Is Social Media a Waste of Time?

Social media is mostly a waste of time. Okay? That's a given. Like the name implies, it's about social, so don't look for maximum efficiency or optimizing output or gaining knowledge or insight or wisdom or anything of the sort. It's about hanging out in the virtual realm and feeling connected by a shared investment of time and energy. If you don't have time or energy, and who does really, then you shouldn't be wasting it with social media. And just as you were getting comfortable, (or tired of) Facebook, comes news of its imminent demise. Teenagers are dropping it in droves, and, if they are anything like mine, picking up instead with something that beats even Twitter for innocuous seeming, ego-inflaming inanity, Snapchat, which allows them basically to send smart-phone self-portraits a la wacky celebrities to each other with commentary that pushes the envelope for meaningless.
But once in a while I get a share on Facebook that makes me sit up and smile in self-recognition, or I see photos of the children of a friend I knew way back in the day and I think, wow how time has passed and I click like or I write a comment showing, I hope, my continued allegiance to a bond that would otherwise exist only in my head. Is that valuable? Enough to keep share prices of Facebook at a decent level, methinks. Yes, it's strange times we live in, when our validation as social beings comes in such a diluted, vacuous medium. But, is it really so strange? Why do people paint, or create stories, or design stuff to hang on the end of their noses? Most of the time it's a waste of time, but in the aggregate it creates a culture that moves us forward and keeps us busy and even might teach us a thing or two once in a great while, maybe every ten to fifteen years.
Basically, and this is probably not apparent because I'm pretty decent at this,  I'm trying to convince myself that writing this blog is a worthwhile endeavor. Who am I pleasing with this, is there anyone edified by my occasionally witty (but mostly witless) rants? I don't know. But it's what we do.
Knowledge alert -- I'm reading The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil in which he argues that the slow pace of cultural change will be forever a thing of the past once our brains are enhanced by computer aided implants or AI which will change us irrevocably because the artificial intelligence will be able to improve and redesign itself at an ever accelerating rate until ultimately we infuse the entire Universe with our intelligence. Probably by 2100. Okay that is probably a horrible paraphrase, but I'm trying to understand this important work with my puny human brain and my so-antiquated system of words and human language and messy Neanderthal intuitions.
I have mixed feelings about this model of how we leave ourselves behind, but do I see it coming to pass? Oh boy do I. Just look at how willing we are to inhabit a virtual realm and how it seems to be okay by us as we drop ordinary, face-to-face human contact. And yet, and yet. Perhaps we will be saved by our shared penchant for time wasting and doing silly things like send silly photographs of ourselves and our cats to people we hardly know anymore. We seem to enjoy the sheer entropy of the social sphere. I don't know. I want to talk to somebody about this book and how it's changed my life. I bet there's a forum on Goodreads.

Guerrilla Marketing -- Anatomy of a Free Promo

As part of this whole book thing, I've been working out a marketing campaign.It was Katherine Brooker, A California-based publicist and book editor, who gave me the shove into the world of Tweets and Google Plus and other virtual world realms where I have been spending excessive amounts of time polishing my marketing chops. Anyway, I just finished a five day free promotion of French Pond Road on Amazon and was consistently on the top 100 list for contemporary fiction for all five days, most days better than 75. That sounded wonderful to me, but I got an email from Katherine earlier today suggesting I trumpet the news. So I wrote up a press release and here it is. Feel free to do with it what you will. i already sent it out on some Press Release Submission Site that promised to trumpet it virtually:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Independent Author Breaks Into Best-Seller Ranks With Dark-Horse Story
As the publishing industry continues to reel under the weight of technological and cultural change, and professional book marketers seem ever more flustered by the vagaries of literary fortune, independent writers are seizing the revolutionary moment, using social media and word of mouth marketing to reach a hungry reading public. Over the Memorial Day weekend, Anthony Caplan launched a stealth attack on the Amazon bestseller ranks. Today, French Pond Road finished up a five-day free promotional offer on Amazon's Kindle Select program as fifty-sixth on Amazon's contemporary fiction list, out-competing titles from such established industry behemoths as Simon and Schuster and Little, Brown and Co.  On the strength of over 100 downloads per day of his book, Caplan expects to enjoy future sales to grow from his initial grass roots marketing. Is this the future of book selling?
Henniker, New Hampshire – June, 1, 2012 – FRENCH POND ROAD, the unlikely road story of a father and son reunion, Wednesday finished up a five day run in the top 60 best sellers on the Amazon Contemporary Fiction list on the strength of a word-of-mouth marketing campaign that its author Anthony Caplan hopes will propel the book's future sales and advance the cause of independent publishing.
The title, published this spring on Amazon's Kindle Select eBook program, was initially released in 2008 in paperback. Caplan decided to market it as an eBook this year as he prepared to launch another new book, a coming-of-age novel called LATITUDES- A Story of Coming Home, to be released on June 30.
"The difference this time around was the model I had on how to market using social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook," said Caplan. "But the truth is I decided on Friday night to launch the free campaign, and it wasn't until Saturday morning that I figured out how to tweet about it effectively. The whole idea was to do a dry run for the launch of LATITUDES."
Authors using the free promotional campaign on Amazon have been reporting declining gains in sales boost from the free campaigns, but for Caplan the benefits are numerous.
FRENCH POND ROAD, a story of a roofer reunited with his autistic teenage son after a 16-year separation, had sold virtually no copies in paperback before the free offer. Now, with the exposure on the well-publicized Amazon best-seller list, Caplan has a readership familiar with his name and his previous books as he prepares to release his latest title.
"My stories are about outsiders, so it's appropriate that my marketing techniques are guerrilla," he said. "I just want to inspire other people to follow their dreams. In today's world, anything can happen."

Anthony Caplan is a writer, blogger, teacher and homesteader in New Hampshire. He is the author of the novels Birdman, French Pond Road, and the forthcoming Latitudes - A Story of Coming Home, due out at the end of June from Hope Mountain Press. Find out more about him and his work at http://www.anthonycaplanwrites.com.