Social networking and the ego trap

My first business card 
Originally uploaded by Pete Kim.

I received my first "real" business card during an Arthur Andersen internship.  I didn't have many people to exchange them with, but I did have hundreds of embossed heavy-weight scraps of paper that made me feel important.

Last week, I was sorting through handfuls of business cards collected over the past five years or so.  Most of them could be discarded for one of two reasons - either the contact was irrelevant (e.g. Swedish online payment processing) or I have better information via other means.  LinkedIn and  Facebook are today's new business cards, delivering profiles with rich content and dynamic means of maintaining connections.

However, I've fallen into the social media "ego trap" not once, but twice.  Two summers ago I had to prune my LinkedIn network to regain usefulness, removing 700 connections. I made the mistake again and recently had to prune Twitter of 800+ "friends" as well.  Maybe that's even the third time - the first being my stack of old paper cards.

I should've known better.  Social networks are valuable for building and maintaining relationships.  Updates and status feeds preserve the signal strength of current ties and boost the signal of weak ones.  But adding connections with low relevance and connection result in static, increasing in annoyance as one's network grows.  Useful social networks require a high signal-to-noise ratio.

I have an idea on why I fell into the trap, which I'll explain in another post.  But for now...

Is it just me, or have you ever found yourself caught in the social media ego trap too?

Comments

[Los]

Daily. I fall at this daily.

[Angela Connor]

I am trying really hard not to fall into the abyss because I know I could easily get sucked in. This is why I don't accept every friend request or Linkedin invitation, and I try to keep my Facebook account meaningful as well. I have to admit that I often look at the number of followers a fellow twitterer has with slight envy, but then I end up on the receiving end of a maniacal twitterer who somehow thinks that every nuance of their life is somehow of importance to me. Let the pruning begin...
So I will learn from your mistakes and recognize that 800 followers is likely more curse than gift, and continue to network wisely.

[Pete]

Well, I can say that identifying the issue means that one is already halfway sprung out of the trap.

Carlos - I'm glad to be reconnected to you, especially following your tweets. It's fun to see where you're at after 20 years.

Angela - good point; different people seek different cadences in communication flow. I think it's critical that we tune our preferences for a comfortable individual feed.

[Dave Knox]

Unfortunately I fall into it way too often. The tough part is that I feel somewhat guilty as I try to dig out. Sure I havent talked to that guy from high school for 10 years but he was the one that asked to connect on LinkedIn so do I really say no? I just don't have an answer to that. I've also found the backlash interesting from people when I prune. I had one person at an agency in NYC write and ask if she'd done anything wrong to cause me to remove her from network. This is someone I had never done business with but I had mistakenly added her when she was pitching business. Go figure

[Alanna SHaikh]

I wonder about LinkedIn in particular, what the value is of a link to someone you hardly know.

[Pete]

Hi Dave - I feel guilty too, especially on Twitter, when someone's following me and I remove them. But I think about where you are and why people are trying to connect - there's got to be a value exchange. You're on the client side, so I'm guessing that many more people try and "extract" value at some point from you (e.g. money, connections, etc) than vice versa. This was non-stop for me when I was at PUMA and people still try to get me to help pitch them today - four years gone.

I think the value exchange also shifts over time. I'm willing to give that high school friend the benefit of the doubt, but don't have qualms dropping the connection if it's not useful. One way I've been managing this on Facebook in particular is using segmented friend lists, e.g. my HS category has 20 people.

[Pete]

Hi Alanna - I think it depends on how you decide to use LinkedIn. There are definitely people who clearly use it for ego purposes only. These are the people who complained bitterly when LinkedIn capped the number of visible followers at "500+" - ego boosters who then write out how many connections they actually have in their profiles.

For some people, it's a primary destination - they actively manage their profile, participate in groups and Q&A, and use Introductions and InMails regularly for business purposes. Weak links work well in this case for professionals in sales, recruiting, and other roles that benefit from research and connection.

