Note: I wrote this article for AddictedToSocialMedia.com (A2SM), an online blog that talks about how to get the most out of Social Media as a whole. A2SM has a series of luminaries writing for them and sharing insight on how to best use Social Media and how they use it. I was honored to be asked to contribute to their success. The original post appears here.
I recently crafted my company’s Social Media Guidelines (and had some fun in the process) and was thinking back to one line of advice in that article: “Don’t Forget Your Day Job.” For some reason, that line kept coming up in my mind so I thought that I would explore it a bit more.
The problem with Social Media is that it is extremely pervasive AND persuasive. But perhaps this is a good thing as well. Let’s follow these ideas a bit more. Pervasiveness is defined as “spreading widely throughout an area or a group of people”. The entire concept of Social Media is to engage in conversations with friends, family, coworkers and strangers via a variety of different mediums: blogs, forums, wikis, social networking sites (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, etc.). Nowadays, building a site that either is purely social or has social components to it is very common. If one does not build in any kind of social aspect to one’s online presence, you are no better than writing in a journal by hand and putting it in a drawer. There is nothing social about that, but of course the choice is up to the author. They might not want their thoughts, feelings, ideas, pains and laughs shared with other.
Personally, I think communication is key but this is where other arguments come into play. Social Media takes away true human interaction. People can hide behind a screen and keyboard, assume (dangerously) other roles and personalities, and talk about just about anything. Dying are the arts of letter writing, now replaced with quick emails, tweets, instant messages and the like. People send calendar invitations instead of picking up a phone to ask about a person’s availability. But, it is this instant nature of our technologically-bolstered communication has contributed to the pervasiveness of Social Media.
Let’s explore the persuasiveness of Social Media. We all know that it is readily available. But why are people hooking into it so quickly now? For one, it’s really easy to do. Companies like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr and the like have created communication and sharing environments that can be set up in minutes. Facebook is a perfect example of how a service can be so enticing. It can be used to reconnect with old classmates and friends that you have drifted away from for one reason or another. As a person grows older, more distractions come into play and people choose different paths. In junior high and high school, people had many commonalities. But once graduation happens, people head off in different directions.
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