The advantages of multiple connections

You can't just depend upon one feed. I depended upon a picture in a Flickr contacts list to find out about this article on social networking:

Networking for introverts just got a lot easier. You'd think that the people who are most afraid to talk to others would be the ones hiding behind the Internet. But in fact, with the rise of social media tools in the last five years, [introverts] are going online to be their extroverted selves.

Author Penelope Trunk goes on to cite a few ways to network online. Here's part of what she says about blogs:

What blogs are not is quirky outlets for desperate and lonely teens. Blogging takes a big time commitment because organizing one's thoughts into cogent ideas, multiple times a week, takes a lot of time.

So most of the bloggers are doing it for their career, and blogging requires so much industry knowledge that most bloggers are midcareer.

I'm not quite sure where Trunk got her statistics, but I suspect that she may have been influenced by the people that she ran into at the meetup that was photographed in the article (Bryan Person, Julia Roy, and the like). While there certainly are these types of people, there are still a number of people who are not necessarily blogging business. And I often approach blogging more casually than those who organize their thoughts "into cogent ideas."

But I like how Trunk summarized Twitter:

Twitter is like instant messenger, only you never shut up.

Sometimes it seems that way, especially for those of us who tweet from mobile devices. But Trunk also touches on the benefits of the asynchronous nature of Twitter (and some of the other social media).

You don't have to listen. When introverts are overwhelmed, they shut down. Twitter makes it easy by not requiring a lot of listening - only reporting....

How does [Person] make time for all this? He puts out information quickly, and scans quickly. Information is not so precious, and conversations are asynchronous and not so time consuming. Also, the wide range of tools means that Person is able to scale up when he has a lot to say and scale down when he's busy.

She then goes on to discuss LinkedIn and del.icio.us, but the one bizarre thing about the article is that Trunk continuously compares each of the social media to Match.com. Is Match.com all that big that it serves as a common reference to which people can relate? I would have gone with eHarmony.com, but that's just me. Or perhaps Hiawatha Bray influenced Penelope Trunk, or Penelope Trunk likes Dr. Phil, or something.

[mrontemp business] | [mrontemp politics] | [mrontemp technology] | [mrontemp del.icio.us tags]

Sphere: Related Content