I see LinkedIn like a "sleeper cell" and have only put it into action once, in 2005 when I was actively looking for a new job. In the meantime, I'm happy to pass along the occasional reconnection request - but don't add anyone who I wouldn't feel comfortable asking the same of. Some people have no problem with that and I've also broken ties with people who are unhelpful.

I guess like any tool, once you've got it, you need to test it out once in a while, maybe sharpen the blade now and then - but if it gets too far into a state of disrepair, you'll just end up throwing it away.

[Mack Collier]

Pete the problem I have on sites like Twitter is that I want to follow everyone that follows me. And a big reason why I enjoy Plurk so much is because I have forced myself to be MUCH more selective about who I follow (well the timeline format helped as well).

[Pete]

Right Mack - it's difficult to not reciprocate a value exchange, right? More on this tomorrow.

But one other quick thought - participation makes the difference between conversation and broadcast. Greater numbers start looking like the latter.

[Tom Cunniff]

IMHO the real trap is not knowing what you want from social networking.

I see social media (esp. Twitter) as a way of eavesdropping on a thousand conversations at once and joining the ones that will spark new ideas or otherwise improve my thinking.

I'm much more excited by finding a new interesting person to follow than by finding out someone else is following me. If I'm interesting, I'll pick up followers. If not, not.

[Pete]

Hi Tom - and I think that not knowing is quite common for many people joining social networks today, who sign up because "everyone else/my target audience/the cool kids" are doing it. Making social media work is about knowing the mechanics and gaining personal value. Search (e.g. Summize for Twitter) can help, a lot.

[Charlene Li]

Agree w/Tom that it's not having a well thought out goal of what to do with social networking.

I accept every friend request on Facebook, but group people I know personally into specific groups/affiliations. I then read the News Feeds for just those groups (a bit of a pain, I must admit). On LinkedIn, it's just the opposite -- I accept invites only from people that I know. And on Twitter, I've been "criticized" for following only a few dozen people, despite having thousands of people following me. That way, Twitter actually is useful to me. Same with FriendFeed.

In addition, lack of time/will to expend any energy on ego building, in addition to pragmatic goals, has also been at the root of my social networking activities!

[Pete]

Hi Charlene - great idea. My RSS feed of all FB friend updates is a firehose; I just created an "update only" list to help, which contains only about 20% of the overall list. (but can't get Google Reader to pick it up)

Welcome back - looking forward to seeing new posts from you at charleneli.com.

[Adam Daniel Mezei]

Something which hadn't been mentioned in these replies was how virtual connections are affecting us as if all these online sausage and interruptions are actually *real* people picking up the phone and interrupting you, or similarly showing up at your place of work in search of a real conversation or otherwise annoy you...

It's simply not the case (even though I know there are scads of people who'll gladly claim their cellphone beeps incessantly from a mass of tweets through Twitter's SMS update option)!

The technology is significantly developed today that you don't have to pay attention to everything you get, right?

Loic LeMeur (www.loiclemeur.com), for example, uses Facebook just for the networking, but doesn't read his Facebook email, realizing that over 85% of it is spam. I personally don't even use Facebook.

On Twitter, I don't add any of those johnny-come-lately network marketing shill-meisters and/or other MLM poseurs, but I sure will follow people who follow me from just about anywhere else, because you *never* know where your luck is going to fall from.

To wit, my Twitter colleague @iankath from Brisbane, Australia spent the whole weekend with me this past in Prague, all because of our connection online.

Neither he nor I could foresee how this was going to come about.

In fact, Ian told me subsequently that I completely shocked him -- he was expecting me to be 100% different (read, not like how I'd behaved with him in the city)...which means, had he deleted my details or culled me from his list after responding to his instincts, our later brilliant chats would have been a moot point.

It's definitely a slippery slope, friends...

Because human nature is such a complex process, and we cannot possibly compute how all of the variables combine and interact, we might want to slightly reconsider who we add/who we delete in the future?

My good experiences in the recent past has caused me to see the light.

--ADM

[Pete]

ADM - what you're describing is what some call the "serendipity" argument, which stands in contrast to a "utility" function. The two aren't mutually exclusive, but certainly are means to different ends. New post forthcoming on this.