Watering your network
We have this running joke at work about “watering” friendships - effectively the activity of maintaining a friendship with a person by frequent contact, regardless of how meaningful, frivolous, brief or length those conversations are.
Read a few posts about Twitter today - one by Stephen, one by Mark - and got me thinking about how I use Twitter. When I explain to people what Twitter is I usually put a “professional network” spin on it … and truly to me the professional aspect of it is more valuable to me and my work than the social side.
But the majority of my tweets would not fall into the “professional” category. Most of my tweets are not questions about how to implement a certain function in JavaScript, or the contact details for a person, organising meetings etc. Most of my tweets are merely social and sometimes nonsensical. Such as the Ceiling Cat discussions the other evening.
However - would I have as many followers as I have, and would people be as responsive to my enquiries … if I only ever tweeted professional and work-related questions? Or at most, assisted other people only with matters strictly professional in nature?
I’m pretty sure the answer is no.
Your network necessitates that element of social banter - without it your communication is sparse and dry … and uninteresting. Especially when some of my contacts I’ve only ever known through Twitter, without offline interaction such as at Web Directions conferences, WSG, CTUB, the office and so on.
Do you agree? Can it then be said that if Twitter were to be allowed or rather introduced into a workplace for professional networking purposes that non-work related communication is not entirely a waste of time as people are sometimes quick to label it? Unless of course it’s a closed Twitter loop for internal team use only - in that case it would be unnecessary to use it for socialising.
May 5th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
We have our own Jabber server with conferences for various working teams. It has all the goodness of twitter (since we’re all deskbound anyway), particularly with regard to memes, lolcats and rickrolls. Also, actual work gets done.
So, I wouldn’t say that a closed-loop needs to be socialising-free.