Social scientists have a name for the incessant online contact we experience by consistently immersing ourselves in social media. They call it “ambient awareness.” For better or worse, the label accurately captures the main benefits of being social on the web; Using popular tools like Twitter and Friendfeed to engage groups of people online gives you an enhanced awareness of what’s going on within the digital ecosystem (for people and topics you care about) in near real time. The only problem is that it can feel a lot like drinking from a fire hose.
The benefits of social media, no doubt, far outweigh the costs. Being able to “follow people” instead of just “following blogs and news” is tremendously informative and fulfilling, and being able to actually engage people of like mind who are having an impact on the world who share passions in your fields of interest etc is rewarding. Social media has given us an unprecedented amount of access to people and ideas, and for that I love it.
But drinking from the fire hose isn’t all sunshine and roses (I wouldn’t use the fire hose analogy if it was) . Participating consistently comes with significant trade offs and cons that are important to be aware of and manage if we want to get the most out of our days. I’ve learned some lessons this year from being hyper connected that I’d like to share. I think they’ll resonate with many of you…
1. You’ve Got To Use The Tools The Right Way
Twitter, FriendFeed, your blog…they’re tools to connect to other people, share ideas and build meaningful relationships. That’s how you have to think about them if you want to get anywhere. You’ve got to always be conscious of your goals and how you’re going to use the tools to achieve them. If you’re just piddling around the internet spending 8 hours a day chit-chatting, following tons of random people and being superficially friendly you’re wasting your time because no one will care about you or remember you. Social media interactions are meaningful only if you’re sharing remarkable ideas, being memorable, helping people achieve their goals, connecting to people and (most importantly) converting those connections into real offline relationships. The only networking activities that really count are the ones that build lasting relationships. Take a moment and think about how many people you would feel comfortable calling up on the phone right now to help you with a problem or achieve a goal….that is your true network, everything else is a vanity metric.
The true network I’ve built since I came online is small compared to most, but they are excellent people that I would never have met or connected with otherwise. I wont waste your time by going into specifics here. For those interested, I wrote a long post about how social media has helped me achieve my offline goals a few months ago called Encouraging Randomness and Accelerating Serendipity. Please check it out if you have the time.
2. Offline Relationships Should Always Take Precedence Over Online Ones
I can’t stress enough how important this is for your happiness and that of those in your daily life. In the past, I’ve been extremely guilty of the “Tweeting at Dinner” problem and I’ve learned the negative affects of letting my attention to social media overlap with my time spent with others the hard way. Work hard at being present in your offline relationships. When you’re physically with someone, turn the phone off. Give people you care about your full and undivided attention. It’s one of the most important things you can do to improve and maintain the best relationships you already have. If you’re constantly checking your messages and updating your status, you’re not 100% present and you’re likely detracting from the shared experience of the moment. The ones you’re with are far more important. The web can wait.
3. Opening Up and Being Personal Is The Only Way To Succeed
Ask any social media “guru” out there. The only way people care is if you put yourself into everything you create online – that goes for long blog posts like this one as well as 140 character tweets. Your personality should always shine through. It sounds trite, but people don’t want dry information on the web (do you?), they want opinion, emotion, truth, humor and authenticity. Give it to them. Otherwise everything you do will be boring, you wont be memorable and no one will have any reason to care at all. Infusing who you are into what you create is the essence of what makes your content interesting and what allows people to connect to you, which is the whole point. It’s scary sometimes to be yourself, but anything else will get you no where.
4. It’s Easy To Get Sucked In To Low-Value, Time-Wasting Minutia
If you’ve never looked at the clock after spending hours online and had the desire to swiftly put palm to forehead, my hat is off to you. All of us do it. It’s human to lose focus and get captivated by cool-but-meaningless bullshit served up in the stream. Stay focused. Time spent laughing and bonding with people over the latest LOLCatz probably won’t help you write that next traffic-drawing blog post. Likewise, refrain from limiting yourself to social media tools like Twitter and FriendFeed for your “shared feed reading”. Social discovery is excellent for ambient awareness (if you know how to look and who to follow, there are gems served up in the steam every minute) but taking a targeted approach and using your RSS reader to focus your learning on well written long-form content is still extremely valuable. If you’re not being focused about your learning, you’ll end up reading everything that the stream serves up and you’ll suffer from non-targeted information overload. Concentrate on value-added activities. Take a step away from the stream every now and again. Collect your thoughts. Write a meaningful blog post or create something and then return. You’ll be thankful that you did.
5. Large Superficial Followings Help, But Strong Relationships Matter Most
There are purists out there who believe that you should try and maintain a low following to follower ratio on Twitter and Friendfeed etc – and that taking steps to pursue a large following is a form of social media heresy. There are others who do everything they can to build an audience and succeed in building massive Twitter followings. I fall somewhere in the middle. I am not a purist (I use socialtoo, for example, to auto-follow people who follow me on Twitter so that I can DM them), but I’m also not out there spamming the heck out of the Twitterverse. I get why people try to game Twitter. I’ve done the math and research on Twitter traffic stats across lots of different types of users, and you can too. Add a “+” sign to any bit.ly link that Ashton Kutcher posts on Twitter, and do the same for joe-blog. The result is almost always identical – the click through rate on Twitter for any given link is invariably just under 1% of the follower count for ANY user, but most links get clicks. Of course, Ashton’s 2.5 mil Twitter following allows him to send traffic equivalent to a front page Digg.com submission (he averages around 15-19K clicks per post) – a little more than most. But for the rest of us, there’s a lot to be said for that “about 1%” click through rate. Creating great content takes effort and it’s tough getting people to your blog to read your stuff so every little bit helps. For that reason I can’t blame the non-malicious gamers who are just trying to get people to notice their work. Being found by the curious clickers can literally make the difference between success and failure.
All that said, strong relationships make a big difference. This is where the purists get heated because they have a strong argument. People who know you and trust you already want your content. They have a reason to seek you out, spend time reading your posts etc. They are fans who are genuinely interested. Having someone like that to connect with on social media is obviously going to have a much greater impact on your success than someone who doesn’t know you from a hole in the wall. However, those extra random curiosity clicks from people who’ve found you for the first time by luck have their place too – the truth is that success is built both ways – by focusing on building relationships AND exposing your stuff to the mob. Whether you focus your attention on building depth or breadth in your relationships is therefore up to you.
6. The impact of having one’s own personal long tail is important
When I started blogging 2 years ago, a basic Google search for my name got 11 hits. The information was thin – just my name on a few pages from my high school’s newspaper that had been posted online, a link to my Facebook account and some candid photos that a friend put on Kodak’s slide share of me driving a beat up Nissan Sunny. That same search today will yeild close to 40,000 hits thanks to blogging and social media – some of them on popular tech blogs like ReadWriteWeb and sites like the NYTimes. I own every link on at least the first 12 pages of Google for my name, which is important because Google results are your resume (whether you like that fact or not). It’s the first place people go to find out about you, and that’s especially true for employers. Also, old friends, people looking to hire and people who are interested in topics I write about consistently contact me and connect – I’ve met and reconnected to many great people this way. Most importantly, putting yourself out there in an open, transparent way builds reputation and authority, establishes credibility and gives you access to people and resources. If you want to read more about the impact of having your own personal long tail, Seth Godin has a great post titled Luckiest Guy that’s instructive.
Got any lessons of your own? Please include them in the comments.
