Trunk's Take On Twitter and Traffic And Being Truthful to One's Self

Penelope Trunk, the Brazen Careerist provided her take on Twitter, social media, and unmashing the mashable back on June 4^th.

Because mashing our social media together for the purpose of marketing one feed to another dilutes the value of social media. If you express yourself in the same way on a blog and on Twitter, then you don't need both.

Now despite my attempts to pass myself off as being fully able to integrate into the world of Web 2.0, I am not the Twitter-type. So the rest of this post won’t be mentioning Twitter again, but Ms Trunk makes a number of good points about social media that this weblog will take to heart.

It's clear to me that blogging is best for expressing big ideas. If you can't convey new ideas on your blog, then you probably won't get a lot of traffic. And most blogs that do well have a single theme and the audience can depend on the theme dictating the content of the blog.

The blogging format is the best means of both articulating ideas in order to work through them and express them to others. This weblog focuses more on the working through them. It does not have a single theme or brand so that and the 10 reasons from Hugh MacLeod explains not getting a lot of traffic. That is not going to change. Maybe I’ll try something different in the future.

What is social media for, really? If traffic is your holy grail, then you need to point all your social media to one spot, in a sort of exercise in cross-pollination. If it's not to build traffic, then it's to build connections. And those connections can improve your life.

So I’ll accept the reality that this weblog won’t be breaking the 100,000-subscriber threshold, or the 1,000 for that matter (or the 100 if we are going to be honest).

So give yourself permission to use social media to explore all the aspects of your personality, rather than just the one you picked for your "official personal brand". It makes sense that you should give yourself some leeway to be inconsistent in who you are—and thereby consistent with who are completely are—in social media. Explore your full identity as you explore the media.

This is the part that I can get behind. The primary reason for this weblog is to explore and that means looking at my personality, my philosophy to create new paradigms for myself and to participate in the new paradigms that I believe are arising. I intend to give myself ample leeway, pardon in advance inconsistencies and fully explore and create an identity in this medium.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman,

"Song of Myself"
US poet (1819 - 1892)