Hi! How Ya Doin’? <shake hands>
While some people refuse the handshake convention on germophobic grounds, there’s always some ritual that takes place when you meet a new person, or encounter someone you don’t see all the time. On the Internet, these established social norms and conventions change.
Social Networking? Take away something as simple as a handshake and what you get is more like a social disconnect.
Almost eighteen months ago Seth Godin wrote about shaking hands. His main point was that social norms take time to develop, but that the Internet has become so large, so fast, that in social networking, there are no social norms.
And you wonder why Twitter is so hard to understand? Or why it’s so difficult to handle a Facebook un-friending tactfully?
The other day I came across a tool that claims to be able to analyze a person’s psychological makeup by examining tweets. So I plugged VirtualVIP into TweetPsych.
The graph of VirtualVIP at TweetPsych doesn’t say much. It shows twenty-two characteristics spaced out in a way that suggests a normally-rounded psyche; you might expect people to be more prone toward certain behaviors than others and have those behaviors be more or less evenly spaced in prominence.
But if you read the report accompanying the bars, you’ll see that TweetPsych believes me to be a sex and work obsessed control fiend with both negative and constructive things to say, low on emotional attachment and uninterested in the past. People who know me might agree with this assessment, by the way 😉
At least TweetPsych thinks my ego is in check. But yikes! Even I wouldn’t shake my hand if I saw that report.
The question is this: since the information on TweetPsych is available to anyone who knows anyone else’s Twitter name, and with no enforceable rules covering the matter, just how can your social networking “profile” be used?
This has business change written all over it. I tell my kids all the time that they only want “good stuff” on their Twitter and Facebook pages. And now I’m telling you: social networking isn’t something you can afford to do in a haphazard way. TweetPsych is all the evidence you need of that.
Want help implementing your business’ social networking strategy? Contact The Answer Guy and we’ll walk you through the soical networking maze.
