Social Verses

A friend of mine lives in Bozeman, MT.  He pointed me to an article that talked about the City of Bozemen requiring job applicants to submit their usernames and passwords for social media sites they are on.  You read right.  Passwords, too.

When I first heard about this, I had a rather negative emotional reaction to it. I was ready to write about it, but decided to wait and take a step back first. Writing when you’re in the heat of battle is never a good thing.

After a few days, I started thinking why this bothered me so much. Social media is definitely becoming a research vehicle for potential employers. As it should be. How you display yourself out to the public can reflect on the company you work for, good or bad. But there is a distinction between what is available to the entire world vs. what is available to a few friends.

Asking for a password to an account–any account–is akin to asking for the key to your house so they can walk around in it. There is an expectation of privacy behind a password. Allowing access behind that password gives access to parts of your life that a stranger–someone you may never see again–should never see.

Sites like MySpace and Twitter are, by nature, public. What you post there can be seen by the whole world. And as a member of those sites, you need to be cognizant of that at all times. It gets even more so if you are using a screen name that relates to your company like I do on Twitter. You are essentially representing your company whether your tweets are about the company or not.

Sites like Facebook, on the other hand, have privacy controls that let you show what you want to who you want. If you keep your profile restricted from the general public, there is no reason a potential employer needs to see what’s there, because no one but who you give access to will.

Granted, some people are using Facebook like Twitter to gather as many friends as possible. In that case, the Twitter rule applies. But most people have a smattering of in-real-life friends that they befriend on Facebook. Presumably, these people know you. And if you’re going to post pictures of yourself acting like a complete moron, your friends will know it’s you being a moron and not a moron that works for a particular company (not that you should be posting those pictures anyway).

A potential employer asking for a password to a social site is really no different than asking for the password to your email (or the key to your house). They’ll tell you it’s different, but it’s not. Password protected information is, by nature, private. They wouldn’t require a password if it wasn’t.

If an interviewer asks you for that information, I suggest you politely refuse. If they said it’s a requirement for the job, I suggest you politely decline the job. There are other jobs out there (even in today’s economy). If they are going to watch you that closely before you even start working there, imagine how closely they’ll watch you when you are working there.

This is an interesting image posted by manolith.com:

Original post at http://www.manolith.com/2009/06/21/the-story-so-far-of-twitter/.

The simple answer is, “yes.”

Ever talk to that guy or girl that just goes on and on and on?  And worse yet, they’re not really saying anything?  The great thing about 140 characters is that you have to get to the point.  You can say a lot in 140 characters.  More than I expected when I first started tweeting.

I certainly have those moments where I’m squeezing words, using funky abbreviations, and chopping sentences to make things fit, but that’s when it gets really fun.  It becomes a challenge.

The real challenge is when you want to @reply to a bunch of people at once and have a lot to say.  Then things get really interesting.

When you have unlimited space like a blog, you too easily get wordy, say more than you have to, and repeat yourself.  You can also get wordy, say more than you have to, and repeat yourself.

If you think 140 characters isn’t enough, you’re not challenging yourself.

I recently read an article about how Twitter employees use Twitter. They don’t tweet very often and they don’t follow very many people. They appear to be using Twitter in the manner it was intended rather than in the manner it has become.

Twitter was intended to let people–a small group of friends and family, perhaps–know what you are doing. That’s fine, but Twitter has evolved into something much more than that. Unless you’re a personal friend of the person that’s tweeting, you don’t much care if that person is eating breakfast or sitting on the can. What Twitter has evolved into is a collective of thoughts, ideas, and information that is beginning to influence the world around us. A Tworg collective, if you will.

In the article, CEO Evan Williams responded to the observations of Marshall Kirkpatrick with this statement:

Many people fall into the trap that you should follow all or most people back out of a sense of politeness or so-called engagement with the community. … I believe people will generally get more value out of Twitter by dropping the symmetrical relationship expectation and simply curating their following list based on the information and people they want to tune in to.

I don’t think it’s a trap. I think it’s a choice. And I think it’s the better choice. Here’s why:

Communication in general, and Twitter specifically, is a two-way street. People are willing to listen, but they also want to be heard. It doesn’t necessarily matter if you actually listen, but that you are willing to. Celebrities that follow back get more followers because they *might* be heard.

I currently follow over 11,000 people. Obviously, I can’t read everything that all of those people tweet, but that’s what filters are for. Desktop clients like Seesmic and TweetDeck to a very good job of allowing you to create groups so you only have to “listen” to a select few. I have groups for personal friends, for technical tweeters, and an “other” group for those people I generally find interesting. However, every once in a while, I glance over at the “All Friends” feed and something catches my eye. I’ll investigate that person further and if their previous tweets are interesting, I’ll add them to one of my filtered lists. If I didn’t follow back 90% of the people that follow me, I would have missed out on some very interesting people.  This is partly a time issue because I can’t properly evaluate every single person that follows me, but I give them the benefit of the doubt.  And I can either filter or unfollow them later.

The way I see it, my personal Tworg collective is better the more people I have in it. Everyone is welcome to join my collective so that I might find something interesting come across my communication neurons. The exception is that if a new Tworg tells me they made a lot of money on Twitter, or I can get 16,000 more Tworgs to my collective in the next 30 days, I’ll sever my connection to them and leave them in deep space with a can of processed meat to chew on until they find the next cube.

