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.

For as socially connected as I purport to be, the only thing I seem consistently willing to share is my music taste. And even then, I’m often reluctant to have some song that someone might misconstrue show up on my web site feed as “Ron is now listening to Something Controversial With A Swear Word!” This extends all the way to my personal presence on sites like Facebook. I’m just not comfortable with incomplete narratives and as of yet, I’m unable to find succinct ways to describe myself in bios. I’m great at helping other people — heck, I do this stuff for a living — but when it comes to me, I tend to err on the side of saying too little rather than too much.

So I was thinking today about this reticence which borders on obsessive, to where I’ll avoid posting almost anything most of the time. I’m not sure of a way around it. I think you have to be all-in or not with matters like this, unless your personality is wired a bit differently. I tend to do better when I put both feet in the puddle, rather than dipping a toe in. I’ve been dipping my toe in for years and progressively get more hesitant to expose much of anything using social media.

For years, my fear was simply that saying too much was just too open ended. But I’ve found assessing my own presence that there are times when I have things I would say, but don’t. I’m not of the opinion that we ought to be slaves to the medium; there are times when speaking up is worthwhile and times when it is less prudent. But one of the things I’ve noticed by doing a lot more reading over the years rather than broadcasting, is I find the most interesting people share more within the confines of their own comfort level.

It makes me convinced I have a place and with a platform to do it, I feel inclined to jump back into the pool and see what’s on the other side.

It made me think about my own social presence. What do you want to happen to your accounts when you’re no longer around? There have been startups who’ve offered to take care of those issues for you, but for those of us around now…is your Facebook page the most important possession you’ll care about? Probably not. It’ll come and go like most things. One way that transparency online does help in an instance like this, is it provides people a real glimpse into your actual thinking. So it makes it easier to know where someone stands on a topic if they’re putting it out there.

I recall a guy who had a strong internet presence within a niche community, who died suddenly. His friends paid to maintain his web hosting for years and at some point, several years after decided to stop doing so. At what point does the connection extinguish? When is enough time for digital mourning? For those close, probably never. I write this because I ponder it in my own life. It’d just as well prefer to see everything deleted, rather than turning over passwords. Not because there’s anything especially secret, I’m just not sure there’s anything — journals, commentary or such — that’s really necessary to left at this point.

I can see that changing, but it’s a topic that I’m not entirely sure I’ve grasped. What say you?

The conversation fired me up enough, that I had to put on my teaching strategist hat in-between bites of gluten free pizza.

Here were some of the takeaways:

1. You need to be the subject matter expert: Maybe you feel as though you’re good at specific things and feel out of your realm when it comes to trying to provide a senior leader direction on a topic. That’s understandable. But the reason you’re there is often to be the “young, fresh mind” offering up key insights and information that will help the organization move forward in its marketing digitally. In the case of these two folks, they’re working for non-profits with limited budgets, but that’s not a unique thing. Which leads me to…

2. See what others are doing well: There are so many resources online that you can spend entire days — to your peril — researching discovering and voraciously reading the pros, cons and so forth of what other people on doing online. The bottom line here is you can find people in your field and around it, doing things that can be of benefit to your organization. It doesn’t mean doing the same things, it means figuring out what’s working and what doesn’t, so you can provide a value-added benefit to the organization.

3. Assess your goals by listening and asking questions: For my shy friends who flourish designing, this one seemed the hardest. “What if I say something stupid? I mean, what if they ignore what I have to say?” Understandable fears, but you never know until you try. And the tactics involved in converting people to a new way of thinking often require showing rather than telling. It can be tempting to want to inundate folks with the bevy of new things that may or may not help. (And don’t get me started on the calls from consultants offering to change your life with this product or that one…) But it’s your responsibility to curate the best ideas, implement what you can within your responsibility and be able to show how it’s helping.

4. What’s the punchline?: Often times, it just boils down to giving someone the punchline. In organizations where people are wearing lots of hats, with leadership who might be set in a different way of doing things (read: older), it might be challenging to convince them to really propel forward with bold new innovations for fear they won’t work as well as conventional methods. That’s where it’s your responsibility to track, measure and evaluate what’s working and what doesn’t. Make sure that everything you’re doing can be tied by to goals that you established, so there’s no confusion about what time is being spent on.

Time will tell whether this recommendations from this spirited discussion — ok, spirited from my end — will necessarily help, but they’re both reported feeling more confident since our little impromptu lesson.

First, the increased complexity of site design is really something that’s getting out of hand. People figure it out, but it seems by catering to those of us who use these tools regularly, it leaves late adopters out in the cold — confused and frustrated to the point of giving up. What’s worse, is the trickery involved in these measures. No less than a year ago, Facebook privacy settings were relatively straightforward and made it easier to control who saw what and how. Now? The duplicity of attempting to trick new users into believing their information is “safe” when in reality, the defaults offer no such assurances seems wrong. It’s fine for people who have someone to help them through the process, but what about people who don’t have that? Does is suffice to say, “maybe you just shouldn’t participate in the conversation?”

On the idea of privacy, it’s simple. Not only has privacy become more important as people interact in a digital space, but so has the ability to communicate on your own terms. Meaning, it’s easier now than ever for people to make judgments about people based on an incomplete picture derived from online presence. Some folks counter this by being completely transparent and others maintain selectivity all the same. It depends on a lot of factors such as the work you do, who you interact with and your other reasons for this.

I feel like we’re revisiting this subject a lot, but it’s an important one. If the folks at the helm of web companies don’t take privacy seriously, it’s a sad song for the future of these services. Users will remain complicit by participating and handing over their personal information, believing it to be safe until something happens. Then, the companies will be forced to scramble and implement makeshift measures to assuage the concerns of a leery public.