I was speaking with a senior, respected person – someone I admire too! – from the VC sector the other day. He was telling – rather, mildly admonishing – me that I should not be so active on social media that people know all about me and my way of handling things, my feelings etc.
His point was that as people grow up in the career ladder, they should be less vocal in the public space and focus more on connecting with people offline. He also took the examples of film stars not being active on the social media space and thereby maintaining an aura about them (I did interject with the fact that more stars are now on social media, with very limited, glorious exceptions like Katrina Kaif).
He also mentioned that as you grow older in the corporate system, the priority should be on building offline networks and not go the public way of doing so, on social media. I do know of a lot of people who are merely lurkers on platforms like Twitter and have a solid offline network. But again, that is just another way to handle a personal brand – the broad point is, you need to do your own PR. If that’s done in public, via Twitter and LinkedIn, so be it – if you want to do it offline, connecting with people in private, that’s a perfectly valid strategy too. In fact a combination of both is perhaps ideal.
The more I heard him admonish me (I took his permission to write about it, but without mentioning his name/identity), the more I recalled a 2010 blog post by me titled, ‘Are we all acting our age on social media?’. Let me not link-bait you into reading it outside of this post, and merely copy-paste the content of that post since it is so relevant.
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Are we all acting our age on social media?
Should we, at all?
In a recent Twitter conversation I was having with a few Twitter-regulars (who else!), one of them remarked, ?Such kids, we are!?.
It?s an interesting quip, on many levels.
Back when there was no social media, our social circle, in real life, was decidedly smaller. We had friends from school, with whom ? if we were still in touch ? we were more casual and without guards. We remember how we were when we were in school and share more things naturally.
But, at the same time, we do not share the same things with our office colleagues and people who report to us. The lack of social media allowed us to build and maintain that facade.
Today, things are vastly different.
I already use Twitter to check if someone I need to get in touch with, is active/online. It?s as simple as noticing his last tweet time and assuming (mind you?only assuming) that he?s online/active. Another friend recently talked about how he used Twitter to check if someone he wanted to get in touch with had finished his vacation. He was tracking the other person?s non-vacation vs vacation tweets to come to a rudimentary conclusion.
Now, extrapolate the same thing with acting our ages.
You may be the CEO of a company. On Twitter, you may have your own set of pals and share info on how you find a new actress cute, but not-so-hot. I wonder how that could be ?used? by someone who reports to you or simply someone who is supposed to look upto you. On Facebook, it?s slightly better, if you have done your homework on your privacy settings!
The wall is broken now, thanks to social media. And what you share is accessible by anyone/everyone. Does the fact that they know more about you change their behavior towards you? Even if you portray the serious, professional outlook face of yours, a quick tweet check will help them understand a LOT more about you, which could perhaps give them an idea that your serious, professional outlook face is?well, just a workplace-facade.
Does that worry you?
I, personally, do not have a problem. I?m usually the same, everywhere, across all ages of people I interact with. That helps. But again, for people who genuinely have a reason to put up a facade for a specific purpose/place, this could pose an problem, I assume. What do you think?
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Well, I chose to disagree with him, mainly because he has never made an effort to get active or even interested in social media. If he hasn’t, I don’t know how he can jump to such conclusions, but overall, this seems to be a theory that more people in the senior side of the career ladder subscribe to, for whatever reason (the most common one seems to be that they don’t have time). Quite a few of our (and many others’) B2B clients constantly ask the question, ‘how many CXOs are on social media?’ as if to justify this trend.
So, what’s your take? And how old are you, by the way? 🙂
Photo courtesy, Arik Hanson’s post on social media consulting and age – not similar to my post above, but another post that connects the two!