A Model to Organize a Social Networking Life

I’ve been wondering and wandering around social networking for more than a year. The socialscape of the Internet keeps expanding. I keep finding connections to my friends in more places and getting more detail about their activities than I might have imagined. If I don’t figure out soon how to manage the information, I’m sure I’ll soon be buried by bits and bytes.

I’m on a quest to find a model to organize my social networking life. I don’t want a fancy dashboard to track things. I want personal competence and right choices made from experience. Right now, I’m looking at the writing process.

The Writing Process as a Model for Social Networking

When we write, we start a conversation. We put ourselves and our thoughts out there for readers we might or might not know. Public writing is a reaching out to connect with other people. The writing process balances structure and expression so that what we offer is clear, concise, and compelling to the people we’re trying to reach.

Social networking and writing both strive for authentic and successful relationships through communication. It seems that the writing process might serve for carving my way through the overwhelming world of social networks.

The writing process I work with looks like this.

The blue ovals show the steps in the process that focus on expression. The green ovals show the steps that focus on structure. Social networking is not as much about expression and structure as it is about ourselves and our connections. I’m going to modify the model to reflect that using the blue steps for ourselves and the green steps for our connections.

Pre-Networking – How Well Do You Know Your Social Networking Sites?

If you’re like me, you probably belong to many social networks already. For the sake of this exercise, choose only one. We can’t write a book, a poem, a magazine article, and a dissertation at the same time. They each have a different form, format, audience, and message. Choosing only one social network will let us focus on how to get the most from our time.

The first step in the writing process is Prewriting. So I’m calling this Pre-Networking.

1. Pick a topic: Choose one social networking site.

   Choose a site you know something about and where you already have friends and connections. Facebook, LinkedIn, or StumbleUpon might be good choices because each has a breadth of features. If we do this deeply for one site, that site will be a benchmark for all sites we use.

2. Research the site. See how it’s structured. Go wide and deep.
   • Notice which friends participate and which seem just to be there.
   • See how and how often people act and interact publicly and privately.
   • Look for how they share information and the kind of information most shared.
   • See how the site handles groups, events, and links to other networks.
   • Read reviews and notice who writes them.

   Record what you learn some way or post about it.

3. Narrow your focus: Choose one audience / purpose for that site.

   Every social networking site has its strengths. Some are social. Some are about content. Some are strictly business. Decide how the site you’ve chosen best works for you. By choosing your purpose for using that site, you’ll know in an instant which features support you and which sort of communities you want to be part of there.

4. Note what information you might want to share.
   Over the next few days, read profiles of the people in your chosen communities.
   • Freewrite or outline the ideas about yourself and your work that you want to share.
   • Make a few notes about the kind of connections that you’ll have in this venue. Will you be an open networker? Keep this to friends? Concentrate on business contacts or potential clients? What sort of information will you share and not share?

   Sound like a lot? If you think about it, it’s an investment in saving time. Having a strategy and knowing a site inside out from the start, can save hours of time spent on things that don’t serve us, . . . or even worse, save us the loss of finding out months later that the feature we wished for has been there all along.

   How well do you know the social networking sites that you’re on?

   –ME “Liz” Strauss
   Next: Drafting that Profile
   Work with Liz!!
   SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!