Slowness is beauty

Nett Administrator
4 August 2009

A friend of mine flew halfway around the world to do some blogging. As an accomplished blogger, why did he fly 10,000 kilometres to do something he could do perfectly well from home?

A superior at work thought that this blogging-at-a-distance could possibly translate into added traffic, clicks and dollars on their website.

However, this superior also neglected to mention this to my friend. When the added traffic-clicks-dollars didn't immediately appear, my friend got the blame.

Avoidable? Entirely.

Perhaps the most important lesson of social media is that it takes time.

Yes, we've all seen the Susan-Boyle-Britain's-Got-Talent music video - it's been viewed nearly 200,000,000 times. Sometimes, with the right push, social media goes huge immediately. But that's very rare, an exception that proves the rule: social media grows slowly, leisurely and methodically. It takes time to build an audience for your blog. It takes time to build your list of followers on Twitter. It takes time for people to discover that video you uploaded to YouTube 18 months ago.

One of my closest friends now has well over 350,000 views on her YouTube channel. She's been making and posting little videos to YouTube for the past two years. No single one of her videos has a huge number of views, but each of them gets at least a few thousand viewers.

Over time that adds up.

She's built her audience, video by video, the same way a blogger builds an audience, post by post. If she keeps up the work, soon enough she'll have an audience in the tens of thousands, an audience which she could, should she choose, turn to profit. But it all takes time.

This idea of nurturing and building social media plays against our common perception of ‘internet time', that sense that everything is happening everywhere so quickly that we must do everything right now.

Write a thousand blog posts, right now. Post a hundred videos, right now. Build a huge audience, right now.

But things simply don't work that way.

Internet time is an illusion. Social time - which is delicious, languid and utterly unforced - is the real deal. We don't hurry through an evening with our friends, we stick around and savour the moment. The same is true for all social media. All social relationships are forged through time. Time is what they're made out of. If we can keep time in mind, we can build meaningful relationships through social media.

My friend came home from his trip halfway around the world, facing the evident disappointment of those who sent him, because his journey didn't yield immediate results. But that was just the beginning, and the beginning is not the whole story.

If the beginning of the relationship is solid and timely, what follows, in the days and weeks and months still to come, may become something amazing. You can't force a plant to grow by pulling on it. The same is true for social media.

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