I think my relationship with social media has changed so much that I really resent social media now. And I'm trying to figure out what a successful exit strategy is as someone who has gotten a lot of opportunities because of social media and how it's given me a portfolio.
'We Are... ' is all obviously about social media and kind of the insecurities around social media and how people have become addicted to their phones and altered children's minds to what they need to look like, what they need to dress like.
It's funny: I spend time in the book criticizing social media, but I'm also aware that a lot of my success is because of social media. I can broadcast myself and my work to thousands of people that are following me or my friends. I do think that social media can be good for self-promotion.
Because of social media being such a marketable format, things are constantly being released, so people don't pay as much attention because they have a million things being thrown at them. You reach more people, but now there's more content. Before, it was harder to get the people but there was less content.
Some of my fans don't really like it when I respond to people who say things that are trying to be hurtful on social media. But I think it's kind of funny. There's a lot of things that make me laugh, that people would try and say those things. I mean, there's some that I can't even retweet or respond to just because of how bad it is.
PR got to be much bigger because of the emergence of digital media. Now we have hundreds of people who are, in a sense, manning embassies for Facebook and Twitter for brands. So the business in effect has morphed from pitching stories to traditional media, to working with bloggers, Twitter, Facebook and other social media, and then putting good content up on owned websites.
Bridging the virtual world with the physical word is really when social media channels come to life and the magic happens. Because whoever coined the term 'social media' didn't do us any favors. It's not really media. It's more like the telephone, less like the TV.
Thanks to Twitter, Reddit, web media, and social media, we have the opportunity now to kind of blur that line between the people who produce the content, the people that watch it, and instead make it a conversation, make it a real community.
I like that with social media, you can choose how much you want to reveal. If there is an issue that requires clarification, at least you can turn to social media. You know it's coming from the horse's mouth.
My social media world is detached from my friendship world. I'll have friends in real life that I don't follow on social media, because I don't really look at social media as the way of connecting to friends. For me, social media is like a business tool.
We do a lot of things that kind of annoy people and our fan base. We try not to get overloaded on it. For us, that means we don't do social media stuff - we have an Avenged Sevenfold social media, but none of the band members have Facebooks or any sort of Twitter.
I feel like if you know any women who's an essayist or a writer or a public speaker or just a public person, and they have any presence at all in any kind of social media, or any place where men can voice at them, you have to be pretty amazed at the level of special provocation and sort of violent speech and misogyny that comes at them. Any woman that's really in the public sphere has experienced this. It's kind of shocking how universal it is.
In general, we're a social network. I prefer that because I think it is focused on the people part of it - as opposed to some people call it social media, which I think focuses more on the content.
How can I make him understand that he did not create me? He makes the same mistake as the others when they look at a feeble-minded person and laugh because they don't understand there are human feelings involved.
I do not understand how deeply people seem to like my work - but I love that people feel I have helped them through hardships, and also have shared my experience of living a more spiritual and present life. It's so great to be able to make people laugh, because this is so often how we get our selves back.
Social media is a way to make communication easier. Obviously some people misunderstand it, some people take it personally, and some people are in a constant fight to grow their engagement. They even become obsessed. They feel like they need to be popular on social media. The most important thing is: You've got to be secure in yourself. In order to have influence on other people, you've got to know who you are, first of all. The reason I get happy when I get more engagement is because that means I did something right in terms of my audience enjoying my content.