to jump ship from Twitter. But I will be carrying out some changes so I can enjoy it more.

Latest news about the collection

Version three of the manuscript is out the door and with the second of the wise poets who are helping me with ordering, culling, titling and general confidence. I finally have a working title that I think I like and will work. Huzzah! (No, that’s not it!) Meanwhile one of my newer poems has been taken by The Alchemy Spoon, and I have a dozen or so others out to other mags. I think I’m back in the submissions saddle.

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The updated poetry magazines submissions spreadsheet and my 1,000th subscriber

Stats are funny old things. Stats, data, whatever you want to call it. On their own of course, or deprived of context, they can be pretty meaningless, unless it’s a simple, one-dimensional calculation, like ‘this is my 609th post on this blog’. I just had to look that up – shame I missed the 600th, that might have been reason for a party. Percentages, averages and statements like ‘the number of xyz has doubled in the last two weeks’ are open to (mis)interpretation. After all, double or triple-next-to nothing is still next-to-nothing. But hey. What do I know. Only that I learnt the value of this kind of obfuscation many years ago as a marketer.

But here’s another simple statistic: last week, just as I was about to send out my quarterly update of the poetry magazines submission windows spreadsheet, my subscriber mailing list tipped the 1,000 mark. Woop! I decided it would be fun to ‘reward’ the 1,000th subscriber, but I didn’t promote the fact, because those types of tweets tend to attract compers, freebie-fans and lightning-fast unsubbers. In any case it’s not a huge reward, but it’s something – a free copy of my guide to getting published in UK mags. So, after not publicising the forthcoming prize I quietly checked my Mailchimp and identified the winner to be… drumroll etc etc… Jessica Boatright. I was delighted to discover that not only is Lincolnshire-based Jessica a poet, tutor and mentor – but also her Twitter name is @oh_so_boatie – brilliant!

If you’re not on the list to get the updates, it’s free and you can sign up here.

Children & poetry/

A question about ‘poechreay’

I’m expecting my granddaughter to be offered a book deal any time now. Last week she gave me a card with a question written on it, somewhat out of the blue, and I wasn’t sure how to answer, so I did what any diligent nana does, I asked the Twittersphere:

How does poechreay work tweet

I was stunned by how much it was shared and liked, to be honest. Within a couple of days it had had over 100,000 impressions and nearly 10,000 ‘engagements’. But most of all I was touched by the replies. People really took time to answer helpfully, creatively and encouragingly. Someone even said they had thought about it all night before replying. Many of the replies were addressed to Hazel by name, which was lovely. Some suggested she had already written a poem right here. And the spelling of ‘poechreay’ went down particularly well (some read it as ‘patriarchy’ which was quite funny, another said she thought it said ‘peach tree’). Some people wrote their replies as poems. If you want to read them you can see the replies here.

Hazel is of course still only five, and both she and her mum are fairly nonplussed by it all. But I’ve been thinking about compiling the replies (there have been 69 so far and they’re still trickling in) in a little book that I can give her, perhaps when she’s a little bit older and can appreciate the wonder of it. I know it’s the sort of thing that I would have been amazed at if it had happened to me, but almost certainly not at the time.

I hope I’ve managed to thank everyone who replied. It’s the sort of thing that reminds me that lovely things do still happen on Twitter, and why I’m still there after fourteen years.

Angst/

Giving up Facebook for at least a month

getting off facebook

Today is my last day on Facebook for a while. I was inspired by Dan Blank’s recent blog post about the importance of ‘investing in white space’ in our lives: time for reflection, time to breathe. If you’ve ever craved more time for writing, reading and creating, it’s really worth a read.

I came relatively late to Facebook and have never taken to it in the way I did Twitter. And yet I find it takes me away from Twitter, because it sucks up more time. And when I open Twitter, I have a much more rounded, balanced, exciting and inspiring view of the world. There’s just something about Facebook that seems closed and self-regarding. But then I ask myself, why am I using it? Here’s my pros and cons list:

Positives
  1. I like seeing some of the photos people post – beautiful landscapes, quirky family snaps, cute animals – but not all
  2. I like watching some videos, but not those that make me feel I’ve just wasted two minutes of my life. Trouble is, you never know which it is to be
  3. I like video messaging with my granddaughter and with my stepdaughter who’s travelling in Australia
  4. I like suddenly seeing an update from someone I haven’t seen or heard from in ages
  5. I like telling Nick about the good things I’ve seen or read, as he doesn’t use FB at all
Negatives
  1. Time wasting (which is actually life wasting) – see point 2 above. I know I do my best creative work when I have plenty of ‘daydreaming’ time (something I always struggled to explain to past employers who perhaps didn’t see marketing as creative work). Instead of uploading photos to Facebook I could be blogging them, and if they’re not worth blogging they’re probably not worth posting.
  2. It’s become a mindless habit – always flicking through posts on my phone when I’m idle – on the train, bus, having a cup of tea etc – when I could actually be reading something, thinking about a poem in progress, calling up a friend to ask her over for a coffee, or even doing a Sudoku (which may or may not help ward off dementia – not sure Facebook has any claims to that!)
  3. I find the continual negotiation of the terms of Facebook ‘friendship’ an increasing psychological burden. People often behave differently online, and believe it or not it’s not usually deliberate. But it can be unsettling to see. I’ve had 20 years’ experience of dealing with life online – I recognise the many negative or unsocial behaviours, of individuals and crowds, and understand why much of it occurs. That doesn’t make it any easier to deal with – no matter how easily we brush things off, or laugh about what goes on – everything we see, read and do in a public online forum affects us. Interestingly, I don’t personally find Twitter anything like as stressful. I could explore the reasons, but that would be another university dissertation.

