TigerTwoTiger

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.

Thank you to steveleggat for the image

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Tags: Online Communities

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 1:08 pm and is filed under Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.