How social media militancy confuses people

So I deleted my Facebook profile the other day. Or I should say, deactivated. It was a personal thing. I can’t recall the last time I did that, but it was cathartic. Until about a week into my most recent hiatus, I realized that it was causing confusion for people who use it as a vehicle to contact me.

My more militant side says “I’m extremely easy to find. Among my friends, I’m surely one of the few that heavily relies on his personal domain as a vehicle for contact. It’s not as if you can’t get in touch with me. How much easier can it get than ron at ronbronson.com? But this isn’t how ordinary people work. You were once on Facebook. Now you aren’t there anymore. This makes them confused.

Luckily, my friends know I do this. So they’re not all that surprised by it. Still, my increased network is comprised of people I’ve met over the years who will drop me occasional notes. Some will ask for a reference or want to say hello and don’t really know where to go to find me. One person took to Twitter to seek me out. I thought it was bold and useful, but it made me realize that I needed to rethink my stance on social media militancy.

Why militancy? Well, I’m not sure. If you live and breathe the social world, it can become ubiquitous with your normal life. For my peers who live in real cities with real people, it’s a lot easier.  But when your real world is distant from your everyday life, I find myself sometimes over-relying on technology to give me what my environs can’t. Like most things, there are tradeoffs and I sometimes need to bow out.

So I deactivated Facebook, deleted my Klout profile completely and detached from Google Plus. Maybe it makes me a bad web guy that I can often be an anti-social media Luddite. Except that’s not my position. I just have a pointed belief that not every network needs to be for everyone. And just because a school decided a platform works for them doesn’t mean we need to join every Tom, Dick and Harry network that evolves simply to have “a presence.”

This extends to my personal presence as well. Especially in a world where I’m still struggling with curating my own personal web presence, I don’t feel entirely comfortable farming out my identity to a third party. So this is part of the source of my consternation. In fact, it’s probably not militancy at all. It’s a personal choice borne out of realities in my own world.

While this is how I see it, I hadn’t really considered what other people who do. I never viewed detaching from Facebook as akin to throwing my cell phone in the lake. But that’s what it’s like for so many connections.

Alas, I rejoined and the messages followed. Lesson learned? I’m not so sure, but for now…I think I have a better understand of Facebook’s role in my personal world. Now that’s a lesson learned.

Social media, participation and the free-rider problem

Story

Article in the Times about blogging and how you can go from being very interested in writing, to not very active at all. It probably spends too much time talking about people who blog because they wanted to get rich and famous, but it’s a pretty good article anyway. The quote I liked most was from Nancy Sun of Saladdays.org

“The Internet is different now,” she said over a cup of tea in Midtown. “I was too Web 1.0. You want to be anonymous, you want to write, like, long entries, and no one wants to read that stuff.”

I started my first blog, mostly by accident. I’d been writing an online newsletter from about 99 to 2001 and after I changed platforms, decided quickly to take the niche production and put it into blog format. I used Movable Type and the blog was pretty popular for what it was and I met all sorts of random people.

For me, a bigger issue is the problem of social media and the free-rider problem. I mean, we all know of the 90-9-1 rule that:

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

But what does this mean for people how continue to develop a footprint in a world where they’re just not fully developed yet? You see it all of the time with these so-called social media guru who aren’t quite 30, have had maybe two jobs in their entire lives, yet have branded themselves as experts in the field and who will tell anyone who will listen the “keys to success.”

Age has nothing to do with this, but it’s sorta funny.

We’ve shifted from an era where blogging, tweeting and other sorts of venting was under the radar. It’s becoming mainstream. As a result, people who are looking for a more complete snapshot of you, will read what you write and use it to judge you. For better or worse.

The difference here is, not everyone will participate. And those who do, might only do so to keep tabs on you. So while it’s fine if your entire social sphere is interactive and on the web, it’s not as good if you’re something of a trailblazer in your own world. Your seemingly innocuous tweets or blog posts where you rant out ideas about this or that, might be evaluated by people who have no context for how you communicate ideas.

It’s a worrysome trend, but what can you do? You can’t expect everyone to start participating. And does participation really level the playing field? Not really.

It’s about exposing yourself. If you’re going to blog, tweet or use other forms of social media, you have to have a purpose and understand why you’re doing it and you need to get something measurable from it, because there are costs to that blog that you think no one is reading.

The more established you are in your career and the more integrated your web presence is to your offline persona, the more latitude you have to use social media as a tool to advance your career. But even then, there are limitations and challenges embedded in it.

I recall a few years ago, I had a job interview at an institution. The first set of interviews were almost all about my blog posts. They’d printed them and were just asking me all sorts of questions about my thoughts and insights. It didn’t seem to be a negative and I appreciated the opportunity to flesh out my ideas a bit better. But it was at that time, that I realized how serious this all was and I hadn’t prior to that.

What you have to say, really matters. So be thoughtful and conscientious about what you’re saying and why you’re saying it.