“Click to Tweet it!!” Um. No.

I’ve asked these linked questions a number of times: how do you manage your social media? how do you use it to your advantage and prevent it from getting in the way of doing what you do?

Lately, as I’ve been populating my Etsy shop and cross-posting on Flickr, I have found that many people think the key to sales is clicking. This activity is couched as adding other Etsyians to your “Circle,” “favoriting” shops or items, and participating in Teams. Some Teams are active, but others have hundreds of members and no responses to threads in the forums. It’s easy to click the day away and think you are participating in groups or teams or pools, but does it lead to anything?

I’ve also been reading some blog entries about starting a business from the perspective of offering yourself and your personal genius to the world – yes, sort of self-helpy, but hey. So I want to take them seriously and internalize the messages and attempt to use them to my advantage.

But it isn’t easy to do this when a sentence that could have been full of meaning is followed immediately by a hyperlink to “Click to Tweet it!!” Um. No. I’m not here to click and Tweet. I do Tweet, and I enjoy it, and I think Twitter is a good networking tool along with other platforms, but to simply consume and spit out again is not furthering my business. In fact, that approach, to me, is the antithesis of what the new business builders and coaches of today claim they are promoting.

At this stage, I’m in it for me, and I know there is a certain level of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” that goes along with this type of endeavor. I suppose I’m resisting just being someone else’s pawn, though. I’m not feeling my back being scratched so much.

So once again - how do you manage your social media? how do you use it to your advantage, and prevent it from getting in the way of doing what you do?

Boobs

I’ll be intrigued to see who finds my post because they were looking for something lewd. Heh.

Well, they may be disappointed but you may be more interested – I have now completed five different “boob beanies” for breastfeeding babes. Here you go. Click the link to see other views.

Baby soakers!

These are super fun to knit and a fairly quick knit as well. I can work on these while talking with friends or on the phone. If I had a TV, I’d probably knit on them while watching it!  There are several more on the way, but here’s a sampling of what’s up in the store.

These two soakers will fit 6-9 month olds in cloth diapers, and possibly up to 12 months old – they have been size-tested on a very large 10-month old! Links here and here.