Social media use no doubt differs depending on why you’re in it. The global conversation is always there: ambient noise, a constant buzz in the background. What differs between us is when we shift our focus to concentrate on that buzz.

Casual users can dip in and out as they see fit – as has been suggested there is no pressure to be involved beyond chatting with your new found ‘friends’ and even then there may not be the expectation for us to invest quality time in these online relationships.

Bloggers and early adopters, on the other hand, have more of a self inflicted need to be involved, to stay current and to keep their profile visible – especially those who cover aspects of the social web. If you are trying to build your exposure levels then time away from the streams is not considered an option.

My recent 3 weeks out lost me about 200 RSS subscribers according to Feedburner and, despite recent regular posts, those figures have not yet recovered. Add to this that social media is inherently addictive and you have quite a heady mix.

Pressure

If we are keen to make an impact then we put pressure upon ourselves to participate, to post, to gain more subscribers or followers – not doing so feels like failure.

As I said in a comment yesterday, investing time in conversations is akin to reading a really good book – you want to know what happens on the next page, in the next chapter, at the end of the story. It is not human nature to just walk away from something we don’t consider to be finished. While we can and, probably should, put the book down we feel compelled not to as we want to see things through to their conclusion.

Drinking from the fire hose

It has often been said that social media addicts do not want to miss anything; they are glued to the services they use 24/7 as they feel they must have their finger on the pulse and be involved in everything and all conversations. This will obviously have an impact on the way the services and other resources are utilised compared to the more casual user.

Steve Spalding has a great illustration in his post “The death throes of feed subscriptions”. He argues that the rise of social media and content sharing services means that we no longer need to subscribe to the RSS feed of a blog as we will be able to find the interesting content collected in those social environments with the added bonus that they are filtered and annotated by our peers.

This scenario leaves us in a quandary when you consider the desire to keep abreast of the flow. On the one hand, consuming our content via RSS means that we can peruse it at our leisure but by doing this we are ensuring that we do not miss anything. Alternatively, using social media to find our content means that we are just skimming the surface of the items available but reacting to them in real time while we are connected.

If the very reason we subscribe to RSS feeds is so that we do not miss anything then to achieve the same result via social media would require us to be always on, always connected – undesirable and unachievable. We must therefore aim to achieve a happy medium.

Balance

How much is too much? If you are not a professional blogger (or maybe even if you are) where do you draw the line and say enough? What is the best way for the addict to emulate the casual user and only dip their toe in the water?

There is no need to continually dive in up to our necks so, as well as our social responsibility with social media, we must address our personal responsibility and not become overloaded. We must become our own social media role model.

Related Posts

• Freedom of conversation vs social responsibility.
• What makes a good social media role model?

I have said before that Twitter is a facilitator for communication rather than the conversation medium itself and to a degree the same thing can be said of all social networking services it’s just that the scale and details vary on a per service basis.

Jason Goldberg posted that he saw FriendFeed as a school lunchroom where “conversations that may have started elsewhere are picked up and rehashed, commented on, and amplified”. He also states that FriendFeed “isn’t a place for deep thoughts and debate”.

Social networking services, and especially aggregation sites like FriendFeed, are places to gather information for easier consideration where you can converse with your peers to spark the imagination and gain inspiration. But can deep conversation or discussion really happen in an online enviroment?

Friendfeed rooms initially seemed like they would be the place for the meaningful thought and debate as you would be able to isolate given topics and take them out of the public stream in order to concentrate on the matter in hand; it seems, however, that this usage has not really taken off as expected.

The domain of thought

Blogs are still the domain of thought as you have no limits to what you can say – you are in control. While Friendfeed has a higher character limit per post than, say, Twitter any limit in any service inhibits really deep thought as you are constantly mindful of your words getting truncated. This is not particularly conducive to an active discussion.

Also, we can blog and post comments but often the spark and spontanaiety of a face to face conversation is lost – as Jason says, he thought about his post for two days and it took twenty minutes to type. How often do we plan what we are going to say but things get lost in translation between the brain and the keyboard.

The inherent delay of communicating by the typed word and the impersonality of this type of interaction can create a conversational barrier so when should we be taking our discussions offline?

