Social Networking: A One-Minute Primer
This is the overview of the talk I gave at the Orange County IABC event last week. It’s a pretty good primer on Social Media, if I do say so myself. Brief being better, here’s all you need to know. I’d be interested, as always, in your thoughts.
a) Networking is something you should be doing always. Don’t rely on "social networking" to get out of meeting new people the old fashioned way.
b) Friendster is dead, when I get a friendster request now, I think, "oh, that’s just… special."
c) Linked in is for recruiters.
d) myspace is being dropped by everyone like a bad habit. I don’t need to have 20,000,000 friends that I don’t know. I get enough of that in NYC.
e) Facebook has the right amount of balance between professionalism and fun.
e1) Sending a professional contact a virtual beer on Facebook is ok. Biting a professional contact with the vampires widget is not.
e2) If you wouldn’t do it in person, don’t do it on Facebook.
f) Again - Facebook doesn’t replace traditional networking. It only complements it. And the only way it can complement traditional networking is if you’re doing traditional networking in the first place.
f1) Traditional networking doesn’t mean "going to a networking event once a month." It means you should treat every new person you meet as a potential contact.
f1a) The goal with that new potential contact, though, should be to help THEM, not to GET help from them. Help them, and they’ll be there for you when you need it.
G) Finally, if you’re lactose intolerant, don’t spend the first 20 minutes of the conference eating from the cheese table before going on to speak, or it will be the longest hour in front of a lectern in your LIFE.
5 Responses to “Social Networking: A One-Minute Primer”
Love this post! It SHOULD go without saying that everythng you listed there is pretty much common sense….. and if you did not get the memo, Mr Common Sense passed away many many years ago.
So thanks for posting it and speaking at your lecture about what should be common sense.
Still one of the smartest men I know-ish.
guess it’s not a good idea that i engage in SuperPoke wars with one of my colleagues on a daily basis? :-p
Peter, thanks for the primer. I saw you were giving the presentation and thought about asking for someone’s notes… I think your comments are dead on. The biggest challenge right now is finding a medium that will link the generations. That may simply be a matter of letting the current facebookers grow old while new ones move in. Or finding a way to link the old fashioned Outlook users (hmmm didn’t I read something about facebook and MS) to the current/new facebook users. If we can create that link we may see a continued growth of facebook throughout the years. If not, I will be on the lookout for the next new social media tool and watch the early adopters drop facebook just like they did myspace albeit for different reasons.
Don’t get me wrong, social media is here to stay and we are witnessing/engaged in monumental evolution. Social media is a PR person’s best friend so it is all a good thing.
As a side, I did an informal poll among my students and many use facebook less now than they did when it was new… hmmm…
Oh, how I wish most of the people I have befriended on Facebook would read this post. In fact, I’m going to go share it there now. Facebook apps are cool and all, but please, stop it with the vampire, treky, super wall, top friend, I’m special, compare me to others, rate my personality crap.
Sorry. When you hit home, you hit home.
Great freakin’ post.
Brilliantly brief . . and you summation of Twitter?