I’ve allowed my personal commitment to weekly blogging to get interrupted in support of a hiatus to get serious about other socicial networking technologies. So if the blog just isn’t enough for you, I am now on Twitter (@larrydunivan), Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo (as Larry Dunivan). Please join me at any or all of these sites. The more the merrier!
It’s been an adventure, to say the least. A few observations:
- I almost threw my cell phone against the wall one day last week. A few of the folks I’m following on Twitter are so prolific that the phone vibrates 10-15 times per day. I persevered until this weekend when I finally turned off the notifications. But with Twitter, you’re capturing a tidbit during a moment in time. So if I don’t read it as it happens, I can’t see myself going back to read through dozens of them some other time. I’ll turn it back on after my leg recovers from the irritation of the vibrating battery — we’ll see how it goes.
- At least 90% of what I see, read or observe has no value. As your network expands, the degree of intimacy you have with the vast majority of the people you encounter decreases exponentially. I have to be honest — I simply don’t care where the guy from my alma mater ate dinner Saturday night. But there it is in all its Facebook glory. And no, I couldn’t have picked this guy out from a lineup (before Facebook) if my life had depended on it.
- LinkedIn? My mission is to get to 500+ connections (bragging rights, nothing more…). Please help me by sending me a request! Pretty useless in the short-term, but I suppose valuable if I find myself in the job market anytime soon. Truthfully, the biggest value I see is in helping folks looking for work leverage my network. We all know it’s the only way you’re going to find a job in this economy.
- There is an occasional tidbit of interest — and I did find one nugget of gold. And in my opinion, the person who said it never should have — and there’s the last, most critical issue. I am an executive for a publically traded software company which limits many things I can talk about. But more importantly, if I were to more candidly talk about my perspectives, it could easily compromise our business strategy. Great for my competition and maybe would offer me a bit of an ego rush, but stupid in the long-term.
So it’s all very interesting, sometimes annoying, sometimes curiously fun. I do have a few great ideas of how we can capture the best of it in our software products (yet another topic I can’t twitter about) and that’s worth it’s weight in gold.
The jury is still out, but I’m sticking around and I hope you’ll join me. But unless it maintains some personal entertainment value (it does for me), the other benefits may not engage you enough to stick with it.
For your own sanity, you might decide how to use the various tools mentioned to “sort” your communication. Jeremiah Owyang, a self-proclaimed web-strategist guru who is also an analyst at Forrester Research has now decided that his Facebook account is his, that is, it’s for his personal friends. He has decided that he has to draw boundaries somewhere. While he is a strong proponent of openess, he has also realized that some personal space is needed. You may find the same in your quest as well.
Larry,
I am new to Twitter in the last few weeks and I absolutely did laugh out loud at your comment about the guy and dinner on Saturday night as I see this mix of personal, professional, and oftimes self-promotional material stream by. I think jidoctor above has the right idea – some is personal and some is professional and there ought to be a demarkation. And the volume too – there was this one person I just stopped following today as he posted 10 Tweets in a row, none of them useful to me. Everything in moderation, just because you’re bored on a train doesn’t give you license to bore everyone else.
Anyway, my jury is also still out. I find that I check Twitter online a couple of times a day when I need a mental moment off from whatever I’m writing. I have no plans to have them feed to my phone – too many posts, too little time.
Take care,
Lisa
Larry, I too am in experimentation mode and have made some decision. First, Facebook, if I use it at all, will be limited to very close friends and family, to the people about whose lives I actually care on a daily basis. LinkedIn is VERY useful for checking out the backgrounds of people with whom I’m meeting (in whatever real or virtual medium), for finding someone with a particular background, and for maintaining professional ties without too much effort. From an HRM perspective, both Facebook and LinkedIn have lots of possibilities in staffing, background checking, new product launch, self- and business/product promotion, etc., so I draw a careful distinction between what’s personally useful and what is both useful and important to my clients, especially to my vendor/provider clients. As for blogging, keep an eye out for In Full Bloom, to be launched this summer. I’ve got a ton to say, and my own blog finally makes sense as the place to say it.
Great to hear you’re joining the blogging universe, Naomi! Sometime I’ll share with you the pressure of trying to deliver on a personal commitment to post regularly — sometimes it gets the better of me!
Larry and Naomi, I’m so glad that you guys can make the time to blog and I am looking forward to In Full Bloom. As for me I am currently looking for work and find LinkedIn to be a tool that could consume my entire day. I doubt I’d ever find value in Twitter or Facebook unless I want to spend my entire life in front of the PC or my Blackberry!
Larry, you crack me up! Twitter is just plain annoying. Heaven knows I have enough buzzing from my blackberry. I also strongly believe people better separate their professional versus personal lives (unless you are very, very young and marketing a new energy drink) if they want to be taken seriously. You’ve got one career (unless you are Madonna) so protect it wisely!
Twitter Twits will become so desensitized to life, pertinent noise and appropriate focus that pharmaceutical firms and auto insurers will likely be back in the black within two years.
I’ve been on LinkedIn since 2004 and can brag about more than 500 connections. I agree with Naomi. LinkedIn’s very useful to keep up with people that I see once a year at HIMSS or HRTech or SHRM. Most are folks I’ve worked closely with at some point in my career. I joined FaceBook for my family, friends, and close colleagues. And have to admit that Twitter bores me. It’s too much input on top of all of the email and IMs I get. Now if I could figure out where Plaxo and MySpace fit into my pattern!
Thanks for the honesty and a good laugh this morning. It’s easy to get sucked in trying out new social network mediums
I received a few tweets, played the cat, ate the bird and now I don’t hear the annoying tweets anymore.
The good bloggers I follow only put out information every once in a while when they have something important to say, or they have a new product to sell.
Linked in is a great way to stay in connect with past co-workers you don’t see much anymore.