Working From The Basement

Mike-
This is one of your best posts, I love it. You are totally right on. The rules of the road are still under development. I have loved the CTTweet crawls and the real people I have met. I have developed some new emerging friendships and I really enjoy it. I have also developed valuable business contacts and relationships. All while having fun. Developing your online “personality” can be tricky and sometimes we forget important basics because of the initial anonymity. When giving social media seminars I often remind people it is like showing up at a cocktail party where you really don’t know anyone, yet. Be polite, ask questions, answer questions and slowly let people get to know you.

Are you the new “MS Manners”??

Kathy

Mike, great post. Just to throw it all out there to the world, this is a topic Mike and I have been discussing one-on-one for several weeks now. I’ve made some changes in my approach to my use of social media, and Mike hits on a lot of the reasons.

The key takeaway from this post, to me, is the off-handed Ms. Manners comment. I think you’ve really hit it on the head here. Just because you follow someone on Twitter, it doesn’t make you friends. In fact, I would argue that it’s more of a fan-type relationship, since Twitter is not automatically a reciprocal relationship. So, when you meet in person someone whom you follow on Twitter, approach the person as you would approach an author whose work you have read or an academic whose research you follow. DON’T approach that person as a friend. (You probably don’t realize it, but approaching the person as a friend is just, plain creepy. Seriously. This is one of the reasons I’ve taken a break from the social media world recently.) Mike’s tip and Kathy’s note are dead-on: Introduce yourself as if you’re in a cocktail party where you’re meeting a person for the first time, yet you’ve heard a lot from a mutual friend. Don’t approach the encounter like you’ve been friends for years and start asking a lot of personal questions.

Okay, my rant. There’s a reason Mike wrote this article, and not me.

One last analogy:
I read a lot of David Sedaris’ books, and if you’ve ever read him, you know that he has a very informal, flip approach to his writing. I’ve even heard him read some of his work live, and it’s downright hysterical. Very personal stuff, about growing up the child of Greek immigrants, in a large family of people who are really larger than life. I can relate. So, if I ever met David Sedaris in person, the wrong way to approach it would be as follows:

Me: “David! Remember that time that you and Amy played a prank on your dad and Amy dressed up in the fat suit and started eating butter! Haha! I can’t believe your dad thought it was real. Crazy! What did Rooster say?! He probably died laughing, didn’t he? I knew he would.”

That approach would pretty much guarantee security is escorting me from the building.

And, lastly, one more thought. Whatever you do, no matter how much you love that person’s work and enjoy her writing, don’t look up her office address from her professional website and drop in at her office. You might have the best of intentions, but that moves from the realm of creepy into the realm of …….oh, I don’t know – really freaking creepy. And, if it happens twice in one week, it’ll probably make that author stop writing for awhile.

Hope I didn’t go too far, but someone had to say it. Thanks, Mike, for opening up this conversation. Our goal when we created this blog was to have candid, open discussions about issues that affect the microbusiness owner. This is a great topic, and I think it’s one that needs to be laid on the table. Let’s get the issue out there. Otherwise, you’re just out there humping people’s legs and having no idea you’re doing it.

I’ve been on the intertubes long enough to be well familiar with the issues at hand. Before the days of social networking, we had subscription based email discussion lists (remember those, anyone?) which later gave way to various online forums.

It is indeed invigorating about being able to carry on a conversation (of sorts) and network with like minded (or not) folk and flex your writing chops, but as has often been noted, there is something about this form of serial, semi-anonymous communication that can bring about less desirable human traits. Anyone who has been on either end of a “Forum Flame War” or been cyberstalked knows precisely what I am talking about.

My resolution, taken a couple of years ago, was withdrawal from certain online communities, beginning with the online discussion forums, and thereafter, Facebook.

The problem for me was one of over-accessibility. There was something undeniably awkward about “friending” an employee or business colleague (who may or may not be a competitor) and suddenly be privy to more personal aspects of their lives. Then there’s the whole issue of having to decide whether “de-friend” someone because they quit, or you had to let them go, or some other aspect of a relationship changed. Don’t even get me started on how to deal with Facebook during a divorce.

And what about clients? When you are a small business owner, you are never fully out of contact; your personal time is something that needs to be carefully guarded. Social networking apps are just another gateway. Do you want clients to know how you spend your weekends? Do you risk offending a client by refusing a friend request?