We are Tworg. Resistance is futile.

Every once in a while, when I follow someone, I get a DM asking me to “friend” them on Facebook.  I’ve never understood that because Facebook is not the same as Twitter.  To me, the paradigm is completely different. Like it or not, having a large number of followers on Twitter is a guage of prestige. Having a large number of friends on Facebook doesn’t have the same level of importance. It’s just not a big deal to have a lot of friends on Facebook.

That got me to thinking about how I use the various social media sites.  I definitely have a division of labor between each of the sites.  Do you use them the same way I do?

Twitter

If you read my post about Why I Tweet, you’ll know that I think of Twitter as a microblog.  I use Twitter to throw out random thoughts to the world to see what sticks.  I don’t care who’s reading it or why.  I’m expressing my opinion like standing on a soap box in Hyde Park.  Anyone who cares to listen, can.  And because of that, I try not to get personal too often.

Facebook

Facebook is more for people who know me.  I post personal status updates, post family photos (my kid’s birthday party or a recent trip), and have fun taking personality tests that would only really mean anything to someone who knew me.  It’s more akin to a (very large) private dinner party than a public soapbox.  So if you just met me on Twitter, I’m not going to be your Facebook friend, so don’t ask me.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an ingenious idea.  It is (or should be) strictly professional and works on the premise of business networking.  You don’t have friends, you have Connections.  And your Connections’ Connections are what make up your Network.  So if you need someone with a particular set of skills, but don’t know anyone with them, it is a good bet that someone in your network does.  And you can use your Connections to contact them. I mainly keep in touch with former colleagues on LinkedIn and what they are up to professionally.  I am LinkedIn to a few personal friends, but there, it’s all about business.

MySpace

I don’t get MySpace.  I joined because I had to get in touch with someone who wasn’t answering their emails, but I knew was active on MySpace.  So I created an account to send them MySpace mail.  At the time, I decided to complete my profile to see what the buzz was about.  I lost interest quickly.

MySpace, to me, was just a bunch of self-promoting billboards.  There was no real interaction.  They have status and mood updates now, but it’s still more about you than it is about your relationships.  I don’t know if becoming more like Facebook helped them.  But by the time they added that functionality, I had already moved on.

Plaxo

Plaxo started out as one giant address book.  I really liked the idea because your friends could update their contact information and you could get the update instantly.  The problem is, like most address books, that it doesn’t get updated.  People forget about it and it’s not better than my paper address book at home.

FriendFeed

I haven’t figured out FriendFeed yet.  I don’t really use it because I don’t see how it’s different from Twitter.  I’ve been told the signal to noise ratio is better, but most postings there end up on Twitter anyway.

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What bothers me about a lot of these social media sites is that they are all trying to jump on the Facebook bandwagaon.  Due to the success of Facebook, all are trying to copy it in some manner or another now with status updates and the like.  But they really shouldn’t.  Each social media site really has its niche.  They should stick with what they started out doing and do it well.  People aren’t going to use their site because it does what Facebook does.  People use Facebook for Facebook.  They aren’t going to jump ship just because the same feature is now on a different site.  But they will use sites for something unique that Facebook (or any other social media site for that matter) doesn’t have.

I first started tweeting for business.  Our company uses social media to turn traditional media ad campaigns into viral ones.  Our corporate Twitter account, which has excess of 18,000 followers will be used to help kick start some of those campaigns.  A few months ago, I decided to bolster my own Twitter account with followers to help the cause.  After all, two accounts with 18,000 followers each is better than just one, right?

I had already been a member of Twitter for a number of months, but the account was more for testing our application’s interface to Twitter more than it was for tweeting.  But now it was going to be converted to a second corporate account, from a developer’s point of view.

As I started, I did what most people do.  I answered Twitter’s question.  I managed to get one or two #followfriday recommendations that first week, which surprised me.  I’m not sure if those first few were just randomly choosing people for #followfriday, or truly liked my tweets.

But after a while, I realized, the question isn’t “What are you doing,” but “what are you thinking?” And if you ask your own question at the end of your tweet, it engages people.  Fellow tweeters respond.  And that’s where the magic happens.  After all, it is called “social media.”  It’s about learning what others have to say, retweeting things you think others will find interesting, and expressing an opinion.

I don’t care that your sitting on your porch staring at the stars, that your watching Britain’s Got Talent, or that you’re in line to see Star Trek.  I do, however, want to know that you found a cool link about the aurora borealis as it looks in space, whether you think Susan Boyle should have won or lost (ok, that one might be overdone a bit), or you have something funny to say about the new Star Trek movie.

What Chris Crum wrote in his article is really true.  Twitter is a microblog.  If you have something to say about a topic, you might write a blog post (like I am right now), but if you just have a quick comment, you might tweet about it instead.

I don’t forget that I’m using my Twitter account for business and throw in the occasional plug about my company.  But I’m also having fun getting people to play #namethattune, retweeting cool links, and being surprised at which of my tweets get retweeted.

Ultimately, it comes down to the interaction with fellow tweeters that make tweeting fun and addictive.  That’s why I tweet.  Why do you?