As a musician who isn’t likely to make it big, MySpace is a great platform to be heard. I can allow people to hear my work and it’s free, I can promote myself as I see fit (and I don’t have any “glittery” or “animated” stuff so feel free to check me out!). I can basically give anyone a chance to experience what I do.

On Facebook, I can talk about what I do, and as a musician, that’s not good when you aren’t known. I can’t feature my music aurally so it isn’t a great venue. And as it happens, I’ve found more of my friends on MySpace so far. I’m 39, so I’m against the norm, I suppose.

For usage, I prefer MySpace. I like to control the look and feel of my site, and that’s a clear win for MySpace. For the above post that mentioned the “thanks for the add” messages, all I can say is that most of the people who like my work e-mail me through the site, and the other musicians who I befriended add a comment on the main page as it’s just common to do. I understand it may look strange.

I technically opened a Twitter account very recently as a lark, but no one will really follow me. I think one other issue comes into play. MySpace was the “hot” thing, then Facebook, now Twitter has that “buzz”. When Facebook stops being “cool”, kids and the younger demographic move on, as well as the press covering the latest craze. Same with Twitter.

Just as I am one of the people who still watches Survivor when others rush off to the latest “hot show”, I stick with what I like because, well, I like it. I like MySpace. I’m not in the 18-35 demos that change brands on a whim. I think that’s an important issue here. After the initial buzz is gone, you have to maintain a core group of loyal fans and cater to them.

MySpace could really revolutionize musicians’ (and any entertainment position) ability for self marketing and needs to stop some of the discourse about it being “so yesterday.” All I can do is point you to my page, hope you like my work and consider purchasing it, and enjoy what I do. That’s all.

Never signed up for MySpace but still go there for the musicians and their music.

Joined Facebook when a friend put up a fan page for another friend, but didn’t really use it until the iPhone app came into being.

Have resisted Twitter thus far.

Thanks for this post and the link. Fascinating.

It is totally possible to turn that stuff off in your news feed. The problem is, you have to turn them off one at a time. I have a FB community of slightly under 200 people, and I do have to spend a certain amount of time “hiding” the notifications about quizzes and games and presents that irritate me. But in general I love the FB interface, so I don’t mind this inconvenience.

I spend a lot of time on Facebook. I think it works for me because I’m using it to talk to communities of people whose lives overlap. The majority of my FB friends have a dozen (or dozens!) of friends in common with me. And most of them are real friends, or at least acquaintances I see on a regular basis. This keeps the conversation lively.

As a bookstore manager, I’ve had FB conversations that have led directly to book purchases for the store, and others that have led directly to sales. For customers who are also friends who spend a lot of time of FB, Facebook is often the fastest way to contact them, and all I have to remember is their name. No hunting for phone numbers or email addresses. We’re still experimenting with using the store’s FB page to promote the store and keep in touch with customers.

The thing is, Facebook’s user interface is terribly unintuitive; it took me a couple minutes to find where the Lists feature is so I could make sure I was using the correct name for it (I thought it was Groups). And it takes real digging to come across features like this in the first place.

A Facebook “Page” (sometimes called a Fan Page) might be a more appropriate place to position yourself on Facebook for business. (Here’s Lois McMaster Bujold’s Page for reference)

See, when someone on FB becomes your “fan” a message is sent out to all their friends that they’ve done so; something that would never happen if that fan simply visited your site or subscribed to your feed. This gets your name out to large groups of people who might never have heard of you before (eg: my sister has hundreds of FB friends). I also think that when a “fan” comments on your Page, their friends will be notified of this as well; yet another “blip” of your name in people’s attention-space.

I’m not trying to convince anyone to use Facebook, just making people aware that if you HAVE to use Facebook, there’s ways to make it work for you.

I’m just not sure why, given it’s so limited — the only people who can contact you must do it through facebook and the only people you can contact must also do it through facebook. They’ve got to JOIN FACEBOOK. Facebook controls every aspect of their communication. And if they decide not to let you do facebook anymore htat’s it, that’s your whole chance to communicate. If I have email, I can have it through any company I want.

