Twitter

A quick "lucima" search on twitter.

It took me a long time to come over to "the dark side". In my heart of hearts I believe that twitter brings out some of the worst elements of humanity. Particularly reminding me of that Heathcote Williams quote, "Fame is the perversion of the natural human instinct for validation and attention." Because many of the people that are on twitter are simply fulfilling their self-induced fantasies of importance. That they deserve their own TV show. And perhaps they by creating a twitter account they get their own show?

It's much the same with Facebook. In fact without Facebook, I wonder if twitter would even exist. Most of the time as I look on my news feed, I see the random musings of divas, unnecessary advice, quotes on life, reactions to circumstances but without providing the actual context, and other utterly useless updates of people who think that they're more important than they really are.

Or maybe there's something wrong with me. Maybe I'm weird for not wanting to contribute to the fodder on the news feed. Maybe I'm reclusive because I don't particularly enjoy sharing personal information to the 4,200 "friends" that I have on Facebook. (Seriously, if you have 4,200 friends what you're really saying is that you're a shitty friend to 4,190 people).

And yes, I'm a hypocrite because for all the smack I talk about Facebook, I do have a Facebook account. And even worse, I've moved even further into the dark side by creating a twitter account. How did this happen? I created my twitter account 6 months ago on a random day that I decided to check out twitter and see what the fuss was all about. As I was pondering whether or not I should create an account, I discovered that @lucima was already taken. As a knee-jerk reaction, I registered @CharlesLucima in the event some other idiot might take that too. And I don't know which idiot registered @lucima because if you google lucima, I dominate everything on the first 2 pages. IIRC, the only other references to lucima are a few Africans with that last name and a design company in South Africa. And the guy that registered @lucima speaks Spanish so WTF?

My twitter account stayed dormant since registration. I didn't use twitter because I felt FB was more than enough for me to reach my audience. But after releasing the podcast with Rodney Alan last week and having some 250 people listen to the podcast, Rodney suggested that I expand my reach into twitter to see if I could reach yet a larger audience. He was convinced that with my following I'd see a large following on twitter.

I'm not convinced.

Regardless of what I thought, the marketing guru in me agreed with Rodney that twitter provides the LUCIMA brand another quantifiable measure of my audience, reach, and pull. The only drawback is that I'd have to sell my soul.

The last time I checked, souls were losing value fast on the stock market. Might as well dump it while it's still worth something :)

What will be the key difference between my posts on FB versus twitter? I dunno yet. What I do know is that half the time, I can't post the images I want to post on FB because of nudity. With that said however, there will be a lot of overlap between my posts on twitter and FB.

What I've noticed over time is that however reluctant I might be, I've slowly acquiesced to allowing FB and twitter to infiltrate my life. But don't get me wrong, I'll never feel completely comfortable with sharing snippets of my life in real-time. And while I'll always feel that the fame game is mental masturbation, I can not refute the advantages that FB and twitter lend towards marketing the LUCIMA brand. For that reason and that reason alone it was and is important for me to get on FB and twitter. You gotta stay relevant.

What about all the stuff you share on blogger? That's totally different. Blogger is a safe-haven for my thoughts. The audience here pales in comparison to the audience on FB or twitter. You guys are the smartest and most like-minded group of people that I reach through any medium (other than my workshops). I actually purposely keep my daily feed of pictures off of blogger so as not to attract dumb people. The dummies can go over to tumblr and look at all the pretty pictures and click "like" or whatever that button is. But for the 3 of you that read this blog (okay it's more like 2 of you and the 1 random person that landed on this page via Google), I value your intellect, your patience, and your systematic way of thinking. You're probably an older male, 35-50 years old, well-to-do (working a full-time 6-figure job), own your own home, you like photography, and for some reason you have this strange habit of reading the ramblings of a young (well not that young) photographer). Don't think I don't appreciate that! I'll never give up blogger because my thoughts can't be confined to 120 characters.

But there's always more to share. Since I rebooted my twitter account I've been pretty active. Daily posts, pictures and more. If nothing else, at least you'll get to see my latest work on twitter so follow me @CharlesLucima. See you on twitter :)