Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.
Tags: Networking, Social Media, Twitter
This is the third of three articles recounting the separation of my personal and professional Twitter streams. The first dealt with why, the second with how, and here I share the end result.
In most good experiments, you tend to learn a lot more than you intended about things you never considered before you began. This was certainly the case in my project to separate my single Twitter account into two streams, an open professional stream and a private personal one. Some pertinent discoveries, in no particular order:
- Dividing your account is not complicated, but it can be confusing. I had to pay attention to make sure I did not alter the wrong account at the wrong time. You also need a lot of email addresses; Twitter requires a unique email address for each account. I don’t understand why, but it will make life complicated for those who cannot readily create a handful of addresses to support their new accounts.
- Current Twitter tools are just starting to become adept at managing multiple accounts. Thankfully, the new version of TweetDeck was released soon after I began my adventure. This new version makes multiple account management much easier on both my desktop and iPod Touch. PockeTwit provides some nice multi-account features on my Windows Mobile phone.
- Having a locked personal account dramatically reduces Twitter spam. This alone made the transition worthwhile.
- I had to find a way to gently steer people who followed my personal stream to my professional stream. Since you can’t DM someone unless they are following you, I have to allow them to follow my personal account, DM with a request to switch to my professional account, and then drop them from my personal account. This doesn’t always work; people seem to make the switch about half the time.
- It is annoying that I can only associate my phone with one account. I understand that tweets sent from my phone via SMS can only be sent to one Twitter account, but I’d like to have tweets from both accounts delivered to my phone. Anyone at Twitter listening?
- I got a lot of interest from people who were confronted by this same problem. A few (@BevBrown/@RunnerBev and @BruceCarlson/@CarlsonSpeaking) have also gone down this path. Many others are deciding if this kind of change suits them, and how the idea fits into the overall philosophy of open social media. (Credit goes to @BevBrown for coining the phrase “Twitter splitter.”)
- I am very grateful to those followers who made the leap and refollowed my on my private account. I am also grateful to those who put up with the confusion along the way. I was surprised by those who thanked me for bringing them along to my new account. I learned that for those of us who have developed real relationships through Twitter, the follower/following relationship is an important connection that is not to be trifled with. It’s not like we’re going steady or anything, but it is certainly more than a passing connection.
With all said and done, was it a Good Thing? For me, absolutely. I feel like I can be much more focused in my professional persona, and a little more relaxed in my private one. As Bruce Carlson shared with me, you can “keep up with your friends better and there seems to be less pressure.”
Ideally, this kind of content stratification should be native to the tools. Someday it will be. Until then, we need to make do with what we have at hand. That’s what drove this process for me; I hope you find my detailed explanation useful as you seek the right balance point in your social media world.
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Book Reviews, Networking.
Tags: Best Of 2009, Book Reviews, Books, Communication, Customer Service, Facebook, LinkedIn, Networking, Relationships, Twitter
If you spend any time doing anything on the internet, you will soon stumble across a special kind of expert who is just dying to help you improve your virtual social life. These self-professed Social Media Gurus promise to reveal deep secrets about Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, all designed to garner you more followers, more attention, and more interest on the internet.
Let’s face it: the vast, vast majority of Social Media Gurus know just a teeny bit more than you do about all this stuff. If you really wanted to learn their secrets, ten minutes with Google (or Bing, which is growing on me) will make you a Social Media Guru, too. And if you really want 100,000 followers, or friends, or connections, one mortifying YouTube video should do the trick.
All these social networking tools are just communication tools: conduits for information. You can learn the mechanics of any of them in a day, and absorb most of the culture in a week. But that doesn’t make you any more social, although you may have made a good start at a network.
What matters is what you send over those conduits. The information you share and how you respond to others is what’s important. It’s the content that counts, not the mechanics of the tool.
Most modern Social Media Gurus want to teach you the mechanics. This is not social networking, just like understanding the mechanics of a piano is not going to make you a piano player. Very few Social Media Gurus can teach you what to send using these systems, once you have mastered the mechanics.
Sadly, the very best Social Media Guru died in 1955, before any of these things were invented. Fortunately for us, he wrote down all his secrets well before he passed away. That Guru was Dale Carnegie, and his secrets are revealed in his book, How To Win Friends & Influence People.