Exposure

The obvious advantage to social media services are the exposure they offer; a conversation can be played out in front of the watching world and anyone is free to participate whereas an offline discussion (maybe even via VOIP) is closed to the rest of the community. Each may have it benefits and shortcomings so we need to establish when the best use can be made of any means of inteacrtion that we might employ.

So, what are social sites?

Are they hotbeds of active discussion or are they merely facilitators, enabling us to process our data in covenient locations so that we may address the important issues in another. more appropriate forum?

Image by Jason Schultz.

It is noticeable that bloggers and the social media early adopter crowd (myself included) are very keen to make a good online impression. Why wouldn’t they? As has been said before, it is not necessarily the act of blogging or the participation that gets us what we want but is often the secondary benefits resulting from our exposure in those environments.

It seems only natural, therefore, that we should conduct ourselves in an appropriate manner for the majority of the time. There are some exceptions who use potentially inappropriate behaviour as a promotional tool but it is rare that this can be pulled off in an effective manner.

Ryan of Tilling the Soil wrote a great series of posts about communicating with integrity and recently commented on an earlier post saying:

Perhaps he has a point. It seems that we do tend to interact with people in different ways depending on the forum for that interaction. Is that only natural or a worrying phenomenon?

Appropriate

Louis Gray has sparked a lot of conversation with his post As I Get Older, Some Online “Friending” Gets Creepier which looks at the issue of age on social media services. Should age be a factor when considering who to accept as ‘friends’ or who to follow?

We live in a difficult age and must be seen to be doing the right thing so do we have to temper our (perfectly innocent) use of social networking sites in order to conform with a sense of social responsibility?

While we may have perfectly good intentions society is increasingly aiming at the lowest common denominator so that even the likes of teachers are fearful of being branded paedophiles should something be taken out of context or a disgruntled student see an opportunity for revenge.

With the increase of people using the internet as a way of grooming children etc. it is natural that this view of society would start to cross the boundaries and self policing this issue may seem an obvious way to avoid future complications. As society itself embraces online life more the divides will lessen and an online community leader will be viewed in the same way as a Scout leader and be equally scared of the implications of their position. We are all being seen as potential criminals.

Perception

we have a different perception of how we act communicate in real life and online – perhaps we have traditionally seen life online as an escape and our interactions not necessarily having to follow the same rules as our offline interactions. It is then rather ironically that we seem to concentrate more on how we deal with people online – is it because our communication is limited so we have to be careful about what we say for fear of misinterpretation?

In real life we have perhaps been more guarded; our face-to-face interactions form part of the daily grind so we are constantly mindful of the pressures we are under so, perhaps, we are less inclined to engage our colleagues (and potential rivals) in the same way that we would an online acquaintance.

Alexander van Elsas agrees that our (expected) behaviour in these different environments differs:

unlike in the real world where we are expected to invest time and effort to keep these relationships valuable, there is no such behavior needed online. We use these friendships for the conversation taking place, but no one really expects you to invest in such a relationship

Are our online ‘friendships’ really this casual and why should this be? Or is it that we are in the early stages of our expanse in to this territory? I would imagine that future generations will become more adept at reconciling both our online and offline interactions as distance ‘friendships’ become more prevalent than at present. We are probably still trying to come to terms with the explosion in global communication.

Impact

Although we use our real names and even our own photo as avatars there is still a degree of anonymity when talking to people on the other side of the planet – we can be more open, more expressive and more opinionated without the fear that it will have a direct impact on our normal lives. Say the wrong thing to your manager and you could get fired but say the wrong thing to a ‘friend’ on a social networking site and you can put it down to a misunderstanding or breakdown in communication. Generally the actual impact is minimal – they may stop ‘following’ you, big deal!

But online communication seems to be a constant contradiction – especially with those of us who are investing a lot of time in social media and blogging. While some may see it more as a ‘throw away’ society our focus on online interactions can be to the detriment of our offline lives.

Perhaps we just have to ask ourselves what is appropriate in any given setting and learn to strike a balance between the two.

Related Posts

• Why do we need social media role models?

