January 2010

The line between fans and friends is sometimes blurry, especially if you’re a blogger or have any type of online presence. And it’s really blurry if you use Facebook.

What constitutes a friend? What makes someone a fan?

Are they ever one and the same, and what do you do when they’re not?

After grappling with this, I’ve decided to share:

3 Things I’ve Learned about Friends, Fans, and Facebook

1. Not All of Your Friends Are Fans of Your Work

To the readers of this blog I’m the mildly creative guy behind a Mildly Creative blog. I’m the guy who draws odd pictures; publishes quirky, little blog posts; and occasionally writes a poem or two.

But to people who know me personally, I’m just Ken. Most of my friends and family could care less about my pictures, posts, and poems. And, to be honest, I could care less if they did. I don’t need them to be fans. It’s their love and friendship I cherish.

I don’t often whip out my drawings, recite my poems, or read excerpts from my posts while drinking beer and eating chicken wings with my buddies.

I seldom even mention the blog at family get-togethers. They all know about it; they just don’t ask about it much.

I don’t ask them much about their work either. We mainly ask about one another’s kids, tell bad jokes, share movie recommendations, and argue over who we think will win the next election or Super Bowl. I like things this way.

I think about this every time I publish my posts to my personal Facebook account. I don’t want my friends to sell me cars on Facebook. Maybe they’d prefer it if I didn’t peddle my work to them either. They’re more interested in seeing pictures of my kids and ribbing me about the steep, hard decline of the St Louis Rams.

Friends and family are the meat and potatoes of a happy life. They shouldn’t have to be your dessert too.

2. Some of Your Fans will Become Your Friends

Maybe you thought I was going to say that not all of your fans are your friends, but that’s obvious.

I’ve been a fan of Stephen King since I was a teenager, but he’s never had me over for dinner. Instead, he just keeps writing books I enjoy reading, and that’s enough for me.

But, every now and then, you get to meet someone who enjoys your work or someone whose work you enjoy and discover you have a lot in common. Email addresses and phone numbers get traded, one of you makes the first move, and, lo and behold, you have a new friend. It’s a beautiful thing.

And it’s this, combined with the first thing, that makes everything seem so blurry.

You want to reach out to your friends and your fans, you want to interact with each group in a way most natural, and yet you understand that not everyone falls so neatly into one camp or the other.

That’s where fan pages come in, I think, because:

3. A Facebook Fan Page Creates a Penetrable Wall

Recognizing the shifting but significant line between friends and fans, I decided to create a fan page. It’s also why I started blogging.

I love my friends and family, but I’ve always had the creative bug, and I’ve always longed to meet and support others stricken with the same wondrously mad disease. Blogging allows you to reach people that way.

And a fan page on Facebook allows you extend that reach without having to inundate your Aunt Agnice or your hapless fellow Rams supporters with things of interest to your readers but of no interest to them.

But, just in case you misunderstand, a fan page isn’t the Facebook equivalent of the Berlin Wall. It doesn’t have to be a heavily guarded barrier between fans and friends.

It’s more like the wall of a living cell. It’s permeable. People can penetrate the wall, come and go as they please, and spend time on each side if they choose. But you can gently direct them where you think they’ll be happiest.

That’s why I’m going to continue to manage a fan page and why I’m going to promote it instead of my personal account.

On the friends’ side, I’m going to talk about my kids and ask about theirs. I’m going to tell bad jokes, recommend good movies, and argue about who’s going to win the next election or Super Bowl.

On the fans’ side, I’m going to share my work and the work of others who I think might be of interest to the people who share my special brand of madness.

And, to make the lines even less blurry, I’ve decided to drop the fan page bearing my name. It’s just too surreal seeing two of me pop up in the Facebook news feeds. In its place, I’ve created a page bearing the name of this odd, little brand I somehow stumbled into called Mildly Creative.

I hope you’ll become a fan of the brand. And who knows? If we haven’t already, maybe someday we’ll meet and become the very best of friends. Here’s the link to my page: Mildly Creative on Facebook

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“Success is achieved by developing our strengths, not by eliminating our weaknesses” Marilyn vos Savant

You could spend the next ten years working feverishly to eradicate your every weakness. But while you’re doing that, you won’t be using your strengths, which are the things that have the most potential to get you where you want to go.

It’s kind of like postponing a journey to build up your arms so you can walk on your hands. That’s great, I suppose, if it’s always been your dream to travel in such a manner, but if you just want to reach your destination and you have two good legs, why not use them and start walking?

People don’t want you to be perfect; they just want you to be good at something.

It’s far, far easier to be good at something when you’re drawing on your strengths instead of desperately working to fix yourself.

Do you know what others see in you? What do you see in yourself? Spend some time thinking about what you have instead of what you haven’t and see how far it takes you.

Use what you got. You’ll reach your destination a whole lot sooner.

Think, Draw, Write.

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