If you have never read this book, do yourself a great favor and pick up a copy. For Amazon’s bargain price of $8.70 ($0.96 on your Kindle) you can learn the secrets of the greatest Social Media Guru in history. Carnegie’s book is easy to read, with each concept presented in a short chapter with supporting anecdotes. If even that’s too much for you, he summarizes each chapter with a one-line moral at the end. The anecdotes are delightful, recalling social situations from the 1920′s and 1930′s that are still relevant today.
If you have read this book before, read it again. You will have the same revelations all over again, and be even more committed to changing the way you communicate with people. Carnegie was among the first, and is still the best, Social Media Guru.
I won’t even try to summarize Carnegie’s advice here. Click the link above, buy the book, and start your summer reading with the one book that could truly improve every relationship you have.
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership, Networking.
Tags: Best Of 2009, Cliques, Comfort Zones, Networking, Relationships, Teams
Last summer, I had the opportunity to watch a group of Boy Scouts go through a high-ropes team building exercise. Beyond the fun of watching boys climb 50 feet in the air with nothing more than a safety rope hooked to their waist, I learned a clever trick about comfort zones.
High-ropes courses are all about getting out of your comfort zone. I am very comfortable on the ground, enjoying the combination of gravity and my feet firmly planted on the earth. Climbing a 40-foot ladder comprised solely of five planks at eight-foot intervals took me way out of my zone, to the point of near-frozen, knee-shaking fear at the top. But I did it, and I’m better for it, if only to avoid embarrassment in front of 13-year-olds who scrambled to the top like monkeys.
There was a more subtle comfort zone that was shattered five minutes into the day. When we arrived, the instructors asked the boys to pair up. As you would expect, they found their best friends and quickly formed twosomes. She then asked them to each assume a character, either SpongeBob or Patrick (remember the audience here). They did so. She then gathered all the SpongeBobs into one group, and all the Patricks into another. One group headed to the ropes course, and the other to another exercise.
In one deft motion she separated every boy from his best friend! For the rest of the day, the boys worked without the comfort of their buddy, opening them to social opportunities they would never have had. They still had fun, accomplished things, and grew a bit. But they did it with a little more risk and became more open to partnering with others throughout the day.
I was so impressed by this trick that I asked the leader about it. She shared that they had choices for any number of groups. Need groups of three? Team them in trios and then ask them to become one of the Three Stooges. Foursomes? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And so forth. They had learned that boys know how to game the “count off” trick, positioning their best friends “n” people away to make sure they stayed together. The character game took them by surprise, before they could figure out how to thwart the leader’s intent.
As adults, we probably won’t be asked to become a cartoon character (I’d pick SpongeBob, FYI). But, boy, do we need to be broken up and moved out of our social comfort zones! How many times do you arrive at a networking event and look for the familiar faces? I’m guilty of this, and I really enjoy working a room and getting to meet new people. For the less gregarious among us, breaking out to meet strangers is a difficult exercise.
How many opportunities do we miss for fear of breaking away from our comfortable friends? There is such value in meeting new people, expanding our horizons, and finding ways to help others. Our reluctance to engage a stranger costs us so much. As adults, we are supposed to know better and not require outside intervention to make us do the right thing. Yet we still revert to old behaviors, rooted deep in our psyches.
We all own this problem. At your next event, acknowledge the familiar faces and turn away to meet the strangers. If your friends chase you down, gently aim them at others as well. You may have to write “SpongeBob” on your name tag to make your point, but it will be worth the effort.
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
Tags: Networking, Relationships, Social Media, Twitter
Computer simulation is a powerful tool, refined over decades to give engineers unparalleled ability to test and verify designs before bringing them to physical fruition. Simulation is also used to explore all sorts of scenarios that can’t be brought to life: weather, nuclear reactions, global warming. But there is a cautionary adage in the simulation world: Be careful; if you do it long enough, you start to think it’s the real thing.
And so it is with social media. We like to think that tools like Facebook and Twitter allow us to develop real relationships with people we otherwise would not have met. And while we can get real value by interacting with people via these tools, it is a far cry from a real relationship. Like simulation, don’t begin to think that exchanging tweets, however well-intentioned, is the real thing.
