It’s Not You. It’s Me. June 22, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.Tags: Facebook, Plaxo, Social Media, Twitter
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Most everyone starts using Twitter in the same way. Trying to gain some traction, we connect to lots of people for varying reasons: friends, coworkers, business partners, church members, etc. Those connections lead to others and our little Twitter world grows. Over time, we develop a fairly heterogeneous group of followers.
For some (perhaps most) of us, that group winds up with some fairly disjoint communities. As a result, you begin to realize that some things you tweet are meaningless to large numbers of your followers. Instead of bringing value to your followers, you are distracting them. It may get to the point that you stop tweeting things for fear that they won’t readily appeal to a large percentage of your followers. When you reach that point, the whole concept of Twitter begins to unravel.
Some would say that this is no big deal, that part of the appeal of Twitter is to bring these divergent worlds together and allow this cross-pollination to occur. I can understand that approach from a theoretical perspective, but the reality is that there are certain tweets intended for one audience, and other tweets that should only be delivered to another. In my case, most of my friends couldn’t care less about the finer points of IT leadership, while my business connections see little value in the arcane details of my chaperoning the 8th grade class trip.
Other social tools, like Plaxo and Facebook, understand that there are layers of access to our lives. Plaxo, for example, allows you to divide your world into family, friends, and business contacts. You control what each of those groups can see, allowing you to reveal more of yourself to those you are closer to. Facebook has even more fine-grained access control, giving you the ability to selectively expose different items to groups or even individuals.
Twitter has a much simpler access control model: all or nothing. You can lock your account on Twitter, which forces people to request approval before they can see your tweets. This is generally considered to be anti-social behavior on Twitter, where most people tend to keep their streams open. Once approved, people have access to your tweets. Oddly enough, people can see who you follow (and who follows you) even if your account is locked.
Within my circle, I am hearing more and more concern about this lack of access control in Twitter. Real people in the real world have real concerns about what they share and with whom they share it. Our tools should reflect our needs, not vice versa. Twitter has tremendous value, but it falls short in supporting a more traditional model of progressive disclosure in our social interactions.
What to do? I don’t want to abandon Twitter. Instead, I set out to divide my Twitter world, creating a professional stream and a private stream. Along the way, I knew I would have to drop some followers and hope that others would play along. I’d also have to figure out how to help people understand how my multiple Twitter personalities connected.
How did I do it? How did it work out? We’re out of space in this post, so you’ll have to come back next time to find out. In the meantime, share your thoughts: do you see a need for better access control in Twitter? Would you split your account? Does this even matter?
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I also have a language problem, for eg. I tweet mainly in English and then some of my Spanish lang friends started joining along. I find that I can’t very well answer them in Spanish and have half of the other people not understand a word I am saying! So I have another account that I tweet in Spanish on. The other option is tweeting everything in both, but it fills up the timeline and also, not always have the same things to tweet. For eg, links to Spanish language resources on the web are of little interest in the Eng feed.
When I read your thoughts on this I realized that I would probably not use Twitter other than for business at this time. Sure I share an occasional tweet about personal stuff, but I tend to model the balance of what I tweet (I think anyway) with what I would share if I worked as an employee in a corporation once again. I use DM’s or e-mail if I am sharing something that I consider more private or personal in nature. Even at work you share more with some people than with others. Perhaps that is because there are no inherent controls. But I am left wondering if I had a choice to use this as purely a platform for my personal life would I use it?
I do enjoy, however, following people who are on twitter for other reasons and even whose business and/or life mission is not the same as mine. The diversity of who and what I am exposed to enriches my thinking and my life.
So (finally) in answer to your questions… I don’t see a need for better access control. In fact I think the more you try to control things the more you are likely to limit what is possible. I also believe we have to choose what our purpose is for being on twitter. Splitting your account is a great idea if you have more than one purpose that could get muddled in one stream of tweets. I am not considering splitting my account at this time.
Does it matter? I think it does matter to think about these things. Your willingness to think out loud about them can help us all find our way to getting the most out of our Twitter experience. Thanks Chuck!
@Monica: I had not even considered the language issue! You are right, though: tweeting in parallel, in multiple languages, would get tedious quickly. Perhaps someday there will be an auto-translate feature in Twitter, but for now it becomes an issue for the user. I will confess that I get followed by people from other countries who tweet in their native language, and I have no way to understand what they are saying. I don’t follow them, but I wonder what I am missing out on…
@Susan: I think your approach, to maintain a professional-only presence, is a fine solution. What began to push me over the edge was that other communities began to spring up on Twitter that pulled me in (Rotary, Scouts, church, etc). Given your wide presence on Twitter and the growth of the service, you may have the problem thrust upon you…
Susan also raises a good point: DMs exist for a reason. I often follow up via DM or email (or, gasp, a phone call!) As we’ve discussed before, Twitter is one way to communicate and share, not the only way.
Hi Chuck.
Great topic. I just had the same conversation with an old friend and CIO who I found on Twitter because he had “CIO” in his bio but used Twitter 100% for personal topics – poker in his case. He wondered how I found him. This convinced him to create a professional id for CIO topics and keep the other one for personal. Lesson here is that if you create separate accounts, keep professional information out of your bio.
That said, while I have a personal id, I barely use it – not enough time.
-Chris
Good points, Chuck, and intriguing issues. And the cliff-hanger, “Who shot JR?” ending is a stroke of something.
As a job seeker, I really struggle with this. Do I have one “brand” and one me, an integrated whole person that is doing all kinds of things besides hunting for a job? Or do I have a professional reputation that I want to use for my job search and keep the personal stuff to just an inner circle? This impacts more than just twitter – also the thoughts I put on my blog, and the responses I put on others’ blogs, etc. If I believe, as I do, that we will have more meaning in our lives with integrated parts (work, life, etc) then I have to put my money where my mouth is right? My tweets are fair game for my mom, the recruiter for a company where I really want to work, and a coach in Seattle I have never met. And my tweets will be about both my work passions AND making strawberry jam AND my new nephew. I am whole. And I bring my whole being to this conversation.
Thank goodness sometimes I can just listen to twitter!
@Wally: Not trying for a cliff-hanger so much as breaking the article into manageable chunks. I shoot for 500 words/post; the next installment runs close to 900.
@Linda: You are hitting the crux of the problem: do you expose a collective “you” or do you selectively expose different facets of you. In the real world, we are highly selective based on context, relationship, etc. These new tools, because of their immaturity, cannot handle that. Do we modify many years of innate relationship management skills to match the tools, or do we alter the tools to fit our needs? Some choose the former; I’m going for the latter. No right or wrong here, but it makes for a very interesting social experiment.
Several (not many, but a few) NASA tweeps dropped me when they realized I tweet about everything that interests me – NASA, leadership, photography, running, my girls, … In the big picture I’m OK with that. I debated on separate professional and personal streams, and decided to keep with one for now.
Here here. It’s very difficult to tweet from under a lot of hats, even harder to write the profile so that folks will know what to expect from you. One day it’s bats in my yard, next it’s thoughts on the Iran revolution, and still later, my favorite local tweets.
Excellent food for thought.
@Joe: You echo the sentiments of a lot of people. Splitting isn’t for everyone, and everyone finds the need to split at a different point in their Twitter experience.
@MKMuir: So what do you think? Will you split?