Ladies talk by Marlis Seelos

Welcome to part two of the ‘tides of social media’ discussion. If you’ve missed Part One – check it out as there are some interesting responses. To revamp, the questions were:

(I am curious how large a role social media plays in your assorted positions as travel bloggers, writers, authors and in your assorted work-related situations.) What do you consider true social media? How do you use it? How often do you use it? Is it effective?

Sarah Gonski,

Love & Paella

I swim a little against the tide when it comes to social media, in that I don’t use it too much to promote my blog, other than an occasional link on my personal Facebook page. I know all the rhetoric about followers and fan clubs and how all that stuff will make me queen of the universe if used properly, but in the conversations of the committee in my head it always comes back to “you already have a blog where you talk mostly about your own life, now you are going to TWEET all about it too?!” If I had a more informational or impersonal blog, maybe it would be more relevant and I would feel less self-mocking. But if there’s a new truth in the digital age, it’s that no one likes a spammer.

Michael Schneider

OtherGuy’sDime Blog

I am in my mid-60s so the era before texting, smart phones, and social networking is not ancient history but rather a well-remembered young adulthood. During that period when someone traveled overseas they were generally out of touch from friends and family except for the occasional picture postcard that took weeks to travel the globe and usually arrived long after its sender had returned. That was fine with me, as I don’t need real-time updates on each and every bus tour, museum visit, and dinner. I don’t need to be informed the very same day about snorkeling with sharks, riding the Killer Quake roller coaster, or your David Letterman sighting along Fifth Avenue. I am quite content to enjoy photographs and stories over shared meals after the happy holiday has been concluded but well before its memory begins to fade.

I always thought that sending a photo of white sand beaches to someone back home in 0 degree weather and a foot of snow to be a form of mental torture. Telling a friend about your three-star Michelin dinner while they sit in a cubicle eating Lean Cuisine and grinding out committee reports to be one of the unkindest cuts of all. For these reasons I do not make use of either Twitter or Facebook while on one of my extended working vacations – I travel by living and working overseas for 2-6 months at a time.

Why post a note that essentially says Look at where I am; Look at what I am doing, and which contains within it the subliminal message “… and you are not!”

Yes, I do email family and friends to let them know I am safe and doing well. Yes, I do answer email when it is something that cannot wait – e.g., letters from my children, accountant, renters, or boss! Otherwise, I am happy to wait until I return home to post stories on Facebook for friends to read and enjoy. Why should I gloat about the many pleasures of my extended overseas breaks to those who may not be as fortunate in terms of travel time? Why post a note that essentially says Look at where I am; Look at what I am doing, and which contains within it the subliminal message “… and you are not!”

Lola Akinmade-Åkerström

Geotraveler’s Niche

Lobster Dinner by Gretchen Wilson-Kalav

How large a role social media plays in your assorted positions as travel bloggers, writers, authors and in your assorted work-related situations.

As one of those people who wears many hats (writer, blogger, photographer, editor, whatever), I use different tools for various aspects of my work. In terms of networking with potential clients, Twitter has been an invaluable tool for quick easy access, and I admittedly was one of the skeptical late-comers to the Twitter game. While you won’t find me tweeting about that decadent slow-broiled buttered lobster dish I’m currently eating, you will find me linking and introducing various people/organizations to each other, occasionally checking in on fellow writer-photographer buddies, finding the right contacts quickly, and sharing links I think can provide value to others. As photoblogger for Sweden.se – I tweet to actively engage different people and organizations that might be interested in and curious about everyday life in Sweden as well as use StumbleUpon to share pertinent travel links across my network.

And considering I still don’t own a Smartphone, I don’t live on Twitter on an hourly basis either. For me, Facebook is really for connecting with my family, colleagues, old classmates, and friends spread out all over the world. I use it to share links and photos I think they might like as well as just keep in touch from my own corner of the world in Scandinavia.

Daniel Noll and Audrey Scott

Uncornered Market

In the early days of our around-the-world journey, we began using Twitter as a broadcast tool to get around censorship in places like Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and China. In those days, we mainly used it for one-way communication.

But we, Twitter, and social media in general have all grown up a bit.

Today, social media to us implies a toolset of connection and conversation with our community. It’s like one part sensory nervous system, one part circulatory system. As such, we don’t believe there’s a “true” social media, but rather levels of effectiveness – a function of one’s goals — in social media that impacts one’s connection and conversation with one’s community.

People get wrapped up in the quantitative – the number of followers, fans, RTs, etc. While that’s important, it’s only one facet. Quantity helps, but quality really counts.

People get wrapped up in the quantitative – the number of followers, fans, RTs, etc. While that’s important, it’s only one facet. Quantity helps, but quality really counts. Although it takes time to maintain and grow one’s social networks (there’s the investment), there are recognizable returns in terms of conversation, community and potential business partnerships.