This came home to me at the Microsoft CIO Summit a few weeks ago. The Summit affords IT executives a chance to share advice, learn about new things, and generally commiserate. I always enjoy the opportunity to meet new CIOs and build new relationships.
While socializing, I realized that I was learning more about these people in a two minute chance encounter than I would in a month of tweets. While there was value in the words we exchanged, the rich context of the engagement provided all sorts of clues about the real person behind the data stream. How did they shake hands? Are they dressed neatly? Do they hold my gaze or look away? How do they laugh? Do they talk a lot or a little? Do I get a “good feeling” about them?
Your brain is the most advanced pattern matching device ever developed. It takes thousands of data bits and instantly makes decisions that dramatically affect how you feel about someone. Your mom was right: first impressions are lasting. When you meet someone, you are matching them against every interaction, good or bad, you’ve ever had and making a judgment. We call it intuition, and most people trust these impressions.
Social media strips away 99% of this data, leaving your brain with very few data elements to work with. I suspect that we fill in the gaps with optimistic values, leading to better impressions of our social media peers than might otherwise be warranted. Social media is to a real, in-person encounter like Morse code is to HD television. There simply isn’t enough bandwidth to get a good feel for the other person.
That isn’t to say that our social media friends aren’t good people (especially all of mine). But it is easy to start believing that social media is enough to sustain a good relationship. Like simulation, it is easy to start thinking that it is the real thing.
Perhaps we need to think about social media as a place to start a relationship. One started, we need to use traditional tools like meeting and speaking to build on that beginning. As the relationship grows, social media enhances the experience instead of supplanting it. Here’s a novel idea: pick one person that you’ve met through Twitter or Facebook and (gasp) call them. If they live close enough, meet them for coffee. Have a high-bandwidth encounter and see what it does for the relationship. I bet we’ll all be better off for it.
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.
Tags: Networking, Social Media, Twitter
There are two kinds of buffet patrons. The first views a buffet as a smackdown challenge: the all-you-can-eat buffet. The second sees a buffet as an opportunity to sample and enjoy different foods as they see fit: the all-you-care-to-eat buffet.
Twitter is a buffet of content, an infinite offering of different tastes and flavors, available for free to anyone who cares to indulge. When it comes to Twitter, what kind of buffet do you view it as: all you can eat, or all you care to eat?
Much as most of us cannot eat an entire buffet, no one can follow and read all of Twitter. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to stop some people. How much Twitter could you eat if you tried? Assuming it takes five seconds to read a tweet, and you spend 16 hours a day on Twitter, you could read 16*60*60/5 or 11,520 tweets each day. Since the average person (according to Twitter Grader) tweets 4.2 times a day, you could follow 2,742 average people and keep up with everything they tweet. But you most likely could not hold down a job, maintain a relationship, or exercise. Ah, well, life is full of choices.
Hopefully, most of us treat Twitter as an all you care to eat affair, selectively following a few favorite people closely, paying occasional attention to many more, and ignoring the vast, vast majority of Twitter users. You can get a lot of value this way, but it takes discipline and focus to get to this point.
Most people start out in the “all you can eat” mode. With few people to follow, it is easy to consume every tweet that comes your way. Some make the mistake of allowing every tweet to make it to their phone via text messaging, a potentially costly decision.
At some point you realize that the content stream is overwhelming. I have heard Twitter likened to being stoned to death with popcorn, and the analogy is apt. Thousands of tiny messages eventually overwhelm your ability to process them all. You realize that you must cut back and switch to the “all you care to eat” mode.
Initially, there is a sense of guilt: what if I miss a crucial tweet? What if I fail to respond to a retweet or direct message? What if I can’t catch up? What if? The answer is “nothing.” Nothing happens if any of these things happens. People continue to tweet, the buffet is still served around the clock, and most importantly, your life goes on.
Let go of eating everything on Twitter. Embrace the idea of a few valued streams along with many that are sampled as time permits. Accept that you will (horrors) miss some stuff. You’re already missing stuff every day in every other kind of media; why should Twitter be any different.
To truly get good value from Twitter, learn to manage Twitter. If you don’t, you run the risk of having Twitter manage you.
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