I know that social networking is all the rage, but frankly, I just don’t have the motivation to really get into it. I guess it’s a reflection of my real life where I like to stick with my few close friends and have no interest in grabbing potential contacts from every walk of life. I liken MySpace and Facebook to doing that. What is the worth of a “friend” when you have over 200 listed? I’ve refused to join MySpace or Facebook or Orkut or Friendster or eHarmony or whatever both because of lack of motivation to keep up the relationships and as a matter of principle. Is it necessary to put all that private-ish information out there? To make “friends” with people you don’t ever see? I can’t stand Evite. Now, eeeeveryone can find my private email address. GAH! Shouldn’t people be wary of these things? All to often though, I see myself as the odd person out and people look at me like I’m a crazy paranoid living in the dark ages. Is this blog revealing too much?
Now the question is, how is my online reclusiveness going to impact my work on Squidoo? I know that many people use their network contacts to drive traffic to their lenses. They build up a relationship with their audience, and the audience begins to understand the quality and content of the work. Then, when a new page or item is promoted by the person, his/her audience is likely to check it out. It’s basically peer-to-peer recommendations. We all trust the opinions of people we know (or “know”) over people who are complete strangers. But, in terms of traffic to the lenses, is this kind of traffic sustainable? I can see how posting your link up in some relevant forum discussing some relevant topic to your lens can bring you constant traffic. People will search for that subject, find the forum, and see your link. I just can’t see how having a MySpace or Facebook relationship is going to help you. (Or a blog for that matter. But I hear blogs can provide backlinks.) Perhaps it’s just me being naive. I consider traffic through search engines and forums and other relevant content driven sites to be the most valuable traffic. It seems like this social networking bit will only get you a temporary spike. Am I wrong?
