About our brand. The Crew Sunday Post: December 29, 2013

The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Kimba the Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It's a chance to recap the past week, showcase books and things we have received and share news about what is coming up for the week on our blog.

The Masquerade Crew: A Safe Place for Personal Opinion

Ever since I started this blog, the @MasqCrew Twitter account as served as both my personal Twitter account and the main gateway for this blog. I share personal things on there all the time, and usually there's very little if any of a blip on the reaction scale. Meaning that people don't normally get all up in arms about things.

A few days ago I shared some personal thoughts on abortion. It's a hot topic. From what I can tell about half of the people out there are for it and about another half are against it. I'm sure it isn't as black and white as that, but the point is I wasn't sharing anything that others don't feel. I wasn't so far in left field that I was the only one with those thoughts.

The question has been raised: is sharing personal things on a business account good for your brand?

I agree with the experts and semi-experts who say to be careful what you share via a business account. After all, we've watched as one PR disaster after another has played out. And I also agree that authors particularly need to be careful not to alienate their audience.

However, there is a difference between a normal business account or author account and my main account.

First, as I've stated, it's always been my personal account. It does speak for the crew but not so much that every tweet falls in line with our general mission. There's a lot of random stuff shared, much of which would not be approved for this site.

There's not enough hours in the day for me to approve every tweet that goes out. I use the mass numbers marketing strategy, which alienates some on the best of days, but this site has the traffic it does mostly because of my marketing strategy on Twitter.

Second, if I didn't share random stuff on Twitter (which helps send traffic to this site as mentioned above but also increases our overall following) and only shared stuff that is posted on this site or other approved material, the range of topics would still be enough to alienate people.

After all, we are not one author promoting one book or set of books. Yes, an author will usually share other things, but their feed is usually very structured. They don't share books of all genres. And when they do share personal opinions, it's best to stay within the appropriate genre.

But I can't do that here at the crew. We promote books that conflict with one another all the time, sometimes blatantly, sometimes subtly. We can't really stay away from any topic because we share them all already.

One of the books we've promoted in the past and will do so again in the near future is about a woman who struggles over a decision to have an abortion or not. The book was written in order to encourage women not to have abortions.

I'm not aware of any other books we're promoting or have promoted that present an opposing viewpoint, but I wouldn't deny an author the chance to promote such a book.

I will not apologize for my stance on abortion, and I will not judge you for yours. Any opinion that is not hateful is welcome on this site and any of our Twitter feeds.

It's worth noting that during this so-called PR blunder, although the number of unfollows was slightly higher than normal, it wasn't so high as to raise an eyebrow. We've lost that many in one day before without any controversy. And we still had a net gain in followers.