I’m curious. Through my association with Absolute Write’s forums and elsewhere, I have plenty of friends who are writers. And the greatest support one can give is to, of course, buy the book or written material. I’ve done that in a number of occasions.

However, it’s always awkward to want to promote a friend but not want to buy the material because … well, I don’t read that genre. And the Erotic Steampunk Romance book will just look awkward on my bookshelf (or in my Kindle).

So, in our interconnected, blogged, Facebooked, Twittered world, I’d like you to tell me how I can help you monetize your efforts and what gets people to ‘add to cart’ your work? I think, as Rob Kroese points out (and outlines with a fantastic accounting of the history of digital publishing), the barrel has gone off the waterfall and is descending into the digital medium. As this period becomes more a “Wild West” for publishers, book sellers, writers and creatives, so to it becomes an opportunity to explore new money streams and reach out in terms of marketing and branding.

I have some ideas, but I’d like you to share them with me here. I’ll use them. I swear.

This week, I performed an exercise in social media interactivity and privacy that I thought might help you.

I took the time to divide better than 750 people who are my “friends” on Facebook into categories of access by creating three lists — gold, silver and bronze. The categories are easy to define:

• Gold — All access. No change. The person sees everything. This meant the person is probably related to me, is a close friend or that I’ve had multiple person-to-person or online interactions that resulted in something positive in my life.
   
• Silver — A friend or an acquaintance. I’ve probably interacted more than one time with the person, but don’t know them quite well enough to put into the gold category. However, they receive almost all the same access as gold people.
• Bronze — An acquaintance. Someone with whom I have had very little or zero interaction. Someone I know through an online forum, a high school friend with whom I rarely interact or someone who I bumped into at conference. You can’t see my posts and you have access to a limited amount of information.

Once I divided the people into the three lists, I went into the “manage account” tab of and set the permissions using the “customize” tab, selecting those lists. It took some time, but I could specifically customize access to a great many things, including posts and photo albums. The entire event took about three total hours, including writing this article.

In all of the above, the keyword is “interaction.” The litmus test question was a simple one: Do you comment on my posts, photos or other items placed on my wall? How often? What sort of quality? In dividing up people into these lists, I discovered that:

• There are 266 people on the gold list, 464 on the silver and 22 on the bronze.
• I exorcised about 20 people from my friends list. I also deleted about 15 pages that I followed.
• I know every single one of the 752 people on my friends list through an online interaction or a face-to-face meeting. Or, we’re related.

My proclivity is to continue to give people access to my Facebook information. Some would argue that the 266 are really the ones I should keep. The others I should purge. I disagree. All of the people here connected with me or I connected with them for a reason. Plus, networking is networking, regardless of the platform. Further, I don’t friend everyone who requests it of me and I friend a sliver of those “recommended” to me by Facebook. Meanwhile, I’ve created a “fan” page (or what is now a “like” page) for a more specific purpose.

And while this was a good exercise to take note of the level of interactivity I have with people (and that they have with me), my level of privacy is unchanged. That is, I take care of my privacy settings before I reach the keyboard, not after. There’s a whole litany of things I will not publish on any platform, even email. I’ll continue to that standard on my Facebook wall, on my Twitter feed and elsewhere.

For better or worse, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and other social media sites are giant marketing channels. You market yourself. Others market themselves to you. In effect, you become a brand; a product or service that is marketed to hundreds, maybe thousands. In turn, your followers and friends are marketing and branding themselves with you. You do that in physical space with the way you dress, talk, walk, smile, stand and interact at work and at home.

Meanwhile, those social media channels are now used by credit houses, employers and anyone else with access to find out more about you. Couple that with the flood of information sold about mortgages, addresses and so on as found on a site like Spokeo, and it becomes that much more important to safeguard privacy before I reach for the bullhorn and begin to talk.

With this exercise complete, I now need to see how it works and fine tune it. And again, I’ll emphasize: the lists are about interactivity, not privacy. Privacy is solved before I reach the keyboard, not after. I’m sure I’ll move some people from one list to another. However, this is probably the right solution for privacy and interactivity.

