A brief aside about the online social movement
Just a question to anyone reading this. How do you feel about the continued growth of social networking/media outlets?
Social networking sites are still growing like crazy. MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Bebo, Ning, and a number of other well known social sites continue to grow and spread their influence.
My issue is this. It feels awkward moving from platform to platform and “reacquainting myself” with my connections. Here’s how my experience has gone so far. I’m interested to hear back from others to see how it’s gone for you.
I knew starting my own business that I’d have to get serious about using the sites I already knew about and had either joined and lagged on or never joined but knew I needed to. LinkedIn, followed by Facebook felt very safe and easy to dabble in.
LinkedIn put be back in touch with a number of colleagues that I’d always liked to have stayed in touch with. Facebook presented me the option to reconnect with friends and find new colleagues in the digital marketing world. I knew where people were working, what their kids looked like, and had a good idea of how deep their knowledge ran on 12 question movie quizzes.
So then I get an invite to Plaxo from a good friend and I want to respond. Then I need to setup my connections in Plaxo to see who’s there. Then I have to give it access to my Hotmail, Gmail, LinkedIn, COBRA insurance forms, etc. And there are so many people on each of the various sites that you pretty much always choose the generic “hi I’m here now too - please recognize our previous connections and reaffirm here again today that nothing has changed in the last six weeks” email.
Anyways, that’s my quick take on the last six months. I’m finding real value in using Facebook to make professional connections and LinkedIn to find business people. I don’t know that I can commit to managing too many more social profiles. I’m interested by Twitter, but don’t have the patience for IM news. I like fast, but not so fast I can barely digest it fast.
As a marketing advocate, I have to know about all of the various social outlest, but as a user, I find myself gravitating towards just a few.
What’s your take? Do you feel any of these feelings or can you not get enough? I’d love to discuss.
Tags: Facebook, LinkedIn, Social Network
March 31st, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Wouldn’t it be nice if all these applications could be synched somehow so that you didn’t have to wonder if you had your co-worker on Facebook but not on Linked In, etc? BTW, sorry if I was the one that sent you the Plaxo invite. Similarly to Facebook Quizzes, if you’re not paying very close attention you wind up spamming all your contacts!
April 1st, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Hey Tiff, don’t worry, you weren’t the first Plaxo request I received. I seem to get invites and friend accepts in waves. It’s a very interesting phenomenon.
I’ve also read about something called OpenSocial, I think it’s a way to keep your profile the same across multiple social sites, but not everyone is using it. And you still have to notify people you’re in a new network.
And Facebook quizzes need to slow down with enabling mass spamming. I’ve done the same thing a few times not realizing I was sending an application to everyone because I clicked the wrong link to see my answers.