Facebook controls the medium, the message, your abilityt o access it, and the level to which everyone you access and vice versa can see things about you — Which means that it’s so much more than email — it’s a whole relationship. I get biz emails all the time from someone I just want to exchange a few words with — I don’t need pictures of their dogs and cats and kids and links to their uncles and aunts and college friends. That’s getting WAY into their business and it’s letting them WAY into mine. I don’t understand what is the wrong paradigm about email at all, I must admit. The idea of having to have some really intimate relationship with every person who sends you an email seems like much more of the wrong paradigm to me.

As for the spam, I get acres more spam on facebook — constant “being hit with snowballs” and “I’ve just turned you into a zombie” and “come be a fan of XYZ” — it’s endless. And there’s no way to filter it (as there is on regular email) if this person is your “friend” — kind of like those “friends” who send you constant chain mail.

The only way facebook is going to feel useful to you is if you start really using it as your primary way of being in touch with some group of people you want to be in touch with. I’m not proposing that you do that, just saying that that’s what you’d have to do.

From my side, I’m a long-time internet user, and spent probably ten blissful years using email without ever getting spammed, so whenever I get a spam message, it raises my blood pressure. So the ability to go into an environment where I never get spam is a real treat to me.

My reaction to spam may be irrational, but it’s real for me. Personally I expect to see SMTP email fade out over time because it’s the wrong paradigm, and what facebook is doing is closer to the right paradigm. I’m sympathetic to your insistence that they can just use the real internet, but facebook succeeds because it actually provides a better user experience than the real internet. Integration makes life easier.

Personally, my big concern for facebook is that all our data is out there, instead of in here on our home computers, and that puts us at the mercy of the people running facebook. But I don’t see anybody delivering the integration and user experience that facebook delivers in a package that puts my data under my control, so I’m afraid that for now at least we’re stuck with facebook. Best is the enemy of good enough.

Personally, facebook I like it not, and I am beginning to heart myspace like whoa – but, as Lily and Lili both point out, I see it mostly as a way to hear musos and bands. I don’t have an account myself. Also, all the musos on there seem to have thirty million ‘friends’ whose only comments are ‘thanks for the add!!’ so I don’t know how meaningful that is. I have bought a lot of musos’ CDs because I heard them first on myspace. (well, truth be told, I usually heard one song of theirs on that crazy old-fashioned thing the RADIO, and then went to myspace to hear some more samples, and THEN bought the CD). I guess it feels more promotional than interactive, but less obviously promotional than a website – a sort of in-between.

It would be interesting to see if there were a way to make myspace work the same for authors as it does for musos. Maybe authors, in the bit where musos usually put their tracks, could put videos of themselves doing madcap things such as, I don’t know, _eating soap_.

I mean, on myspace at least, they have to go to other pages on the internet to find all those glittery animated gifs and backgrounds, so they must at least visit some kind of page that isn’t myspace.

For instance, the other day, I got a facebook message from my aunt. To read it, I had to get it on my email, click through, sign into facebook, click through to the messages, and finally got to read it. If she’d just emailed me then THAT would have been one click. I just don’t get why I would go through all that work when I could have just read an email.

Maria’s post (No. 18) is why I have both a MySpace and Facebook account am learning to/coping with using them. There’s got to be Very Special Hell for their interface designers though…

How other Authors deal with this:
Richelle Mead, Rachel Caine & Lisa Mantchev all have websites, myspace, facebook, LJ’s, & Twitters.
Cassandra Clare has a twitter, LJ, myspace & website.
Melissa Marr has a twitter, website, LJ, Myspace, facebook & visits a fan forum quite often.
I don’t know how they make it work but I have them all friended on sites or their pages bookmarked on my computer.

I like networking I guess. Every site has something to offer.

Sorry for the length, hope it made any sense.

Back about 2-3 yrs ago when I was in High School –a definately not rich, yet not poor school with a culturally diverse student body– everyone had a Myspace. It wasn’t really a matter of choosing between Myspace or Facebook, because we just didn’t need to. But when I started college –in the same city my High School is in, and far faaar from the Ivy Leages– most of the students used Facebook.

