Picture “Video Killed the Radio Star” playing in the background… I am hardly a star but it is what I thought of yesterday while hearing people discuss Twitter at the AIMWest Social Media Confab yesterday at the Grand Rapids JW Marriott.
In my case, it seems increased usage of Twitter has led to decreased blogging and the trend seems to have spread to others in my office. Maybe I’ve had less to blog about, less time to blog in general, or perhaps less interest…but in any case it usually comes down to the redundancy between what I might blog about and what I am talking about on Twitter. The “What I’m Doing” widget on the right captures just about everything I am up to via a Twitter feed so is it at all helpful or interesting to summarize or rephrase it here?
The other issue of late has been my desire/need to separate work and personal life. I equate this to taking two distinctly different groups of friends out to the bar and then watching the awkwardness that ensues. You know some old friend is going to tell the most embarrassing story or pick the most inappropriate youthful indiscretion to relive…
As my professional contacts grow on my previous largely personal social media outlets I find myself censoring or at least very carefully considering what I post for general consumption. For instance, my trip to Key West, FL during Fantasy Fest was an amazingly fun time with a group of friends that I’ve known since college, but most of the photos I took “documenting the madness” are hardly safe for work. As I’ve told people, the most popular Halloween costume was just plain nude with a little body paint. (Don’t worry, me and my group of friends remained clothed at all times) I tweeted about it, but I resisted all temptation to “twitpic” the events. Maybe a year ago I would have posted pics on flickr, blogged about the craziness and shared more realtime with Twitter. It’s not like I have a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde dichotomy going on between my work and personal/social life…its just easier not starting meetings with Deans or the President with a conversation about something crazy I see/say/retweet outside of work.
I’d be interested to hear others’ thoughts on this, any solutions, insight, best practices would be appreciated! I know from conversation yesterday others are in this boat as well!
#1 by Brittany - November 20th, 2009 at 16:51
Interesting post, Ben!
Having spent just a year and a half in the “professional” world after graduating, it’s been an interesting transition for me trying to decide “what information do I want on the net” and “if I blog/tweet/facebook this could it come back to haunt me later”.
As a student i used to blog pretty freely about what went on at school and funny things that happened at my student job. Now I feel like there are large chunks of my life I don’t want to /can’t share, (for example, i keep work totally off limits) and my blog has gone more ‘silent’ because of it. I used to post daily–now it’s more like weekly or every other week.
I don’t use twitter a lot (nothing against it, just that most of my closer acquaintances use facebook and all of my more important twitter contacts -like you- repost their tweets on facebook, so I still get what I want anyway) but I am pretty avid on facebook and a lot of the smaller stuff that I used to blog, goes there. I feel like I’m able to be a little more candid there because of their privacy controls. Of course stuff still gets around–but I feel (perhaps erroneously) that I’m a little more able to control who sees it. If I had stuff like your fantasy fest photos, that i really wanted to post, I would probably do it there–with some pretty strict privacy limits on that album. Still not failsafe, because nothing’s safe on the internet, but probably a good balance.