Personal Power
June 24th, 2009 by Nancy
Just take a moment to think about how many social media sites, forums and online conversations you are actively involved in. For many of us, our social media activity resembles the old target of influence. There are probably a couple of sites you are intimately involved in, checking back and contributing to them several times a day. Then there will be a few more that you are reasonably involved in, spending time with them daily or a few times a week. And then there will be a lot more that you are only peripherally involved in – you have a profile, you visit occasionally, but you can go days or weeks without ever opening them up.
This is pretty normal, however, have you ever considered why the select few sites are so important to you? What is different about them? Is it their functionality? Is it their entertainment value? Is it the community on there?
I am going to go out on a limb and suggest an answer which you may not all agree with, but which pretty much sums it up for me. The sites I spend most time on are Facebook and several car related forums. I can check these several times an hour. Twitter was in this list, but I have let is slip a little recently, so I am down to a couple of times a day for that. And I think the reason is this:
On the sites I am intimately involved with, I know the people I am speaking to on there personally. I have met many of them, I have shared lunch, drinks or an event with them. I have got to know them as human beings rather than as avatars. That makes my interaction with them a lot deeper because I know I am talking to a real person whom I like and look forward to building more of a relationship with.
I have noticed a similar thing with Twitter, as well as with blogs, Ecademy, LinkedIn and many other social media sites. If I know the author or individual personally, I feel a better connection with them online. This is why personal interaction has always been, and will always be so important, irrespective of how deeply we immerse ourselves in a cyber world.
Nothing can take the place of hearing someone’s voice, or seeing their facial expressions and reading their body language. As great as an emoticon is, it just isn’t the same as spontaneous laughter, and a text speak message will never carry the same weight at a sentence spoken with genuine feeling. To that end, we constantly encourage people to make the effort to meet up with their online contacts face to face. I don’t know about you, but when I speak to someone online that I haven’t had the opportunity to meet, chat with on the phone or over Skype or at least hear on a podcast or see on a video, they adopt a kind of generic look and generic voice in my mind. It is only when they become personal to me that they truly stand out.
This may go against the mad popularity scramble that seems to be growing on the internet, and it may show me up to be old fashioned, but I can’t stress the power of the personal enough. Have a think about where you spend most of your time online and who you spend most of your time interacting with directly. Are they people you have met or not? I would be really curious to know everyone else’s experiences.
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An article in last week’s Marketing Week caught my attention commenting on the continuing strength and value in old media techniques. The article, entitled ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=d603910a-d161-46da-83c3-1b1134b9edf8)
Firstly, apologies for my absence on this blog since introducing myself a few months back. You’d be absolutely right to assume that we’re stacked. With the changes in the marketing scene, this has become an incredibly busy year for us – brimming both with work as well as excitement.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=8a49a03f-a93b-4d50-992a-7ef2bfe6872e)
I have discussed before the issue of sustainability when it comes to social media, but I think it is worth looking at again as social media engagement slowly becomes a part of mainstream marketing and PR activity and loses its ’shiny new thing’ status. The reality of business is there is always far more to do than there is time in which to do it. Whether you are running your own business, or working for an organisation, the demands upon you pile up. Anyone who has an empty in-tray or to-do list is either retired or kidding themselves.
I have just experienced a fascinating example of the sinking authority of printed publications. These kind of changes always interest me. I know when I was doing my MA that the only authority I could provide was of a printed sort and adding references from online sources required extra diligence in order to ensure they were legitimate. I am not sure how long this will be the case.
A while back, I started a spreadsheet which listed every new social media site I came across, categorising it and giving it a comment in order to try and keep them all together in my own mind. If there is one thing I strive to be able to do is to at least advise if someone asks me about a site, and it is tough to offer advice if you had never heard of it before. As you can imagine, the spreadsheet grew to such a point that it became almost impossible to look at, and even harder to keep up to date. All you have to do is watch the RSS feeds of
If you are a member of a niche social network, there is a very good chance that it has been created using the ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=0270f586-a690-488c-bd0c-4d1d4472165d)
One of the many changes that the social internet has brought is that the divide between business and personal life has been blurred. Business is no longer a 9 to 5 activity. Mobile phones, email, laptops and high speed internet means that our ‘personal life’ is now inexorably permeated by business to the point that sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference.
