B is for: Building a platform - pointless time suck or preparing for the future?

One of my favorite blogs to follow is The Intern, a young, editorial-assistant-turned-Big-Six-author who, of anyone out there, is the poster girl for building an online presence. So I read with interest this post on the benefits of social media for budding writers...or lack of them.

To sum up what you can read by following the link, a writer friend of Intern's did an experiment: she social mediaed the heck out of her book for six months, then erased her entire online presence and watched what happened.

Can you guess? Right. Nothing. Her Amazon sale numbers remained exactly the same.


So...what do you think? Is her experience the norm?

And if it is, would it change the way you blog?