Year: 2008

What are we worried about?

Dave

I’ve been in a holiday mood today and have spoken to three of my favorite relatives. One I talked to on Skype after sharing thoughts on Facebook about the crock pot chili recipe I was trying today. She’s using Facebook for her business, and to communicate with her kids “and me, her cousin”. The other two relatives, both of whom I’m sure would love to be on Facebook communicating with the rest of the family, told me they were interested but had held back because of the fear of exposing too much information. I can only assume this attitude is largely driven by the current, pervasive anti-social media tone that shows up at times. “What if I say something about myself that a future employer might take exception to?” Well, yes, but the two people who expressed this concern to me have a combined age of around 130. One is never going to apply for a job again, and neither is likely to be doing anything anyway that would deter a prospective employer.

Yeah, I get it, and I don’t mean to be dismissive of their concerns. I’m also aware that I’ve always been a very open person, for whatever reason, and not too concerned about expressing myself. I realize not everyone is that way. But I can’t help but feel that a certain amount of reticence in the general populous toward social media comes from a very small number of salacious stories about people being embarrassed online that get wide coverage.

Internet fast for the holidays?

Dave

First of all, do we still talk about “memes,” or is that something else on which I am hopelessly behind? If we do, here’s a meme I’m seeing among some of my Twitter folks: an Internet fast for the holidays. Three of my colleagues have mentioned it, and two have cited spousal annoyance as a reason. That caught my attention, as I’m getting some heat at home for being buried in the BlackBerry or constantly staring at my laptop. Telling The Mrs. to follow me on FriendFeed did not elicit a positive response.

I’ve felt a bit overwhelmed by all my connecting methods lately. Ever since accepting the position of social media manager at SAS I’ve felt I needed to beef up my online presence. I started blogging in 2003 but I haven’t blogged about work until I started this blog, and that makes me feel at a disadvantage. At least once a day on the blogs or Twitter feeds of the social media gurus I follow I hear about something that I’m either not doing or not doing to its full potential. Steve Rubel is the worst “or best, I suppose”. I’m convinced he makes his morning toast on his iPhone, via Gmail. I was awake at midnight Saturday, in bed with my laptop, with a vague feeling I needed to be doing something with my Facebook profile, or checking in on the groups I’m following but not, you know, following. And then there’s my LinkedIn profile, and should I be using TweetDeck, and do I have Twitter alerts set up and what was the tool that Jim Tobin mentioned last week that made his BlackBerry beep whenever someone mentioned him on Facebook? Or was it Twitter? And do I even need that?

So the idea of an Internet fast sounds appealing, and also terrifying. Does that mean I’ve let social media become the equivalent of a dozen new inboxes that need to be dealt with? And if I go cold turkey “heh” on the Web this Thanksgiving, where am I going to look for stuffing recipes? A cookbook? What is this, 1952?

Have you condsidered an Internet fast? What would you miss the most?