Reeta Luthra (Paradox of Reality) » Social Networks

How To Leverage More of What You Want

Reeta Luthra — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:00:28 +0000

Have you ever decided to do something only to find later that it’s not working out?

If so, then it’s not necessarily your ultimate goal that’s the problem. It could just be that you need to stop how you’re doing it and try something else.

There are three things to remember about goals & achievement:

Defining what you want is not just a “nice to have”. It’s essential.
Your personal values help plan the route you take.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Knowing what you want means you don’t get stuck with what you don’t want

Some people have asked me why I no longer have a facebook account.

In an earlier post I mentioned that I had outlined some personal and business social media objectives (or goals). Because I had done this to quite a level of detail, I was able to evaluate how the various social outlets I’m subscribed to were working in my favour.

Now’s a good time to point out the difference between goals and tactics. I had goals to achieve through using social media. But the way I go about it and the methods I use are tactics.

What I discovered with facebook is that it tries to be all things to everyone. For me, it’s doing so at the expense of what I want. Facebook puts it’s emphasis on “opt-out” of it’s various social elements. I prefer giving others, and being given the choice myself to opt in.

Can you think of a time where you didn’t define what you wanted from a situation and ended up wasting weeks, months, even years caught up in something you later realised wasn’t suitable?

Your personal values tell you whether or not a route is right for you

My “friends” on facebook include actual family & friends, colleagues, online friends, networkers and business contacts. And as facebook tries to be all things to everyone, therein lies the problem.

My family & friends don’t want my business news.
I don’t want my colleagues, business contacts and random strangers to click and dig their way into profiles of my family.
I don’t like networkers spamming my family & friends with “friend requests”.
I don’t like being tagged in photos.
Unlike twitter where short is sweet, the facebook version of snippety, bite-sized friendship leaves a hole.

Facebook offers customisable privacy levels but they’re limited in scope. And I’ve grown tired of spending my spare time customising facebook privacy every time they implement a change.

The nicest and most satisfying way to reach your goal is by travelling on a road that fits with your personal values and aspirations. Facebook brushes the wrong way against many of my personal values.

What could you change to make one of your goals more pleasant to reach?

There’s more than one way to skin a cat

Just because you started in a particular direction, doesn’t mean you have to follow it religiously. Remember the difference between goals and tactics?

If there’s no commitment, promise or obligation on a certain path, then you can meet your goal in a way that feels more in tune with yourself.

If you do have commitments, it’s a good idea to track and understand if there’s a deeper source of discomfort. It’s an important question because throwing off one commitment because you’re too tired means it will probably come up again in a different form.

A lot of people find themselves in a seemingly never-ending situation because they had entered it without knowing what they wanted from it. That’s why defining your goals is so important. For a long time, I hated the word “goal” – it was too corporate mumbo-jumbo for me. But you don’t have to call it a goal. It’s something that you want and you can call this anything that does it justice.

As soon as you define what it is that you want – either on your own or with a personal coach – you suddenly discover that you do have options.

A different way of doing things exists in almost every situation. Your natural flexibility and curiosity will help you find it.

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The Sticky Web of Linking Up Social Networks

Reeta Luthra — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 22:34:57 +0000

Having dipped a toe into social media, I’m finding it’s a whirlpool sucking me in.

I’m a techie and I’m also pro-privacy. So while I’m hooked by the technology, I worry about where all this is leading. Is social media immunising us against privacy concerns? Perhaps even numbing our resistance to increasing levels of government paranoia-mongering?

Staying aware

The Big Brother connotations have been around for a while now. They were there in the early days, circa 1995, when online interactivity consisted mainly of independent silos – Usenet, forums and Inter-Relay Chat (IRC) applications.

Now, the silos are broken down and you can Stumble a bookmark to your Twitpic photo which then gets fed to Twitter which then sends it on to Friendfeed which sends it to your Blog which displays it on Facebook…

Also, as people tend to use their real names, employers, disgruntled ex-partners and the police can easily track what you’re up to. Then there’s dodgy activities from third party applications sneaking in to steal your data. Not to forget the Internet Archive that stores everything for posterity.

Internet best practices add a layer of cushioning. Hide your date of birth & email address, make liberal use of privacy options and choose an obscure email password reminder question – not your maiden name etc. And obviously, if you hate your job, don’t twitter about it!

Today’s social media carries a seductive illusion of control – sometimes I think it must really be 30% proof because some of the stuff on twitter surely can’t have been posted while the sender was sober.

Despite knowing this (and probably being guilty myself of one or two “what-was-i-thinking” posts), I’m happily going for a swim in this whirlpool…

Knowing what you want

Social media is a real time-sink so knowing what you want from it becomes a way of helping keep you on the straight and narrow.

Some people want to simply keep in touch with friends and family, to post photos and exchange some easy conversation. Others want to expand the reach of their business network.

My goals are:

Keep in touch with friends and family
Keep abreast of changing technology – I’m an ex-techie now working alone in a non-techie field so linking up with techies online helps me out a lot
Learn from people – get information, hints and tips on subjects I care about
Get the word out when I post a new blog

Knowing what my goals are helps me to identify the most appropriate social networks for my needs. Bungling up is all part of the game as I found out when I posted information about depression to my personal facebook page, leaving my friends and family wondering what I was on…

Linking up the Network

Up until a few days ago, my social media activities were more or less independent of each other and I was only active on a couple. I’m still only active on a couple but I’ve connected them up to make things a bit more streamlined. I’m already getting messages on one network initiated by something I posted on another.

Here is what my social media network looks like now – you’re welcome to click through & connect…

Twitter – This is my current favourite. My tweets feed through to ecademy and friendfeed.
*Facebook personal page – My links and notes feed through to friendfeed. It imports from *NetworkedBlogs.
*Facebook fanpage – This feeds through to my Facebook personal page and facebook newsfeeds of those who are subscribed. It also imports from NetworkedBlogs.
*Facebook group – I’ve kept this standalone for two reasons: 1) It’s had no activity for ages and 2) facebook doesn’t let groups connect to anywhere else!
Friendfeed – This is my newest network. It feeds through to Twitter, the Paradox of Reality website and ecademy. It imports from NetworkedBlogs, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Facebook personal page, LinkedIn and the Paradox of Reality Blog.
Ecademy- This imports from friendfeed, Twitter and the Paradox of Reality Blog.
LinkedIn – This feeds through to friendfeed and imports from the Paradox of Reality Blog
Paradox of Reality Blog – Although a blog is not a true network, it still falls under the social media banner. This feeds through to NetworkedBlogs, friendfeed, ecademy and LinkedIn.

Linking the networks together means that my goals become easier to manage. Friendfeed especially is a nice hub allowing people to take advantage of features from various sites in one place. I’m deliberately not feeding twitter to facebook because I haven’t found a way to feed it to just my facebook “fanpage”. It seems it has to go to the personal page too which is something that is not suitable for me – friends & family wouldn’t want to hear my twitters.

Each social network has a different flavour that impacts how you interact on it. Twitter is a constant stream of real-time information from people you’ve actively added in order to read what they have to say. I get a lot of useful information from there. LinkedIn is a lot more formal.

Linking networks makes online social activity easier and efficient for those who are using it to exchange ideas with new people. But if you’re also using social media for personal socialising and are thinking of linking networks, it’s worth double-checking your privacy controls and setting your own rules on what is visible to people you’ve just met.

*Update December 2009 – I deleted my facebook account because it was no longer helping me with my goals.

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Photo Credit: SpoonGraphics
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