Facebook is great for professional networking and for connecting with colleagues. Swell. Don’t get me wrong. I really like these people, it’s great to stay in touch, and we can continue to learn from each other. But if I drank, it would be the social media equivalent of hanging out with the same bunch of guys every Saturday at the corner bar.
I’ve always maintained a very strict personal policy (I’m big on personal policies) of not trying to connect with people through social networking that I did not have some legitimate connection with in the first place. I have generally limited myself to established friends, co-workers and former colleagues. I then got really adventurous and extended my networking to people with the same job and title. But sometimes talking to like minded people about the same topic day in and day out can result in complacency, staleness and circular thinking and discussion.
So I chose to bust out of my safe little circle of friends. My New Years’ resolution for 2008 is simple: do things differently. Take a different route to work. Try a new restaurant. Treat people differently. Take chances. This has actually changed my social networking strategy, and as a result, my use of social networks has become more far more rewarding in just the past few weeks.
Late last year, I formed a Facebook group called “Yesterday is the Day Before Today.” It was meant as a bit of word play on the name of the Geoff Livingston / Brian Solis book “Now is Gone.” My dear friend Amanda Chapel sent invites to the group to her Facebook friends, thereby connecting me with a bunch of really cool, interesting people doing things totally unrelated to PR and social media. Can you imagine? This was a watershed event in my use and enjoyment of social networking.
Through Amanda I met Geo Geller, a fascinating artist, photographer, writer and thinker who describes himself as an “insultant for hire.” Really, he’s the coolest guy on my friends list. Through Geo, I met a bunch of other interesting people, who I will not name here out of respect for privacy. All I had to do was overcome my fear of rejection and click the “add as friend” button, or in many cases, people added me. Ergo, I must be sort of cool! (That’s part of how I finally broke through the artificial barriers imposed by my social networking policies. If people I perceived as trendsetters were doing it, I reasoned, I could do it, too.)
I now try to connect with someone new every day on Facebook and Twitter, and will start doing the same on other networks. Usually I search for common interests, like PR or social media or speech writing, but other times, I try to connect simply because someone has a cool blog, (you might find this shocking), because someone is attractive and has a cool blog, and once, because someone had a really cool name. I now use the flimsiest of excuses to broaden my network and therefore my perspective and opportunity to learn and grow.
Tags: geo geller, amanda chapel, geoff livingston, facebook, brian solis, now is gone
