The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 76 - Social Media Revisited

Transcript:

Jen: Hello, listeners. Pete and I have been having a hoot over in our Facebook group, and if you're not over there, what are you waiting for? We're having very interesting conversations with very interesting people, and we would love to have you. Also, we are dropping exclusive content in that group like things from the cutting room floor, things you would never hear unless you were a member of our Facebook group. So go to Facebook, type in The Long and The Short Of It, and come join us.

Pete: Yes. We made it Jen-proof to find so you should have no trouble joining the Facebook group. Also, remember, we have a website: thelongandtheshortpodcast.com, where you can find every single episode, every single transcript, and every single Box O' Goodies that we've ever created, which is a weekly email that we send out with the episode with a list of fun and interesting resources relevant to that week's theme. You can subscribe to the Box O' Goodies at the website, and you can submit questions, and look at a couple of ridiculous photos of Jen and I. So head to the website, thelongandtheshortpodcast.com. Finally, if you're enjoying the show, we would love it if you could take a screenshot, text it to a friend, send it in an email, post it on social media, whatever you feel inspired to do to help us find more amazing people, like you. For now, enjoy this week's episode.

Pete: Hey, Jen.

Jen: Hello, Peter.

Pete: So I have observed something in you...

Jen: Oh no.

Pete: A shift in behavior, if you like, that perhaps I never thought I would see. And I think we probably need to talk about it.

Jen: I have two ideas of what this could be.

Pete: Okay.

Jen: I'm a little scared. Should I put them out there and then...?

Pete: Throw them out there.

Jen: One is that I answered an email you sent me? [laughter] And two is that I have been posting on social media.

Pete: As funny as the first one is, you're spot on with the second one. Jen Waldman has taken a social media, and now we need to revisit everything that we've ever spoken about as it relates to social media.

Jen: Okay. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Jen: Well, thank you for noticing, Peter.

Pete: Of course. I mean, I was shook when I saw an email in my inbox from Jen Waldman. But equally as shook when I just happened upon Jen Waldman riffing on Instagram all of a sudden. So, talk to me. Talk to the listeners. Why the sudden change? What happened? Where are we? What decade is it?

Jen: Yes, you're right. There has been a profound shift. And part of it started because...okay, I'm going to see if I can like really get to the origin of this.

Pete: Let's do it.

Jen: So, my studio is building an online learning platform. And our first, like, real offering was going to open for registration. And it seemed to me that if I wanted to build an online platform, I should use an online platform to do that. So I started thinking about how I might market on social media. And I want to just be really clear that when I say "marketing", I don't mean sell, advertise, create a commercial for, or anything like that. I'm talking about marketing through the Seth Godin lens of understanding the people you're talking to and the change they're looking to make, and then offering a solution to help them make that change.

Pete: Spruiking.

Jen: Spruiking, if you will, mate. [laughter] So I started thinking about my blog voice, because I do a weekly blog post, which initially was terrifying to me. And I found sort of my voice for the blog, and it has made it very easy to blog. I mean, there are some weeks where I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I've got nothing to say. What am I going to say?". But for the most part, I have a consistent voice there. So I started thinking like, what might it look like to use my blog voice somewhere else?

Pete: Mmm.

Jen: And that was how the social media voice started, with some very, very clear edges on the sandbox. Which, ironically, I wrote a blog post about.

Pete: (And we'll put a link to it in this week's Box O' Goodies.)

Jen: Yes, so make sure that you are subscribed. And essentially, the the voice I'm trying to cultivate on social media is one of service, and generosity, and empathy. And so I've created an ethos for myself by which I am fully living. And that, essentially, is that I'm creating shareable content, meaning there's got to be something in there that I think is valuable enough that the person reading it would want someone else to read it. Which is why it's not selling or advertising, because I'm not trying to get something from the posts, I'm trying to give something with the posts.

Pete: I love it.

Jen: Okay, so second is to start with why. I know my why. My why is to help people better know themselves, so that they can better express themselves. And I want to make sure that with everything I'm doing, I'm seeking to help people feel more expressed. And then I try to structure the posts: "why, how, what". And most of the time I'm successful...sometimes I realize I'm not. And then I, uh, practice empathy, meaning: what might it be like to be the person reading the post? Like, I'm trying to speak directly to them, and also know that it's a post in a feed of other posts, on a day where they've had experiences. And I want to make sure that I am showing up to be of service, and not to poke the bear. And then finally, it's that I imagine that the "post" button actually reads "posts for all eternity", and I ask myself, "Would my future self be proud of this post?".