Getting off Facebook is a popular concern. Google it and you’ll see what I mean.  This WikiHow article gives a very good overview of how and why to do it.  I particularly liked this piece by a self-confessed procrastinator for whom Facebook had ‘the gravitational pull of the Death Star’.

However, leaving Facebook entirely takes some getting used to, so I’m quitting initially just for the month of January, to see how it goes. Habits take a while to break, and you need to help the process along. So I’m uninstalling FB from my phone, logging out and ‘forgetting’ my password. I’m going to encourage my rellies onto Skype, and rediscover the visual sites I love such as Pinterest and Houzz. I’ve never found Facebook interesting for news or debate, I get that from Twitter. But I’ll continue to skim the Guardian online and emails I subscribe to, such as The Brief Daily.

I mentioned in my last post that I want to create more face to face time with other writers, with friends and with family. Get out more, basically.

I’m not leaving social media altogether – I’ve been using Twitter for over ten years and although I’ve been a lazy participant of late I plan to rediscover all that I love about it, but without substituting my Facebook time with Twitter time. I can’t see that happening because I’ve always had an easy and healthy relationship with Twitter.

This isn’t about online vs ‘real life’. I still maintain that actual bona fide friendships can be made and maintained remotely – it used to happen via letters and written correspondence (remember pen friends?), it’s not a new thing. I’m giving myself time to blog, to read blogs and to connect with the people I love and respect and who inspire me online, just not on Facebook.

 

*cartoon by Nadia Farag

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A poetry anthology comes to life via Facebook

My Dear Watson anthology

Look what arrived today – my copies of the lovely new anthology from Beautiful Dragons (mastermind: Rebecca Bilkau), My Dear Watson. It’s a celebration of the 118 elements on the periodic table. Each poem takes one of it the elements as its inspiration, and 118 poets have contributed. Poets were sourced and Rebecca organised the whole project via Facebook.

Social media platforms elicit strong feelings. Not so long ago it was the internet itself. In 2001 you could say “I hate the internet/I don’t DO the internet” and you’d find plenty of folks agreeing with you. Now it’s kind of unusual since the internet is difficult to avoid. These days it’s social media. “I hate Twitter/I don’t do Facebook.” All fine, and I’m not suggesting in ten years everybody will be ‘doing’ Facebook and/or Twitter. But in 50 years everyone will be using similar (and hopefully much improved) tools because communication methods are constantly changing. Remember: the first people to have telephones in their homes also ran the gauntlet of ‘Are you Mad? What on earth is the POINT of it?’ And that was only 100 years ago.

I personally feel privileged and very lucky to be one of the first generation to experience both the pre-internet and the early internet era. It’s real history and we’re living through it. The tools we currently have are not perfect by any means. Remember: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter etc etc all started in some guy’s bedroom. Nobody knows the rules because we’re figuring them out as we go along. But the tools are what we (humans) make them, and when things go wrong, or the tools are abused or used for bad ends, it’s not down to evil computers or that dreadful ‘social media’, it’s down to evil people.

Anyway, what got me going on that strand of thought was actually that I wanted to celebrate, for once, the wonderful things we humans can do with the tools available. The contributors to ‘My Dear Watson’ are a community only in that we all heard about it on Facebook and responded. (OK, some of the poets had already contributed to previous anthologies). Poems were submitted, and virtually all correspondence was carried out on Facebook. Even Rebecca notes that ‘not one of them (the contributors) knows all of the others’. I’m not saying this is a unique achievement  but it’s a fine example of how a crowd-sourced project (the herding of 118 poets is no mean thing) can generate its own community, and it was facilitated via a social platform. Nothing special about Facebook, although as free, web-based platforms go it’s pretty suitable for this kind of collaboration.

So brava, Rebecca, and thank you.

And let’s try not to fall back on easy statements like “I hate ovens!” just because we haven’t yet produced the perfect souffle.

 

Angst/

The Road Not Taken & FOMO

Two roads diverged

Just the other day Don Share posted on Twitter a link to a recording of Robert Frost reading ‘The Road Not Taken’. How wonderful to hear it in the poet’s voice. Here it is on YouTube:

Matthew Hollis, in his 2011 biography of Edward Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France, tells of Thomas’s distress at this poem, taking it so personally, in fact, that it was the final push that sent him off to war (and his death). This, despite Frost trying to reassure him the poem wasn’t meant as an admonishment for Thomas’s (self-perceived) cowardice or indecision, but rather a very mixed message indeed, full of ironies and what the poet called ‘the fun of the thing’.

