Please Like me, Follow me and by the way ... can we be Friends?

You know how it's considered bad to be needy? Needy as in "Pleeeeeeese be my friend". Not attractive is it?! That was before the dawning of the age of facetwitblog.com. In the good old days (four years ago), you set up your website and hoped it hit the mark.
Excitement built up when people would send messages via the contact form. Hooray! Someone's finding the website and communicating via it. Then one day it made Google Search page one and all was good in the virtual world.

Then bang. Google Analytics started to tell me actually how many people visited my site, which pages they arrived from, how long they stayed and where they went next. (Actually even Google Analytics isn't that clever - how does it know whether the page was read and refered back to or left open on a computer while the viewer had a shower, cooked supper and met friends for drinks? Or at the very least went to the toilet and made themselves a coffee?) But it's all good fun and keeps us on our toes. And we do get a very useful insite (sic) into what is of interest to our readers.
But now? Now we have to have Followers and be Liked. The goal posts keep changing faster than a drug dealers phone number (Yes, I learnt so much from The Wire). Within one year I've had three different Facebook pages for Sprismatic and have caused utter confusion among many of the members of the Group. The Group wall postings were liked instead of the Fan Page. I don't like causing angst and it broke my heart to see the chaos I'd caused. Apologies to you all.

Eventually I gave into pressure and threw myself into Twitterland. Quite like it actually. I'm following all sorts of people who share their work, thoughts and laughs. Educating, entertaining and inspiring. Ah but then I realised it wasn't all about who we followed, it's all about how many thousands follow us. Tricky one that. If I follow certain people, retweet that many times and do the whole follow friday thing then I can bump up my followers. Lovely. For now I'll stick to posting what I think may be of interest and hope even that isn't too much information for my followers. As it is each tweet flashes up here, there and cyberwhere from the Facebook Fan Page, through to this blog and up again on the home page of my website.

And breathe. To be honest, I love it all. I love being allowed a window into the thoughts and work of these incredible people. We build up our own media resource, chosen to reflect our interests and concerns and hear from them directly instead of an interpreted, abridged and often altered version in one newspaper or one tv channel. I just don't like having to need followers like some self obsessed guru seeking affirmation.
So to you all, thank you for liking, loving, friending, following and not blocking me. And if you aren't doing all of these yet, please do. I really DO need you. Peace, love and (I'll try to keep it) light.