I have a Myspace account that I check because that’s where most of my friends are. I joined Facebook recently because thats where people I know from college are. And I have a twitter because that’s where most of the people, mainly writers, I like to know about are.

BUT, I’ve joined another thing to stay in touch with friends from my secondary and primary years at my home country where yet another kind of networking site seems to be popular.

I [who is technically a legal adult but whose age still comes in numbers ending on teen] didn’t need more than your name to find your blog. So I think the cards are a great idea. Your website and blog are the first things to appear on google, although it must be noted too that I also found your myspace [even though you dont use it] like on the first or second pages of results.

I just tried googleing a bunch of YA authors and their myspaces are on the first or second pages of results –even if they don’t use them. Like, Maureen Johnson doesn’t check her myspace often, yet it appeared on the 3rd entry, and her Facebook which she does check, does not appear. [in fact the first Maureen Johnson Facebook that appears, is not even Maureen Johnson the writer, but some other person]

What I’m wrestling with now is whether to FB or Myspace under my pen name.

That’s exactly it. I love being able to respond to questions and comments from readers. So the whole structure of friends and following is just awful. I hate the idea that I might be inadvertantly dissing someone!

That’s part of why Twitter works better. People can directly write to me and I can respond outside the following apparatus.”

Except Twitter has a similar problem, I think. You can @-reply to anyone, but you can only direct-message someone who is following you. So when I follow someone, and I get a direct-message from them thanking me for the follow or something, I usually can’t respond because they haven’t followed me back. I do like that the @-replies provoke so much conversation on Twitter. Just saying, it has some issues of its own too…

I go to a School where most people have laptops out during class supposedly taking notes, and mostly spending time on facebook. I think it mostly just offers a good distraction, people can talk to their friends and play online games at the same time.

The business cards will have a slightly higher success rate, I’d imagine, but they wouldn’t work even a quarter as well as Myspace and Facebook.

Here’s why:

A business card is not within a teens reals pf reality. We don’t think about them, don’t use them, and only barely know what do do with one if it’s handed to us. Nine out of ten times, it’s shoved in a pocket where it’s forgotten, goes through the wash, and is illegible ever after.

Even if the teen planned to check out the website (which is unlikely; remembering to do so is even less likely) they are then no longer able to. And the wash scenario is not far fetched at all. I do it ALL THE TIME, as do almost all my friends. “Hey do you have ______, I put it through the wash…” is a phrase I hear about once a day if not more.

Myspace and facebook, OTOH, are not something that’ll be forgotten. Why? They’ll go home, log in – because it’s what they’d do anyway & requires no deviation from the routine – and remember that cool author they met at school. Since they’re already there, it’s just a click and they can friend you. Then you need to accept – and so when you do, they’ll be reminded AGAIN & possibly contact you because hey, cool – an author accepted my friend request!

It’s all about the routine. If you can fit into people’s daily routine, especially with teens, you are far more likely to have follow through than if they have to go out of their way to have the privelage of saying hi. You’d need to have made a stellar impression for that, wheres a good/great one will suffice if you fit the routine.Business cards are NOT part of a teens routine, in any conceiveable way. Myspace and Facebook aren’t part of a routine, they ARE the routine.

Just something to consider

I went back and logged in today for the first time in years. Now I have a profile, which is actually a profile, and it links to my personal site. I’ve got a picture, a short musical playlist, and some random interests listed. I figure this way if people want to contact me through MySpace, they can. If not, no big deal. Setting my profile up wasn’t very hard, and the templates look a lot better now than I remember them looking three years ago.

That’s exactly it. I love being able to respond to questions and comments from readers. So the whole structure of friends and following is just awful. I hate the idea that I might be inadvertantly dissing someone!

That’s part of why Twitter works better. People can directly write to me and I can respond outside the following apparatus.

I know I am going to have to suck it up and do self-promotion and crap on all the social networking sites, and get a Twitter (I’m sorry, I don’t get why 140 characters is soooooooo fantastic either, whatever happened to paragraphs?) eventually, but I want to barf at the idea of doing it and I keep putting it off.