Photo by: Steve Garfield (http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevegarfield/)
Social media – love it or hate it, it’s definitely got people abuzz both inside and outside the Net.
I had a Twitter account for ages, but never quite understood the appeal. Aside from key words to tag a particular person or subject, I honestly thought that it was like Facebook, which was all I needed. I was so wrong.
A while ago, my good friend, Ian, spoke to me about the social media stance and how he’d been using Twitter to increase his online clout. I did some research and discovered that almost every web designer that I looked to for inspiration was on Twitter and some other form of social media. It was an eye opener. So, for the last few months, I’ve been immersing myself in Twitter, learning the proper netiquette and such, and while I’ve been using it selfishly as a reference to design articles I find both inspiring and relevant, it’s been functional and enjoyable. On the downside, there’s almost an inexhaustible number of like-minded folks I can follow, however, a percentage of those people that actually tweet useful information to amateurs like me is significantly finite.
Aside from the promotional potential and ability to consolidate updates to your contacts, here’s the big question: why? Why does everybody need to know what one person in the world is doing at any given moment? This method of pushing updates to people whether they want it or not (on a subscribed basis, that is) is almost vain and egomaniacal (nothing against vain egomaniacs, though). The average person doesn’t care whether or not you ate a peanut butter sandwich for lunch (although they should, because peanut butter is tasty). If I don’t think it’s relevant to anybody in particular, I try not to post updates to Facebook or Twitter. However, what is the point of self-promotion without giving the public a face to go with the name? How personal is too personal?
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