Giving Is the Currency of Social Media

photo by creativecommoners

One of my favorite books on writing is Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. In it, Anne Lamott writes:

Annie Dillard has said that day by day you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects. If you give freely, there will always be more. This is a radical proposition that runs so contrary to human nature, or at least to my nature, that I personally keep trying to find loopholes in it. But it is only when I go ahead and decide to shoot my literary, creative wad on a daily basis that I get any sense of full presence, of being Zorba the Greek at the keyboard. Otherwise I am a wired little rodent squirreling things away, hoarding and worrying about supply. Arthritis forms in my hands and in the hands my mind is using to shape things, in the hands of that creature in the cellar who wants and needs to use all of his favorite rags in the ragbag he works from.

You are going to have to give and give and give, or there’s no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.

Besides the fact that there really is no cosmic importance to getting something published when everyone is a publisher (certainly not the case when Lamott wrote those words 15 or so years ago), I’m struck by how aptly it describes what we experience every day in social media.

Giving is one of the great givens, a prerequisite for success in social media. Others expect you to give freely of your time, knowledge, expertise and advice, with no obvious expectation of return on your investment.

While Lamott may have been writing about the return one derives from investing oneself fully in her writing, she could just as easily have been talking about the investment you make in your social media efforts. We’ve seen time and again cases in which the investment of giving has paid rich dividends to the giver.

If there’s no reason to write other than to give and give and give, then I think much the same can be said for participating in social media. For many business folk this may be an alien concept, but for nonprofits it nicely complements our mission-driven, social-benefit, collaborative natures.

Learning to be a giver is one of the keys to social media success. Hoarding and worrying about supply simply lead to arthritis.

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Tagged as: anne lamott, bird by bird, social media, writing