My Social Networking Explanation
On a recent episode of Mac Roundtable and Victor’s Typical Mac User podcast, they started talking about social networking sites, again. They raised their voice explaining how social networking sites are a waste of time, and some are calling it “bacon” to the fact that you are spammed by your own friends with request to join new social network ideas that pops up almost on a weekly basis. I hate to do this, I’m 30 years old, and I know what is worth waste my time on and what not.
During the whole conversation, I felt like I should have been there to explain why social networking sites are not for everybody but at the same time is something that everybody should be aware. A podcaster that gets this the way I do is Mitch Joel from Six Pixels of Separation take your time to listen to him to understand what is going on with social networking sites. Social networking sites are a great tool to advertise who you are and what you do, there are so many of them that if you where to join and update them all on a daily basis you will go crazy.
The point to it is that if someone hears your name and tries to look for you let say on MySpace, would they be able to find you. You would miss the opportunity of someone discovering you just because social networking sites are annoying to you. Have a presence, what I do is I join every single social network site that I can and the first thing I do is to tell people where to find me, where to find recent content, and where do I regularly hang out. Is really about letting people know that you are aware of this social environment but most of your time you spend it somewhere else.
Choose your favorite ones and keep those updated, that’s another example of what I do. I don’t like Facebook, many people are crazy about it, what I did is to make a twitter application active within Facebook so that every time I update my twitter account it updates Facebook automatically. How hard is that? Another great complaint is about notifications, Adam from The MacCast complained about this one. Adam here is my answer to you, turn them off, that’s it. You don’t have to receive notification if you don’t want to. The only ones I keep are the ones that let me know that someone wants to be my friend. Why? Because that is the point, to network, to get to know what you do and why you are in a social network environment.
Social networking sites are not my priority, if fact what you can do is have a separate email account for those places, and check them once a week. I wrote this post like in 2 minutes, mainly because the idea is very clear in my head. This is also something that Mitch discuss a lot on his show, and I agree with him 100 percent. Give it a try, understand that you don’t have to tell your life on any of these places, you tell people only what you want them to know. If one site is hot today, join it, if tomorrow is not hot anymore just let it go but leaving some contact information like you website address.
Agree? Disagree? Let me know what you think, post your comments on this post, and let’s discuss why or what is wrong about this whole thing. Subscribe to my RSS feed to get more great content and thanks for reading.
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[...] a post from Robert Scoble at http://www.scobleizer.com about bill of rights for participants in the social web, I realize that my affinity for the entire social environment, social networking, and social [...]
I find that the more I ask for people to add thier voice… they more they do.
That’s what makes my digital presence exciting… and worthwhile.
I know many people who are anti-social networks, Second Life, etc… that’s fine. It’s not for everybody.
It’s definitely enhanced my life in business, personal and community areas.
Good comments and remember you can drop by my show anytime and provide your point of view, or write it as a comment on my blog. Thanks for the thoughts on this.