Grapevine Consulting

When i lived in Italy I visited the Benedictine monastery in Subiaco. It’s built around a cave where St Benedict supposedly lived in solitude for three years fed by a shepherd or monk (I’ve heard both versions) who lowered a basket of food down at intervals. The cave is surprisingly peacefully and, depending on your temperament, kind of appealing.

My positive response to the environment demonstrated that people feel different degrees of being intro- or extroverted and it’s something that crops up in questions when I run social media training sessions: who are ‘these people’ ie bloggers, tweeters, social networkers et al and why do *they* feel so comfortable broadcasting their lives?

I’m not sure I know the answer. At a basic level, once you and your friends start using something like Facebook it becomes more standardised and natural, you find yourself adding more personal updates, posting photos etc.

But honestly I still feel a bit like a social media “observer” using tools like this blog and Twitter to engage with my community from professional more than personal desires. As a pretty private person being publicly online makes me feel exposed and I contemplate deleting my accounts to run away to my Benedict’s cave. (Although I wonder if after 30 mins there I’d discover a compulsion to tweet “sitting in cave waiting for @Romanus to stop by with the food basket”).

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I don’t come from a search marketing background but it’s something I like learning about right now as it so clearly crosses over into social media comms campaigns. Something else I like, is having misguided, tech dummy ideas about technology I think should exist or be invented. I’m going to create a new category for these posts called “Random Thoughts” so you can just skip through reading them, or, if you are a brand which has already invented this technology you can come and tell me about it.

So….I live in an area of London where there are a lot of tourists. Just walking to and from things in my area frequently puts me in the path of camera toting tourists and, although it demonstrates an intolerant part of my nature, I often don’t pause every metre so they get the perfect shot. Admittedly it’s not only recently I’ve developed this “outta the way tourists” attitude. Living in Rome, Bath and Wellington N.Z. during filming of Lord of the Rings may have finely tuned this approach.

But, I was thinking the other day “I wonder how many people have photos with me striding through the background?” Then I thought if I can Google my name and see how many people have mentioned me, why shouldn’t I be able to search for how many people have photographed me? There are probably a lot of places I’m captured on camera which I don’t know about, or where my friends haven’t told me they’ve posted the photos.

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