I finally did it. I'm a social networker.
Tuesday night I signued up for a Linked In account. Today, Facebook. The former had slightly more thought put into it--I've been thinking for the past couple of months about how little effort I put into professional growth and development, an issue which may or may not lead to some series of posts. Not that I expect it to be any cure about what ails me (professionally), but I can see it having some utility as a professional tool. The Facebook registration followed from that--in preparing my boss for a European marketing trip, I was doing some background research on who she was meeting with and found that a good number of them had Linked In or Facebook accounts with some biographical info. So I signed up for Facebook to get that info, not realizing you needed to be a "friend" to get it. That obviously does me no good--at least for that purpose.
My initial thought is that Linked In is clearly better from a professional perspective. Facebook is a gated MySpace, a site I have little use for. I did read a BusinessWeek column re Facebook's business advantages, but I think it comes down to the types of networks you're involved in, how you separate business/social and one's one initiative.
My initial view of Facebook is that, like MySpace (or this blog), it's a massive time sink, and completely unwieldy at any type of scale. What's the point of having 200 friends? How would you ever track what's going on? How many profile pages are active versus just there so one can have pages to look at? I can't see myself not being in the latter category--if I'm going to bother being active enough to create/add content, I'd rather do it here or picasa than a members only page that will get lost in the shuffle of the gobs of friends pages people have.
Or maybe I just don't know how to use it yet. I got involved in a conversation at work the other day in which the Operations person in other unit was complaining about how other people in the group did not want to grow/adapt/learn the new systems that were available. They were content to use tools as they've always used them rather than trying new approaches or even new programs (this was a conversation based primarily on file sharing and interoffice networks. I know, exciting stuff.).
So anyone have thoughts/experiences?
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Utter randomness
Independent Owen
On topic!
Posts
Labels
- baby stuff (1)
- entertainment (18)
- food (4)
- home improvement (1)
- insurance (1)
- investing (4)
- joanne (8)
- mountain dew (3)
- owen (25)
- parenting (1)
- personal finance (11)
- photography (2)
- ultimate (1)
- video (1)
3 comments:
I just wrote about social networking apps the other day. I was going to summarize and save you from a self-promotional link but I haven't had quite enough coffee for that yet. So here's the link.
Of my current meager number of Facebook friends, I'd say not quite 20% are very active: they're people like me who spent way too much time at their computers and update something daily. Another 45% or so update maybe every week or so. The rest rarely update. I was going to make the broad statement that it was mostly the engineers that never update, but that's not the case. They waste as much time writing snarky wall comments as anyone.
Dude, linkedin is by far the most useless social networking site out there. I've been on it for years, and the only use I have for it is reconnecting with former colleagues. But I haven't "recommended" anyone, I haven't been "recommended" by anyone, and I don't think I would use it to look for potential hires if I was a manager, and I certainly don't use it to look for jobs.
Of course, I only use facebook because I know so many 20-somethings from coaching college ulty, and they were all on it 4 years ago.... my friends my age don't really add content to it as often.
Anyway.. just my two cents. And did you know that you can setup facebook to automatically read your blog's rss feed and import it as a "note?" Just another outlet for your content!
I was kind of forced into MySpace - a friend of mine created my account for me (that's one way of getting friends!). I was going to use it to play around and learn HTML, but that phase in my interests didn't last too long. I did get in touch with a friend from high school, and I occasionally check out pages of people who moved away to see what they are up to, so it does have some uses. But generally I hardly ever check it now.
Post a Comment