Now, Another New Social Network

The latest two hot social media are Pinterest and Tumblr.  Pinterest is a virtual cork board — a place where you can pin all of the visual things that interest you.  You can then re-pin. It’s being called “social scrap-booking. It is integrated into facebook and twitter.  Tumblr is a “micro-blogging” site – a place to post and surf little mini-blog posts. Tumblr had 120 million unique visitors world wide in January 2012, according to eMarketer.

I’m finding Pinterest very interesting.  Its user base is slanted toward young, college and early career women.  You can see this influence just by looking at the board topics – fashion, art, celebrity and beauty. That said, I’ve found some interesting infometrics on pinterest boards. It reminds me of the sharing of ironic photos on Facebook.  Engaging and fun.  According to eMarketer, Pinterest had 11.7 million unique U.S. visitors in December 2011, up from 7.5 million in November.

I love all of this information washing around on the internet, through all of these social media. However, I continue to wonder whether I have the attention and focus in order to absorb all of the info floating around. Merely checking my Facebook and Twitter profiles seems to suck away hours each day.  According to eMarketer, the average Canadian Facebook users visited FB 14 days during the month of Sept 2010, and spent 340 minutes on FB during that month. That’s almost six hours a month on FB.

I guess my point here is that we all need to be intentional when we choose to engage with social media.  Understanding why we are using a specific service, what benefits it provides and what risks it entails is essential to effectively using these great services. Randomly jumping in is likely to cause you lots of distractions with little productivity to show for the time you spend.

Twitter is not a Social Network

Twitter is not a social network, at least that is what a group of four researchers from Yahoo Research believe, in a paper presented at the International World Wide Web Conference in Hyderabad, India in 2011.

Here is a brief summary of their findings:

Approximately 50% of the URLs consumed on Twitter are distributed by just 20,000 elite Twitter users, during a nine month period from July 2009 to March 2010.

Categories of elite users tend to follow within their categories rather than between categories. Bloggers tended to follow other bloggers, celebrities tended to follow other celebrities, media tended to follow other media.  Organizations tended to pay more attention to bloggers, and their attention is more evenly shared between various types of users.

Almost half of the information disseminated is done so through almost 500,000  “intermediaries”, users who either retweet, reply or repost URLs   Ninety-nine per cent of intermediaries are “ordinary” users. However the most followed intermediaries were “elite” users.

The top ten thousand ordinary users accounted for only 5% of attention.

Bloggers content tends to have a longer lifespan, being reintroduced and retweeted often months after the first introduction, while news and media tweets have the shortest life span.

The researchers conclusions?

Attention remains highly concentrated with less than 1% of the users accounting for 50% of the attention, that users tend to follow those like themselves and that there is a “two-step” process of dissemination for communication flows.

The research is consistent with my own experience of Twitter.  I love Twitter, but it isn’t a an exchange media, it is a modern broadcast media.  I follow experts across my areas of interest. Every now and then, something catches my eye, and I click the link and read the article.

I rarely engage in meaningful dialogue, because 140 characters make it very hard to have a respectful, deep conversation about a topic more complex than whether I’m at Starbucks enjoying a Frappuccino. I recently wrote a post “Leaders are Born, Not Made“. A follower tweeted that he “couldn’t disagree more”. This could easily have slid into a “flame war”, but fortunately it didn’t.We eventually realized that we both held the same opinion, so all was good.

Have you ever tried to follow a debate or exchange between two people on twitter? It’s often difficult to make sense of the thread. This makes it difficult to join in on the discussion. It’s also very difficult to follow the logic of the exchange. Thus, I tend not to use Twitter for exchange, but rather for dissemination of information.

I love Twitter. But it is not a Social Network. Follow me @ColleenSharen.