Pete: Ooh, I like that.

Jen: Okay, and then something I wrote about in the blog...and then I'll stop talking so you can actually respond to this.

Pete: [laughter] No, this is good.

Jen: So I had an experience on Instagram that really shook me. And it was...I'm very glad that it did. So, you know when someone finds your account, and they suddenly start going through all of your posts and liking everything? And you're like, "Why is this person suddenly liking everything?". Well, it feels harmless when, when most people find your account. But when someone you hold in high regard and respect to your core is the person who suddenly finds your account, and then you start seeing, "This person liked your post, and liked your post, and liked your post, and liked your post, and like your post", in a row...well, I'll tell you what it did to me. It sent me into a tailspin, a panic. Holy cow. And I went back and I looked at every single thing I had ever posted on Instagram. (Which was easy for me to do because it's not been a lot of things.) And there were some things where I was like, "Oh my gosh. I cannot believe this person saw that. Like, what was I thinking?". It was a great litmus test. So now what I've added to my list of criteria for publishing something is, "Would I be proud if this particular person saw it?".

Pete: Hmm. I like that. I like that. I like that. I feel like everyone has had that experience, where-

Jen: It's the worst.

Pete: -you spiral into a panic when you realize a bunch of people have seen something, and you're like, "Wait. Do I want them to see that?". Reminds me a little of my recent faux pas on The Long and The Short Of It Podcast Instagram account, Jen.

Jen: Oh, Peter. So, the only people who could have seen this were the people who saw it.

Pete: Right.

Jen: So please describe to the listeners who did not have the pleasure of seeing this. What happened?

Pete: Yeah. I mean, you can see the finished product at our Instagram account, The Long and The Short Podcast...The Long and The Short Of It Podcast. But I had this great idea based on a few accounts that I'd witnessed, to have like a giant tile image of you and I as like a static image on our podcast Instagram, so that if anyone found us on there, they would see it. They'd be like, "Oh, that's The Long and The Short Of It. I get it.". And maybe check out our website, and all that jazz. And in doing so, I ran this great photo through this app, and it was like, "Yeah, this will look great.". You just like plug this, push this, press that. And I just didn't think. Right? Like I was excited by the finished product. And essentially what happened...well, literally what happened is in order to make the tiles the square, the giant photo, it had to post six, or maybe nine...?

Jen: It's nine. It was nine.

Pete: Nine? Nine. That's a lot. …individual photos (pieces of the jigsaw, if you like) to make up the giant photo. And so we had a photo of my left shoulder. We had a photo of Jen's right thigh. We had a photo of, like, everything. Every body part came up as a separate photo and...

Jen: Of unmentionables...

Pete: Of unmentionables. And I proceeded to have a tailspin, and a panic, and some sort of anxiety attack about what I had done, and what Jen was going to say when she found out.

Jen: [laughter] I gotta say, Peter, it brought me so much joy.

Pete: Good.

Jen: Now if I had been the one to do it, I would have had the same reaction you had. But being the observer, I was like, "Oh my gosh, there is a picture of Peter's groin. That's interesting. In close up. Oh, there is half of my chest, in close up. Huh.". And then for one of them it was just a blue tile, like there was nothing on it. [laughter]

Pete: So, a little bit of short term pain, a little bit of short term panic, but I think the finished product looks kind of cool.

Jen: It does. And you can find it on our Instagram.

Pete: So anyway, that was just like a fun story about tailspins, because I think they're real, especially when it comes to social media, which is so interesting. It's like, it's like the place where FOPO is so extreme. Fear Of People's Opinion becomes so extreme on social media. But I love the intention you're putting behind it, which I know we've spoken about in like, way back when we talked about social media the first time. Around doing it with intention, and then we both kind of experimented, we didn't really like it, and now we're revisiting. So what I'm curious about, just to ask a question...you mentioned "blog voice" and how you might leverage that in social media voice. How does that relate to, and is it different from Jen's voice?

Jen: So, blog voice is a voice that I started to discover while I was on my writing retreat.

Pete: Mm-hmm.

