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.

This morning, when I opened Twitter for the first time, I had 289 followers.  I made one tweet about my new lease on my house (grr) and, five minutes later, I had 12 new followers.  Surprisingly, they all had something in common: they all wanted me to LOVE the new ‘Star Trek’ film. Also …

• They were all women, apparently all between the ages of 16 and 24.
• They all were following at least 900 people but only had, say, 24 followers.Â
• And they all kept saying the same things: “OMG!  The new Star Trek!”  and “Well, looks like I’ll have to be late to work but I saw Star Trek,” and other youthful, edgy sort of ‘ZOMG!!!111!!!’ web quips about the film.Â

Surrogates all, sent out into the Twitter ecosystem.  Probably paid with free tickets or minimal compensation (or some sort of casting couch promise).  If real people, I picture them curled up with their laptops tweeting away madly from scripts given to them by Paramount or some other marketing firm like telemarketers with specific times (like when show times starts on the East, Central, Mountain and Pacific time zones), sentences and more.Â

Reviews are almost all positive for the new film.  Momentum has been building for sometime.  Admittedly, I am as excited to see the film as anyone.  So, what Paramount is doing in the Twitter space is smart — flooding it with people (or bots, which is more likely) that are saying the same things reviewers and the general consensus is saying about the film.

Look at it this way: when you’re at a party, you don’t want it to run out of liquor.  Hype is the intoxicant that keeps the box office tally climbing and the patrons in the drunken, happy stupor.  Besides, movies make most of their bank in the first two weeks of release or they just don’t make it. So, this makes sense and the surrogates will probably drop off before Memorial Day.

The tactic is not new.  Even the magician has a plant in the crowd to help him with his gag.  Surely, the recent American presidential campaign used the virtual surrogate in a way never before seen.  There are more examples.  So, it wouldn’t be fair to lump this in with all the wonderful advances Web 2.0 distribution makes.Â

However, to my recollection, this is the first real whack across the face with marketing I’ve had Twitter give me.  The results being that ‘Star Trek’ stays a “trended” topic for the weekend (and when viewing those trends, that what you see is the marketing hype mixed in with real opinion), if not longer, and that the high people get from seeing the film sustains and bring them back for a second viewing.

With better than 9 million people on Twitter and 145 million (or more, depending on your source) on facebook, as well as a smattering of social media diaspora elsewhere, the marketing tactic makes sense.  That is, after all, where the young eyeballs with all the disposable income have gone.  And besides, social media is more intimate thean television, radio or what remains of print.  It’s a great hook for an emotionally charged medium to make its bank.

I wanted to be mad that I’d been flooded by this marketing campaign (besides,  I’m guessing they are elsewhere, too), but I was too caught up in how clever (and overt) it is.    Whether they are bots or real people, there’s power in numbers.  A great majority of Twitter users will believe they are being followed by another ‘Star Trek’ fan. Every little psychological push to get us into the theater or back to the theater or just saying good things about the film will work on at least a few of us.

When you get a few surrogates latched on to your Twitter account, I’d like to know your reaction.