Yesterday, Julian Baldwin coined the term “needstream” saying:

Basic needs are “needstream” so mainstream doesn’t necessarily need to include everyone

I commented that as everyone doesn’t need the same thing then everyone’s needstream is going to be different and no one service can encompass everyone.

Alexander says that the future focus will be on smaller, more localised social networks and I think Julians’ quote goes a long way to explain why – the larger the audience the less relevant things will become. As I have said before, the global conversation will remain – and even grow – but there will be a bipolar existence on the web where people will “drift between the global and local conversations as needed”.

Needs and wants

What do we actually “need” on the web? The answer is very little and many, by not even being connected, demonstrate that in personal terms we need nothing. Our jobs may dictate specific needs but once we clock off the internet fuels our wants rather than our needs.

Everyone wants something different – we are the sum of our life experience so have our own individual likes and tastes. These may intersect with those of others at various points but the differences between us are what makes life interesting.

Social bookmarking

Our wants on the web directly reflect our interests and some turn to social bookmarking services to explore those intersections with the wants of others – choose a table, pull up a chair and shout hit me! With only around 20% of the world actually connected and a mere fraction of those using a social bookmarking service the number of available intersections is going to be severely limited.

Social bookmarking is certainly not for the benefit of the content producer. It is designed to assist the consumer in their discovery process but I would argue that it fails. Is this due to incorrect categorisation or tagging, or simply because the social population simply isn’t large enough?

Take yesterday’s post about MooMag for example which was submitted to StumbleUpon. It’s always nice when someone feels a post is worth sharing and it may drive some traffic your way but I have always maintained that this traffic is of incredibly poor quality – those people who hit your site but realise, once they get there, that it’s not really of interest to them. They may not read the full post, will likely not follow any internal links, will not subscribe to your RSS feed and in all probability will never return unless they hit the Stumble button and are sent back at random.

Conversion

The aim of any blogger is to convert the casual visitor to a repeat reader, subscriber or even evangelist but in the context of this post the true measure of conversion would be the number of click-throughs to the MooMag site.

Fortunately, I had been looking at the incoming and outgoing stats recorded by MyBlogLog so knew how many visitors had clicked on the outgoing link to MooMag prior to the post being Stumbled. In the period after there was only one click-through and there is no guarantee that this was from a StumbleUpon user. If we assume that this click was a StumbleUpon user then the conversion rate was only 1.2% – there were 83 visits from the stumbled share.

To me this illustrates that the already limited intersections we share with others are incredibly vague meaning that the percentage of truly useful intersections is going to be minute. We may share broad interests but they don’t bear much fruit when we get down to specifics and makes we question the role of social bookmarking. If the conversion rates are so low when we have a reasonably limited set of people using these services what are they going to drop to once the adoption rates increase?

Your thoughts

What do you gain from social bookmarking services either as a content producer or as a consumer?

Steve Rubel started a conversationon FriendFeed which really polarised opinion. He asked “Should FriendFeed have a private messaging system like FB, Twitter, et al?”

Divided

Responses ranged from the affirmative such as “Taking conversations private is a great way to further a business relationship” to the complete opposite “Please do NOT add another lame messaging service like the one that Facebook and Twitter have” with some people suggesting a solution where XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) could be employed to hook FriendFeed up to Google Talk.

It is obvious from the divide in opinion that some kind of compromise is needed so I suggested that it might be an idea to use what’s already there instead of reinventing the wheel.

It can be useful to take certain discussions private but it is understandable that people do not want yet another inbox that they need to check. It would, therefore, make more sense to have some kind of ad-hoc system that exists for the duration of the conversation. FriendFeed has its rooms so it seems logical to me to create a temporary, private room on the fly which is destroyed once you are finished.

You would, of course, need some form of online presence system in place (there’s no point trying to start a conversation with someone who isn’t around) and if the person you wish to chat with is not online then – just like instant messaging applications – you could be given the options to fire off an email.

Self contained

Not everyone on FriendFeed uses (or would even want to use) something like Google Talk so why force a third party solution on to them. It is better to keep things in house if possible – one less thing to worry about. An ad-hoc system you only use if you want to keeps everyone happy; those who do not want private messaging on FriendFeed don’t use it – simple.

What do you think?

Is this a suitable compromise? Would it work for you?