Jen: And blog voice knows exactly who it's talking to. My blog voice has a very particular person in mind. And what's really funny (maybe this is a tangent, but it also might not be), is I've found...so I was building this online course, which was the whole reason I started getting more active on social media. And while I was building the course, I had a very specific client in mind, who I had taken through similar steps that we're taking in this course, and who had really reinvented herself to be a person who is fully expressed in her work. So every time I was feeling stuck, I would imagine I was speaking to her prior to that change.

Pete: Mmm.

Jen: And that was the voice I used, was the voice for that particular person. So that, I mean, the audience is just very clear in my mind.

Pete: Mm-hmm.

Jen: But the other thing about blog voice is I try to affect my blog voice with things that I would be using as inflection or gesture. If I was in front of you...you know, I spent a lot of time on my feet in front of people talking. And I don't have to think about my voice as much because I'm so fully there in front of them. They hear the tone of my voice, they see the passion behind it, or, you know, I'm wildly gesticulating while I'm talking. But blog voice is just words on a page, so it needs a character behind it.

Pete: Mmm.

Jen: And that character is very much me. It's just me in this very specific circumstance.

Pete: Love it. Without tiny limbs flailing everywhere, it's just words. That's great. Okay, and so now that you're back on social media, and spruiking, and acting very much with intention and integrity, what are you observing? And what are you curious about?

Jen: Okay. So, I'm observing some pretty amazing things. An example is we have a scholarship program at the studio, and speaking about it on social media allowed me to reach people who didn't know we had a scholarship program. In some cases, people who were wanting to study. And in some cases, people who were wanting to fund.

Pete: Wow.

Jen: So that was pretty great.

Pete: Wow, that's so cool.

Jen: Yeah. So that felt like it was serving multiple audiences. Um, I would say the biggest and probably most important aha moment of this whole thing is that initially...you know I like the important/urgent matrix. So initially, social media was in the not important/not urgent quadrant of the matrix, which is what I call the "Delete Quadrant". Anything that is not important and not urgent, like, who cares? Well, what's interesting is because I'm not looking at social media from the perspective of me being a consumer (which is where I put it in my Delete Quadrant), I'm looking at it as coming from a place of service and there's nothing urgent about it, it's really about consistently showing up in service, with content that is shareable and generous, and has an empathetic posture. That moved it into the important/not urgent quadrant, which completely blew my mind when I realized that. And I had been toying with the idea...I had hired this absolute brilliant woman named Allie, uh, to help me sort of sort out what I was going to do with social media. And originally, I thought that she would maybe ghostwrite some of the posts for me. And after recognizing that this is now in my important/not urgent quadrant, I realized that no, I could never ever have anyone else write my posts for me, if I'm going to keep it in that quadrant. Because what is so important to me is, is the consistency of the voice, and being of service. And the important/not urgent quadrant, in my mind, is it can only ever be done by me. So if I'm moving social media there, then it can only ever be done by me. She can help. She can help me manage it, and facilitate it, and get it out there. But I really need to be the creator.

Pete: Brilliant. Brilliant insights, Jen Waldman. Congratulations. It reminds me, what you just said, it reminds me of...I think we talked about it in the Working For Free episode, where you mentioned Seth Godin describing a moment that you can work for free as when it's a gift to your community.

Jen: Mm-hmm.

Pete: And it feels like that's very much how you're treating social media, is like, "I am going to create gifts for my community.". Not GIFs, G-I-F-S, but gifts with a t, G-I-F-T-S, which are two very different things. Although maybe they're the same.

Jen: Although I'd like to create a GIF of your face when you realized that you had posted a crotch shot on Instagram.

Pete: My goodness. The amount of panic in my face at that moment. Alas. And so I love this, because it ties into so many things. Like I said, that's, that Seth quote around gifts to your community. And then also (I'm sure I've mentioned this before), that I heard the brilliant, the wonderful, one of our favorite humans to follow and read, Brene Brown. She talked about social media as being like fire.

Jen: Mmm.

Pete: In that you can use it for good. To, in the case of fire, to create warmth, and community in a shared place together. Or you can use it for bad, and destruction, which some people do. And so I think about that as part of the generous work you're doing, is, "I'm using it in a productive way, like one might use a campfire when it's freezing cold.".

Jen: Ooh, I just love that so much. I want to call out one other thing that has made this experience different than previous experiences.

Pete: Mm-hmm.

