So, the Saturday before last I was lying in bed drinking tea and reading the Financial Times Weekend Magazine. The FT Weekend edition, including the supplements, is probably the best newspaper in the world. And for a while now, I’ve been going through the FT Weekend in the hope of finding interesting, funny ads for my swipe file. But it’s been thin gruel. Most of the ads in the FT Weekend have mental health problems.
Yet this weekend was different. I spotted something that I actually really liked. It was an ad for an upmarket estate agency featuring a tree-lined, luxurious looking driveway, presumably swooping up to a house, with the line, ‘For the people who like a long drive at the end of their commute.’
See, look, I’m not lying.
It’s good, isn’t it? Anyway, I posted a few short paragraphs on the ad, uploaded it to LinkedIn, went off to Milford on Sea music festival for the afternoon, and promptly forgot about it. (Forgot about the post, I mean, not the afternoon.)
Here’s what I wrote.
Like I say, I pretty much forgot about it. But the following morning, Sunday, I checked my email account. More emails than normal. And not just junk emails, actual people were actually asking me to connect. This was new. Rarely do people want to connect with me. But people had seen my post, liked it, and commented on it.
I went over to my LinkedIn account and saw my post had something like 15,000 views and a hundred or so reactions.
This immediately made me a bit giddy. And the giddiness continued as I replied to comments, edited the post to credit the writer of the ad, and watched the number of views, reactions and comments balloon. Once it got to about 25,000 views (which LinkedIn calls impressions), I wondered if I might be on the verge of going viral.
When you search ‘how many views are classed as going viral on LinkedIn’, here’s what you get.
So it seems on that Sunday I was about halfway to entering ‘viral territory’. By the end of Sunday I had 36,901 views. The following day, Monday, I got a further 25,169 views. Tuesday 10,926. And so on. It looked a bit like this:
In fact, it didn’t look a bit like that, it looked a lot like that because that, above, is that – my impressions graph. At the time of writing I have nearly 93,000 impressions for that post. If I manage to get 7,000 more, I go from ‘entry viral’ (50,000 views) to ‘standard viral’ (100,000 views).
Yet I’m not sure how much I’ve liked it. I’ve enjoyed almost doubling my follower count and my new connections seem sound but the whole experience made me feel slightly unbalanced.
One reason I don’t like it, is because it’s not really my work. Okay, I provide some commentary on the ad but I didn’t create the ad. It wasn’t about me. I always felt that Pitching the World would be the making of me, that someone would swoop in – much like the way a driveway swoops in – and rescue me. Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t you like that? Someone swooping in, driveway-like, and rescuing you? Of course you would, we all would. I thought that would happen with one of my posts, that one would go viral and I would be showered with praise and money and love and then, if I’m lucky, maybe even some more money and love.
But the way that I reacted to going viral – and not even full viral, more homeopathic viral – on LinkedIn suggests that I’m not cut out for going viral anywhere. For a day or two I couldn’t get anything done. I just metronomically checked my Notifications to see who else was lying at my feet while feeding me grapes. In fact, I’ve just done it now, some eight or nine days later, and saw that I had a new reaction.
See, if you’re obsessed with monitoring your fame, you reach this kind of stasis. Which is a real shame. Because I don’t want to reach a kind of stasis, I want to get stuff done. I love getting stuff done. You know those times, as a freelancer, where you can spontaneously take the day off and go to the cinema, or spend a day lying in a park, while patting yourself on the back? Great, isn’t it? That’s me. But at the moment that’s me every day. And the allure soon wears off if every day is some syrupy indulgence – because if every day you can be spontaneous and skip through parks, or sit in a darkened cinema with four other bald men with their sandwiches, it just means that you don’t have any work.
Which is sort of me now. I can cope with not having any work, I’ve not had work lots of times. And, somehow, I’ve always been okay. But I do have a big list of things I want to do, like become a leg model. I’m sure there are other things. But you should really see my legs these days because my legs these days are something else, something other than ordinary legs. They’re the legs of a god. I walk miles in sand and hours up hills and then I oil them (the legs, not the hills) with Malibu fast tanning oil from Savers and think that, yes, although they are legs they are also something else, something otherworldly.
Malibu tanning oil (with beta carotene), earlier.
Look, it’s time we stopped all this. There are other things that I want to write about this experience, like how going viral-ish has made me gunshy, that I don’t want to disappoint my eager new followers and so I can’t post anything else at all at the moment, but this has been going on for ages, this post, and I really need to do things that include not writing this post. But I will try to become a leg model, just you wait and see. And I will also stop checking my LinkedIn notifications and become much more productive. Just you wait and see that as well.
If you want to follow me or connect with me on LinkedIn then go here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-rowland-85b423208
I’d like that, a lot. If I don’t respond right away then I’m doing okay. If I do get back to you right away, send help.
Pitching the World 