Source: Wu, Shaomei, Hofman, Jake, Mason, Winter, and Watts, Duncan. “Who Says What to Whom on Twitter”. Presented at the International World Wide Conference 2011. March 28 – April 1, 2011. Hyderabad, India.  Sourced on the internet February 17, 2012: http://research.yahoo.com/node/3386

Networking and Social Media

Networking is a highly developed skill that any working professional needs in their professional tool kit. It’s almost a motherhood statement. We accept this as fact, while most of us do not effectively act on it. I recently asked an acquaintance if he had a LinkedIn account. He said that he did, but didn’t really know what to do with it.

I am not an expert on social media or on networking. But I do read a lot. Robert E. Kelley, in his book How to be a Star at Work[1] (p. 75 – 97), dedicates an entire chapter to networking. According to Kelley, we need to network in order to fill gaps in our knowledge. Today, the complexity of organizational life means that we just don’t know everything we need to know. Our networks plug this hole. Kelley’s premise is that networking is about an exchange of favours. You earn your way into a network by doing favours for those in the network, and eventually the people in your network will do favours for you. You need to have integrity to build a network, do what you say you are going to do and do it well. You need to have a skill of value to offer, and you need to be generous. Above all, networking is not about exchanging business cards, (or at least the exchange of business cards is only the introduction).

Back to LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a tool, not the act of networking itself. When you make a connection on LinkedIn, it is the bricks and mortar exchange of business cards. It is only the beginning. Networking is about relationship and trust. At least some of your relationship needs to be face to face, personal and deep in order to build a solid network.

In order to effectively use LinkedIn, you have to be purposeful. That is, you have to have a plan for social networking. Each person will have a different plan. I use it to identity potential guest speakers for my classes, identity case study research leads, and to stay in touch with former students. Other friends from my former business life use it to find sales leads, or to find potential partners for business initiatives. But note that it is most effective if you actively use social media with a purpose.

LinkedIn is one big rolodex. It has a couple of advantages. First, it is portable, you can access it from anywhere you have internet access. Second, you have access to all of your connection’s rolodexes. But please, don’t abuse a connection’s contact list. Ask to be introduced. It’s only polite.

The bottom line? LinkedIn is not networking. You must actively use it with a purpose in mind in order for it to work well. My recommendation? By all means, actively use LinkedIn. It is a powerful tool. But don’t forget the old school methods of networking. If you need something, pick up the phone and ask.

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[1] Kelley, Robert E., How to be a Star at Work. Random House. 1999.

Ego-Surfing and Narcissism

My new word of the week is “ego-surfing”.

Yesterday I was doing my annual google search on myself. I know that this sounds narcissistic in the extreme, but I do have a legitimate reason for doing this. Because so many people have had their reputations smirched or their identities stolen on the internet, I do a regular check to make sure that no one is saying untrue, nasty things about me.  Social media experts recommend that you monitor your web presence.

Purely by accident, I found a wonderful post about me from a former student. I was so excited that I showed a colleague, who promptly noted that I had been eg0-surfing. Which made me laugh, because, to a certain degree it is true. What started out as a reputation management exercise turned into an exercise in ego.

By way of attribution, according to Wikipedia (the source of all knowledge), the term ego-surfing was first coined in 1995.  A 2009 Study from the Pew Internet and American Life project shows that 57% of American adults have Googled themselves to “manage their reputation”.

The era of the internet has certainly changed the way we view ourselves. We have become much more conscious of how we are seen by others. Some evidence suggests that university age Facebook users who were higher in narcissism, lower in self-esteem also showed greater Facebook activity, and higher levels of self-promotion, where the person attempted to persuade others about their own positive qualities in photos, picture enhancement, positive adjectives and metaphorical quotes. (Mehdizadeh, 2010)

So go ahead and google yourself. Just remember, you can’t believe everything you read.

Mehdizadeh, S. (2010). Self-Presentation 2.0: Narcissism and Self-Esteem on Facebook. CyberPsychology, Behavior & Social Networking, 13(4), 357-364. doi:10.1089/cyber.2009.0257