All, I’ve created a facebook ‘Fan’ page that you can go ‘like’ and I’d sure appreciate of you would. Here’s the link:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Writing-and-illustration-by-Jason-Tudor/135183246510068

Goal is to try to keep the media happenings in my life in that stream and keep the personal stuff in my personal stream. I hope you’ll ‘like’ the page and give me a little momentum as I begin the query process for a number of stories I’ll have going out.

Thank you!

I’ve begun trimming fan pages on Facebook. I’m doing this because there are plenty of fan pages that are putting out news that I’m simply not interested in, though I do have an interest in the product, service or organization that is running the page.

My expectation on becoming a fan on one of Facebook’s fan pages is that I will be treated like, well, a fan. Also, that I will meet other fans of the brand. And I will, eventually, socialize and conversate these brands into something more. That may mean a purchase. They may mean attending an event. I could mean a behavioral change, but I’m 40, so that would be a stretch. In any case, my expectations are for me to able to approach these brands on a one-to-one basis, and feel like that they belong to me.

Star Wars, Marvel Comics and many video games tend to do these things well. They are brands that know how to handle fans (and fanboys, for that matter). They give back. They talk to their fans. So, it’s no surprise that as many companies begin this journey into social media, they just don’t know how to have a one-to-one engagement like Star Wars or Marvel does. In particular, the American military brand  is having a hard go in the space. (Disclaimer: I’m a DOD employee; this is my own a opinion and not necessarily that of the DOD)

Right now, there are hundreds of military units clamoring for attention in the social space. You can find a fan page for many military units and government organizations from San Jose, California to the sands of Afghanistan. Some do well. However, the majority seem to see the fan page (and the Twitter feed and other forms of social media) as a means of pushing a news release. No conversation. No questions asked. No two-way engagement. This may be a case of rookie nerves. It may also be a case of simply not knowing the social space. There are a myriad othersreasons I suppose. However, it could also be military people following an age-old paradigm.

It goes something like this: “We have an event we want publicized. Let’s put our news release (choose one: on the fax machine/in email/on the fan page/in the Twitter feed) and send it on its way. We’ll then move onto the next release. The end.” And that’s that. No engagement to encourage publication. No socialization of the issue to create awareness and availability, or to show passion or care on the issue. Simply, here it is, like it or not. We’ll be over here moving onto whatever is next.

I don’t want to be a fan of that. I don’t need your news. I’m a fan of you. I like your unit. I like your drink. I like your book. I like the author. However, I don’t like when you don’t pay me and the other fans the least bit of attention. It makes me want to become a fan of someone else who is more like me and more willing to engage me and my interests in your brand. Now, I know. Fan is short for fanatic. But every fan of any brand has expectations. Fanatics, passers by and other levels of people who want to engage the brand matter. So, too, are the people who aren’t ‘fans’ that you want to have engaged as part of your communcation strategy.

As an author and someone trying to market his own writing, I want to engage my fans. I want them to buy my writing. I want them to buy the next bit of writing as well. And based on the current economic climate and the given information landscape, I’m betting my fellow writer friends want that, too. So, my thoughts on being good to fans might look something like this:

• Give me something on your fan page, blog or Twitter feed that I cannot get anywhere else. John Mayer, the musician, does this brilliantly on his Twitter feed. So does Neil Gaiman and others.
• When you do this, be interesting. The person running your social media stream should understand celebrity, have a personality and meld all that with the company brand and communication strategy. If he or she does that, you’ll be a rock star in all the right places. If he or she does not, bumpkins.
• Engage me. Ask questions. Offer me the opportunity to have input (other than the money out of my wallet going into yours)
• Praise me every once in a while. I’m here for a reason. I’d like a stroke every now and then for no other reason than I’m a fan.
• Tell me what you expect of me as a fan. I’ll give that back to you 10 fold.

As the writer, I must be part of that engagement team. I must understand how people consume information about the thing I am trying to make money from. I must understand how I can best create the opportunities for people to act upon and monetize the content I create. I must be more than a writer in this regard. It’s hard, but it must be done. Traditional media is transforming faster than Optimus Prime in a Michael Bay film. As an author, I (and the people who would help me with my publicity) must transform, too.

The fan pages that I am pruning this week failed in some or all these regards. They’re easy to find. Will you be trimming your fan page quotient like I did? Tell me if you do and why.