Jen: I decided to exercise my...a part of my artistic self that has never really been exercised before.

Pete: Oh my goodness.

Jen: In that, you know, I don't really have a background in visual art, or graphics, or anything like that. Like as being a theatre director, I create beautiful pictures on stage with the help of designers and actors, uh, and I tend to the visuals. But I've, I've never been a person who's been like, "Let me create a static image and, like, look at it through an artistic lens.". And because we live in this time, there are so many incredible websites and apps that allow you to exercise some degree of artistry with a lot of help from someone else who's legit a graphic artist. And so I've been exercising, like, what is my taste in terms of visual elements and graphics? So I've been treating it like an art project. Like, I'm treating myself like an art student. I'm learning how to use certain things. Like, sometimes I put something out there that I'm like, "Ooh, that, that really resonates with me. But my goodness, that image is dark. Definitely, like, gonna do flowers next time.".

Pete: Yeah, yeah. I think, building on that, because...so what I would say is, watching you, and seeing you, and observing you start to act with so much generosity and integrity on Instagram inspired me to post a photo of my crotch, and your chest, and create that graphic that you can now see, which looks great on our Instagram. But to rethink and reexamine how we might experiment with our Instagram account...and what you and I have spoken about for so long is like, we have so many great, wonderful, and hilarious photos that we've collected.

Jen: We really do.

Pete: Like, there's so many. And we've often wondered, what do we do with them? How do we use them? And there's a bunch on our website, and we've shared some sometimes. But to your point around making it an art project, it got me thinking, how might we use those? And so I just noodled down, like, what an ethos might be, inspired by your clear points. I think what we've started to do, and what I'm starting to do is to only use Instagram Stories, and for the ethos to be to create generous, empathetic, and fun content that starts with why. So we want people to look at it and smile, and for it to be generous.

Jen: Mmm.

Pete: And that's really it. It's not about trying to collect a bunch of resources, because we do that now in the Box O' Goodies. For me, it's like, can we just create fun, generous, empathetic content that starts with why, and that basically includes a bunch of hilarious images of you and I?

Jen: Oh my god. They really are very funny. I'm such a beginner at Instagram, I don't...I haven't really figured out the whole Stories thing. So I'm relying on you to be great at Instagram Stories since we're only using Stories for The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: You're doing great.

Jen: Eventually, I'll figure out how to do that over on, in, in my lane. But in both cases, I love that what we're trying to do is offer an experience. So with The Long and The Short Of It, the idea is like we want to put a smile on your face. And with my...I don't know if you have an ethos for your personal Instagram, but for my personal Instagram, the idea is I want to help people have some sort of aha moment. It could be teeny tiny or it could be epic, but I want them to like resonate in a new way with at least one word that is in the post.

Pete: Mmm. So to answer your question before we close out, I don't have an ethos for my personal Instagram account. And I wonder if that's why I have so much anxiety, honestly, about posting, and sharing, and doing things on Instagram because it feels...

Jen: [gasp]

Pete: ...sometimes it feels self-indulgent. Sometimes I'm just, I'm paralyzed by FOPO. Sometimes I'm like, "Should I do a post about the podcast? Or should I do a post about the wedding that I went to on the weekend? Like, what am I actually doing here?". And so, I think that is a very common experience for a bunch of people. And so I wonder if the challenge is: consider, what's it for? What is your ethos? And what are you going to use it for? And I realize that I've just coached myself into realizing that I haven't thought about what it's for. Hmm.

Jen: Peter, may I offer you a challenge?

Pete: Go.

Jen: Because you love things that are meta...

Pete: Uh-oh.

Jen: When you create your ethos, will you create a graphic for it and post it on your Instagram account?

Pete: I knew you were going to say that. I have butterflies in my stomach thinking about it. So I guess that means I better try it. I guess that means I better try it.

Jen: That sort of sounds like the worst answer you could get if someone offers you a marriage proposal. [laughter] "I guess I'm gonna try it.". I feel like I'm wanting a yes or a no here.

Pete: Yes. The answer is yes.

Jen: Woo-hoo! Alright. Well, listeners, you have that to look forward to.

Pete: I'm all sweaty and anxious. So thanks for that. What a great way to finish.

Jen: Maybe you could also give us a close up of your sweaty brow while you're at it.

Pete: [laugher] People have seen enough close ups of me for the moment.

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.