As travel bloggers, social media is an integral part of what we do. Here’s why:

1. It helps extend and grow our conversation circle from connections in related niches (travel, lifestyle, food, personal growth) to networks of loosely-related interest overlap, to the entirely random. This extends our reach; it also keeps things interesting.
2. It enables real-time micro-storytelling updates to fans and followers. For world travelers, social media updates are one part storytelling device, another part personality indicator. Some people don’t like to read articles. For this “now” crowd, tweets, updates and other social media bits help them remain connected.
3. It offers a direct line of opt-in communication to some important people whom we might not traditionally otherwise have direct access to.
4. It greatly aids trip planning and connecting – everything from practical info on the ground, to lining up a short-term apartment to securing a last-minute trip to Antarctica.
5. A bridge to the face-to-face or going beyond the avatar. We try to convert these virtual relationships to “in the flesh” relationships.
6. Gives us leverage and ripple to reach large groups of people at one time. There’s not only promotion and exposure for newly published content, but also for the long shelf-life bits to new followers and fans.

Mary Anne Oxendale

A Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai

To keep the doctor away! by Mary Anne Oxendale

I am a teacher by trade and a writer by passion and social media has worked its way into both, often dragging them together in my streams of conversation and connections. I am relatively limited in what I do with social media: I only use Twitter and Facebook, using a VPN because I’m in China and they are both blocked. I don’t have a smart phone. I don’t use apps. I check them when I’m at home in the evening because I can’t access them at work during the day. China is a good place to go on a media diet, should you wish to do so.

For me, social media is totally about throwing words and ideas out there and seeing what sticks. These days I do it for both my writing as well as for teaching ideas. When I was 10 years old, I posted an ad in an Archie comic book for pen pals and started writing to dozens of other ten year olds around the world, thrilled to be making so many far-flung, improbable connections. I continued this into my teens, having long handwritten intense conversations with people in the former East Germany, in India, in Ghana. This is pretty much the same thing, except I don’t store my letters and postcards in shoeboxes now. I use social media to know what others are doing with their days. I use it to stumble upon creative projects and to meet people who inspire me and who have inspired others. My blog’s Expat Interview series took off because of Twitter and re-Tweeting. People I’d never heard of asked to tell their stories on my blog and still others wrote in to say how much they loved this. I don’t make any money from this and don’t intend to. It just makes me incredibly happy to be swapping stories, brainstorming mad possibilities, finding common ground. Is it effective? It depends on what you expect to get out of it. For me, social media is a tool, like a phone or email or a bicycle. It gets me where I’m going, connects me to the world, and that’s all I ask of it.

Wade Shepard

Vagabond Journey

My first response to being asked about my social media strategies were curt, critical, and slightly biting. We never really dove fully into the social media scene at Vagabond Journey Travel, using the various mediums only as a way to communicate with readers and for the small time promotion of new articles. I found that my first response to this panel discussion focused mainly on the negative or otherwise annoying points of social media — the sea of garbage posts, the “you promote me, I promote you” ethic, the petty squabbles that evolve between various bloggers, the wolf pack tactics of travel blogging “gangs,” and the sheer amount of time it takes to run a successful social media campaign. I’ve always focused more on the creation of content, on writing, on photographing, on talking with people and living than with promoting myself on Twitter and Facebook. To these ends, I sent off a rather snarling response to Gretchen as my contribution to this panel discussion.

Then I began realizing that I was taking the benefits of social media for granted while focusing only on its negative aspects, I remembered how I worked within a group which used Facebook and Twitter to unparalleled success when trying to locate a Vagabond Journey correspondent and old friend who went missing in the earthquakes and tsunamis that rocked Japan this past March. As I came to publish in How to Use Social Media and the Internet in Disaster Response, through communicating with each other, people on the ground in Japan, and various media outlets we were able to accurately provenience our missing friend from various living room “command stations” on the other side of the planet. When NBC called on their pursuit of a story, we were able to tell them exactly where to go to find the “missing Americans.” This would not have been possible without the communication platform that Facebook and other social media outlets provided.

The power of properly utilized social media is vast, and this relatively new way of communication can give a group of commoners the power to efficiently coordinate people from around the world in a singular task as well as communicate with a network of thousands almost spontaneously.

The power of properly utilized social media is vast, and this relatively new way of communication can give a group of commoners the power to efficiently coordinate people from around the world in a singular task as well as communicate with a network of thousands almost spontaneously. This ease of mass global communication for common citizens through social media is truly revolutionary, but, now that they are so common and thoroughly a part of global culture, it is also easy to take these systems for granted. Yes, there are truly mountains of crap to sift through when trying extract information on a given topic from social media platforms, but the fact that we have these avenues easily available to be able to contact and communicate with literally thousands of people at the touch of a few buttons is STILL truly remarkable. Recreationally speaking, I still don’t dive too deep into social media, but this does not diminish the fact that I view these platforms as truly awesome ways to communicate what you have to say, to make essential contacts, and to round up a tribe of people to accomplish various goals and objectives.

Editor’s Note: As always, thank you to everyone who has been a willing participant! I would also like to thank everyone who has contributed to past panel discussions as well. The responses have been numerous, enlightening and much more than I anticipated. I applaude you all.
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On a side note, I want to take this time to pay tribute to Marlis Seelos, who was not only my friend and colleague on Travellerspoint, but also graciously let us use many of her photographs for articles here on TravelBlogs. She passed away recently and will be missed by many, especially me. So, in Memory of Marlis…

Thank you all once again. G.

© Gretchen for TravelBlogs, 2011. |
‘Why Can’t We Be Friends?’: Social Media – Part Two |
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