Last month I attended the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, or AWP. (We writers are awesome with words; less so with acronyms.) The conference took place in Denver – a lovely city for sure, but really, I would have been thrilled to travel anywhere for it. When you are a freelance writer, any opportunity to get out of the house is exciting.

These days, any industry conference, retreat, or multi-day seminar is going to have at least one session on “Your Industry and Social Media.” Convention centers might even have this as a booking requirement. AWP was no different, and though I was only at the four-day conference for a day and a half, there were no shortage of panels for me to attend on how I can/should/would-be-crazy-not-to-use blogs, twitter, Facebook, etc. to promote my writing. Given that many of the attendees of this conference are graduate of MFA writing program that have not necessarily published a book, the mood at these panels was what I’d characterize as cautiously optimistic. The democratization of content distribution that the web offers is very appealing to unpublished writers, and in some ways, writers have leg up on others in professional eloquence. But the camp is split between the luddite/purists (what you’d call them depends on who you are talking to) – technophobes and those that fear distracting themselves from larger projects with things like Farmville and Words With Friends; and those that have gone full speed ahead with sophisticated websites, blogs, twitter accounts, Facebook fan pages, and foursquare check-ins at all the hottest literary spots in their city. 

After one of these panels, I turned to a friend — a guy about 30 years my senior who’d graduated from my MFA program the year before, and who I’ve gotten to know through a Facebook-based morning writing group — and asked if he was on Twitter. He said something that I thought was really interesting, the first original comment I’d heard about social media in ages. “I resisted Twitter for a long time,” he told me, “because I didn’t think I had anything to say. But then someone gave me this advice that you join Twitter at first just to listen, and when you do have something to say, you’ll already have people listening to you.”

The idea of “listening” on Twitter and Facebook (and any number of social media outlets) doesn’t get a lot of play. I feel like I read at least one article a week (online, natch) on the theme of oversharing, information overload, and virtual navel gazing. Like everyone else, I have friends with chronic SUS (Status Update Syndrome). But for every friend I’ve banished to “Hide” in my newsfeed, there are one or two others that I ignore (online!) because they never do anything, or share anything. My orientation towards social media, I realized, prioritized the consumption of personal utterance — and dismissed the non-sharers as the Facebook equivalent of prudes.

And yet, there are a lot of advantages — especially for individuals — to a more modest social media strategy. By listening more — and not putting out — new users can familiarize themselves with the customs and lingo of each realm without getting into the kinds of embarrassing SNAFUs that leave one feeling as if they’ve walked into the cafeteria on the first day of high school with toilet paper stuck to their shoes. Listeners also endear themselves to the prom queens and quarterbacks of their social media circles, which as we all know can pay nice returns when others see that you are attending their events and invited to join their causes. By not putting out, you also have the ability to craft a more deliberate online persona and platform that reflects the vibe you want others (friends, potential employers) to view for you. Finally, everyone loves a listener, and as my friend says, when you do have something to say — when, say, you’re ready to announce that book deal or start-up launch — you’ll have a solid infrastructure of good karma and friends that will happily rally behind your endeavor because you’ve already been listening to them.  

I joined Twitter when I got back from AWP; a month in, CLO_NYC has tweeted 20 times and has a modest number of followers (I can’t tell you how many because Twitter is currently experience a meltdown. That’s what we writers call irony!)  I’m crafting my Twitter persona to express my platform as a fashion and New York City culture writer, and only tweet when I have something to say on one of those topics. But interestingly, I’ve noticed that my understated approach to Twitter has caused me to be a little less reflexive in what I put out as my “real self” on Facebook. These days, I’m less inclined to blab about how hard I’m working on an essay in a status update. I still keep tabs on what my friends are putting out, but instead of writing my own comments, I’m using the “Like” button more, so they know I’m listening. For sure, these tools are great/effective/cheap/modern ways to get a message out. The thing is, I realized, I don’t have a message all of the time. Listening is a vital and edifying part of online media — as it is, of course, in real life. The pitfall of putting out is self-devaluing. So from now on, I’m saving myself. . . . for some special message.