My solution, admittedly antediluvian: quit Facebook. I kept Linked In and Twitter, but divested into personal and professional Twitter accounts, and my personal tweets are private.

Could you explain more about how you think a “Fan Page” gets around the friend issue? In other words, that you can allow someone to be a fan rather than a friend? This still puts you in the uncomfortable position of having to refuse (or ostensibly redirect) a friend request.

Edward, thank you. I actually almost deleted my comment over the weekend because I worried I’d gone too far. That said, it’s comforting to hear that others have experienced this and to get ideas about what might work to solve the problem.

I’ve actually recently been considering deleting Facebook entirely – for many of the reasons you cite and also because with the new FB layout, I’m starting to feel like I feel towards having a landline, i.e., this is causing nothing but headaches and I’m “paying” for the pleasure of allowing people to spam me. So, I’ve seriously been considering deleting my FB account entirely.

This decision is tough for me, because I’ve been doing a lot of public speaking engagements about social media, and I’ve gotten a lot of business from FB. But, I agree with you completely – the friend/family/colleague distinction has caused hurt feelings and, ultimately, problems. Removing myself from FB would remove this problem.

As far as the fanpage suggestion, I think Mike is referring to what I do when I get friend requests from colleagues. I send them a polite message, letting them know that I use FB to play games with my sister, poke my mother, and share pictures of my dog. Since the person probably doesn’t want to know that much about my dog, the B-Law fanpage and B-Law twitter are probably better, or we can connect professionally on LinkedIn. This seems to have solved the problem on its face, although I am still experiencing fallout. This fallout is what I think Edward was hitting on with his response comment to Mike. The fallout comes from the ambiguity in relationships. If I have a beer with you at a TweetCrawl, does that make you a new friend or a new colleague? For me, that makes you a new colleague. For many, many others, this makes you a new friend. I have definitely been getting confused responses from the people who I chose not to friend, asking if they have done something wrong or offended me in some way.

Facebook is different for each user. Each one of us has to strike a balance. For Mike, he has found a different balance than for me. I choose to keep my FB very private.

Anyway, I digress. I have a new blog post topic, though. Almost ready to throw it out there…….I bounced it off @lostcosmos this weekend, and he said he’d buy the t-shirt. Let’s see if I can pull it together in a way that I’m comfortable posting.

Oh, and Edward, in response to your direct question: Yes, you can allow someone to be a fan without being a friend. (Actually, I don’t think FB has the functionality of refusing fans yet.) You can’t, however, invite someone to become a fan, unless that person is a friend, so that functionality will have to change (I think).

But, yes, you’re right – it still doesn’t remove the awkwardness of turning down a friend request; it merely buffers it and redirects.

Diana, you may want to take a look at this post (with a link to a relevant NY Times article) on my site:

http://tinyurl.com/ylaeksu

Your response is excellent; more on this later.

Mike, it was Friendstercide. Long story, for the rest of you, but the point is my friend from college was about 2 years ahead of me in thinking that social media had jumped the shark. When I asked if I could find him on Friendster (years ago), he told me that he had committed “Friendstercide,” because he was sick of the baggage that went with using the site.

Edward, I just noticed your comment today. (Almost two weeks behind in my blog reading.) I can’t get that link to load. Problem with your site? Would love to hear your thoughts on this stuff.

Jumped the shark indeed.

This is a link to a recent NYT article about what they call the “Facebook Exodus”:

http://tinyurl.com/lkqpgv

This is a link to an excerpt of the above and some resultant discussion on my own site:

http://tinyurl.com/ylaeksu

Speaking solely for myself, I remain off of Facebook for a host of reasons, largely personal, but also because of the redundancy and distraction factor. I have several websites, use Twitter, “exist” on Linked In and that is more than enough, in my opinion. I view being on Facebook as redundant, and occasionally intrusive and annoying.

My observation is that Facebook has essentially become “the web” for people who lack the knowledge or interest to build their own sites or use a conventional email client. There is a whole class of internet consumers now who have never used dial-up, IRC, subscription based discussion lists or Fido/Usenet.

…and this is an expectable and totally normal progression. The other, more important issues are my own personal privacy, what I wish not to know about others, and to maintain ownership and control of my personal and professional online presence. For these reasons, I opt out.

Interesting. Good to see they now offer deletion in tandem with deactivation.

Put me down firmly as a “former Facebook user”.