Then this morning I open up the latest email from Maria Popova’s excellent Brain Pickings, to read another beautiful essay, this week on the topic of all our roads not taken – In Praise of Missing Out: Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on the Paradoxical Value of Our Unlived Lives.

In this early internet age of ‘fear of missing out’ – one of the truly troubling aspects of social media – the idea of being haunted by the road not taken, or the lives we might have lived or perhaps we feel we ought to be living, seems extraordinarily relevant.

As Philips puts it, “We have an abiding sense, however obscure and obscured, that the lives we do lead are informed by the lives that escape us,” going on to argue that our ‘wished for’ or fantasy lives, the ones we could have/might have lived, are as much a part of us as our real lives, and as Popova says, “the most ideal of these missed-out-on experiences reveal a great deal about the realest aspects of our lives.”

This is a fascinating read which got me thinking about so many aspects of online behaviour, not just FOMO or how the medium seems to fan the flames of envy, but also the holding power of online communities, fantasy worlds and games. I wrote an academic paper on the subject fifteen years ago entitled ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave’ – props to the first person to tell us in the comments what song that line comes from!

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Different ways of promoting your blog posts on social media (reblogged from Social Media for Writers)

Blog share settings

This is the last of my re-blogs from ‘Social Media for Writers’ while I’m on my hols.

Please do still leave comments, which I love reading, although I won’t be able to reply immediately.

Social media can be a big time-suck, if you let it. So it’s worth knowing about automation – what tools are available to help you out, how to use them wisely and so forth.

Here are a few tips and ideas  – How to promote your blog posts on social media – manual vs automation methods. Hope it’s useful and thanks for reading.

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Making the most of Twitter lists (from Social Media for Writers blog)

making the most of twitter lists

This is the second of my re-blogs while I’m on my hols and trying to take a break from the internet! My ‘Social Media for Writers’ blog has many useful articles on it but I’ve never gotten around to promoting it much, which is a bit of a waste, and I’m not proud of the admission!

Please do still leave comments, which I love reading, although I won’t be able to reply immediately.

Something that came up briefly at the ‘Making Poetry Work’ event at the Poetry Cafe recently was Twitter lists. There are many great uses for lists on Twitter, and I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s really making the most of them – I think they’re one of Twitter’s best-kept secrets!

So here are some tips – Are you making the most of Twitter lists? 

 

Angst/

Hello New Year my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again

On paper it’s been a good year. Two non-fiction books written, one published and the second out in March. One poetry pamphlet quietly out the door (even though I had to form a poets’ collective in order to get it published) to modest acclaim, which is the best I hoped for even in my dreams. Several significant new poetry friendships established. Not a lot of poems published in magazines but enough good results to keep my poet-ego going (just about!)

There are lots of positives on the horizon in the next year or so, in many different areas of my life, but one thing I know I must do is make more time to write poems. I absolutely love all the opportunities that poetry offers, whether it’s organising or facilitating events, initiating new projects and seeing them happen, going to readings or giving them, meeting new people, collaborating with others, reading blogs, discovering exciting poets or bloggers who are new to me, trying to analyse the mindsets and workings-out of poetry editors, the highs and lows of poetry submissions … and writing about it all. But I wonder if I spent too much time and energy on all that in 2014?

Social media is another area I need to manage with more discipline. A poet friend recently announced she was leaving Facebook in order to spend more time on writing and with family. She’s since amended that to say that she’ll be checking in very occasionally, but the principle remains. I can understand this entirely, and it’s very tempting. I’ve always found Facebook to be the cruellest and most suffocating of social channels. Sometimes I wonder how it would be to withdraw entirely from social media. Peace, quiet, being oblivious to other people’s lives. I know writers who pretty much stay away from the whole circus, and I envy them in a way. But online communication has been a significant part of my life now for seventeen years, since discovering the internet and joining my first online community. I can’t start to list the wonderful things it’s brought me for risk of sounding trite. It’s also my livelihood.

So, my New Year resolutions are pretty much this:

  1. allocate regular time to write poems, and don’t spend said-allocated time slot mewling over what I’ve already got out and which magazines haven’t replied, or who’s just won a competition and why it’s not me, or whatever.
  2. limit my time on social media – loads of apps and techniques to try here, for example.
  3. don’t stress about how many poetry books, pamphlets and mags are piling up unread. I’m considering ways to tackle this, for example reading books in strict order of acquisition, but I’m not sure that will work as some collections are very much ‘dip in and out’ and others you can’t stop once you start reading. Also, when a magazine comes through the door you want to eat it up there and then. Any ideas?
  4. blog posts – better editorial planning, writing & scheduling in advance as much as possible. I have three blogs I need to update regularly and 2 or 3 others that need occasional attention. I also write a lot of guest blog posts, and manage a stupid number of Facebook Pages, none of which I’m able to give the right amount of attention to. Could be time for a cull or a reorganisation.

I started this post thinking ‘I’m not going to write yet another end of year review’ and I realise it’s gone a bit that way. Sorry. Please do keep reading and commenting, I appreciate it more than you can imagine. Thank you for putting up with my rants and opinions. I wish you every joy, health and happiness in 2015.