Alexandra Petri, who writes The Washington Post‘s ComPost blog, offers some good advice in the wake of the firing of Business Insider’s CTO over his offensive Tweets.
In a nutshell, she notes that your online existence isn’t some alternative to real life; it is real life, and you should treat it with respect accordingly.
Or to put it in her words:
The Internet is where you live.
And sometimes I wish you could turn the dang thing off. I wish you could get away from it for a second without feeling that everyone was hanging out without you. But that is the essence of life online. Everyone is there hanging out without you, always.
It is where you live*. And it’s real life. And it’s forever.
* Except LinkedIn. There are no real people there.
OK, I admit it. I shared this because her footnote about LinkedIn cracked us up.
That may be the best LinkedIn joke ever. Of course, it’s not a crowded field. Something that dry, that sterile, doesn’t usually inspire a lot of giggles.
Hey, I’ve given LinkedIn a chance. Lots of chances. I’ve built up my contacts there to well over a thousand.
To no purpose, near as I can tell.
To me, in terms of usefulness, social media fall into three categories:
- Twitter — The most dynamic medium of all, a combination of a wire service on steroids and a conversation you can engage in with the whole planet at once, which is every bit as awesome as it sounds.
- Facebook — A good place to share pictures with family and friends, and… that’s about it. Other than that, it’s kind of a mess.
- Everything else — Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, yadda, yadda. I’m underwhelmed.
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OK, wait — do you count Spotify as a social medium? In a sense, that’s what it is.
Anyway, that’s pretty cool…
Maybe I need a fourth category — cool media that are sorta, kinda social, but more than that…
Must be why I like linkedIn the best. It isn’t about interaction; it’s just a personal version of the old leave-behind booklet. Except one goes there before the meeting to see who one is going to meet.
LinkedIn may be the most real of the sites; simply because the people who use it actually meet in real life. And that is where the business will continue to be done. Has anyone actually done business on twitter? Or Facebook? Or, really, just because of them?
Agree. I like Linkedin very much. I’m not interested in going on there to read the viewpoints of anyone other than people in my line of work – and even then it’s technical stuff we are discussing- not someone’s opinion on social issues or politics. That’s not really what it’s all about.
For an independent consultant like myself, Linkedin is far more valuable than the time waster known as Twitter. Twitter is a fire hose which you have to funnel yourself to determine what is valuable. Linkedin doesn’t have the high junk factor that Twitter contains. The features of Linkedin I find most useful are the specialized group
discussions and the ability to write recommendations for people.
I’d be interested in knowing what percentage of the tweets you read everyday are meaningful for your job.
I do Facebook more than most… it’s more of a scrapbook for me to capture events. But I like to see what people are doing and have been able to connect with plenty of people from my past thru it.
I’m glad you get some good use out of it.
I was sold on LinkedIn as the “professional” social medium, and I gave it every chance — building up a huge contact list — but just haven’t found it that useful. Too many roadblocks, too many blank walls, too much outdated information. Too many people set up a profile there and never come back to it. It’s just not very dynamic, from my experience…
Why would you have 1000 connections on Linkedin? I don’t understand that. That defeats the purpose.
As most guides I have read suggest, limit linkedin connections to people you know well, or business people that you have interacted with that you believe you can help – or that can help you directly with your business or professional life.
There are many people that I know loosely on Linkedin- but I have no interest in connecting with them. I have limited my connections to people that i know well, folks I have had a close working relationship with- and a few outsiders that i know of that are in my line of work that I will probably be working with soon. My connection list stands at about 75 and that’s where it’s going to stay- I ignored several requests this week for connections.
Just in the last week a connection of mine on Linkedin helped me find an app to use in my business that has already prompted my boss to give me a big pat on the back.
“Why would you have 1000 connections on Linkedin? I don’t understand that. That defeats the purpose.”
I can see two reasons:
1. If you are an independent consultant like me, you want to maintain as many connections in your field in order to source potential working relationships. I have 400+ connections and the majority of them are within my specialized technology area.
2. If you want to establish a global reputation in a specific area, it’s the best way to connect with people around the world who have a shared interest. Since I have links to my technical blog and other useful information on my profile page, people frequently ask to connect with me, My one link to a series of free technical quizzes I created has generated thousands of test takers who can identify me as a leader in my area.
I can see someone using it for that to have that many connections.
However, for the wide majority of users, having a limited number of connections on Linked is really useful.
Agree. I read twitter- but it’s a huge waste of time for the most part- people arguing, complaining, and plenty of quite vulgar. It can be fun at times- but it’s mind wasting stuff – even the political stuff.
I enjoy facebook – because I keep up with my close friends and family members- and we can see what each other is doing for the weekend, etc.
LinkedIn is to Business what Facebook is to Friendships
I get 2-3 requests to be “linked” to people that I barely know or were introduced to during the previous week. If someone asked me a person’s name a week later or what they do I couldn’t tell you, but they want me to be “linked” to me. The strange part is I don’t even have a LinkedIn account.
I got LinkedIn, forgot my sign in information, and that was that….
By the way, I looked at the Twitter feed of the guy who inspired that post, and I was intrigued to find this statement: “I’m first to admit mistakes were made by me…,” on his way to arguing that others were “blameworthy.”
Interesting that he would choose that Reagan wording. You’d think that, in a 140-character format, the tendency would be to say “I made mistakes” rather than “mistakes were made by me,” unless you were really reluctant to admit culpability…
LinkedIn has some good forums and occupational interest groups. They’re one of the best places to meet people online.
I guess that’s true if you’re really, really into what you do for a living as a thing in and of itself. I never was. I mean, I was never into the professional tips and best-practices and knowing my fellow professionals. I was into the subject matter — the news, the commentary, the ideas. That’s what has always gotten my endorphins rushing. That’s what I’ve always loved about journalism; I could care less about who the new city editor at the paper in the next town is…
Revisiting this post two years later, my views are even stronger on this subject. And the difference in our perspectives is fascinating.
It’s one of those things like the eternal cognitive divide between word people and numbers people, or men are from Mars/women are from Venus, or whatever. Or those who like Neil Diamond, and those who don’t.
It is said that Twitter is the medium for journalists and people in politics, and I guess that’s so. Unless it’s something personal, you pretty much have to pay me to get me to spend time on Facebook. While I might stay on Twitter all day if I could get away with it. The rewards are just enormous to someone like me. It reminds me of when I was in college and had a part-time job working in the library. Soon after I started, someone gave me the task of taking the older periodicals down from the public part of the library to the basement, to make way for newer editions. I would take an armload of them down — and then no one would see me for the rest of my (admittedly short) shift. I just couldn’t file them without pausing to glance through some of the older editions of wonderfully esoteric magazines that I never knew existed. I would just fall right down the rabbit hole every time I went down there. It was like the intellectual version of being that age and thrown into a room full of gorgeous naked women. It would take awhile to convince myself to leave.
Twitter is like that, only more so. Hundreds of feeds (I could follow thousands, but I limit myself) that lead to fascinating articles on every topic under the sun.
The point, people, is not the 140 words. It’s the links. It’s being able to tell from the 140 words which links are worth clicking on. Some are just teases — leading you to posts not much longer than the Tweets. But some — far more than I ever have time to enjoy thoroughly — are very rewarding…
Not to mention the fact that there’s no better way to keep up with news…