Something very interesting happened over the weekend, and I thought I would tell you about it. Actually, the really weird thing is that the same incident happened two different times with two different parties involved. As it happened, two different people, who I’m pretty sure do not know each other at all, sort of called me out in the public Twitter stream. One said I never talked to them and the other asked me why I wasn’t tweeting their blog posts.
Now, there are plenty of people in the world of social media who would say something like, “Ah, you must be doing something right. The haters are coming out to get ya.”
I’m not really keen on that sort of argument. If these folks felt like I was not treating them fairly, I have to listen to that. But it makes me wonder, as we continue to travel into the realm of 2012, if this side of my social media life will just continue to grow. Will more people start “calling me out” on Twitter and on their blog sites? Will more people feel free to randomly troll my posts? Is that what I have to look forward to?
The payoff
Now, the other interesting thing about this scenario is that I am not really sure how far my own particular path of online success can go. There are so many people above me in the social media lasagna that I’m not sure I could ever break through to that level of success. In fact, a lot of those folks still don’t even reply to me when I try to talk to them on Twitter or when I comment on their blog posts. The ceiling that I need to grasp onto is most definitely a Cathedral ceiling. Maybe the sky itself. Am I going to offer some new insight into the online world that has not yet been covered by a much more experienced, much more knowledgable, much more well-known person? I highly doubt it.
It seems to me that at this particular time, I’m headed towards a casino where I’m going to need to decide whether or not to make a huge bet. The bet is as follows: Is any level of success I will find online going to be worth the increasing amount of dissidence I will encounter as I strive for that success?
How many more readers can I get on my site before I start getting overrun by people who disagree just cuz they can? How many more Twitter followers (who are not porn bots) can I gather before I start meeting unpleasantness on a daily basis?
My livelihood is not really based on doing this stuff. This is all volunteer, extra-curricular. Where is my ceiling for dealing with gratuitous unpleasantness, and how does that relate to my ceiling of potential success? Where does one outweigh the other?
I seem to be at a fork in the road, or getting to one.
Which path would you take?
Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/s3a/5352487145/ via Creative Commons
