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There was a time when the risk of experiencing socially awkward moments was confined to when we were outside our homes and actually socializing. With a bevy of social media tools now at our disposal, those nervous and uncomfortable moments that were once the exclusive domain of networking events, office cocktail parties, and high school reunions are brought straight into our homes, offices, and mobile devices 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Almost anyone who has placed a profile on Facebook has experienced the awkward moment when someone that they never really knew in high school asks to be their friend. It could be the guy or girl in class that you never spoke to, the loudmouth who smelled bad or the quiet goth dude who you were always a little afraid of. You hesitate at first, thinking, Do I really want to “friend” this person? Then you question the person’s motivation to be your friend and evaluate the virtual social implications of accepting or rejecting this person. Will you hurt the “friender’s” feelings if you choose to reject him? Or, if you accept, what will all your other friends, whom you see in person on a regular basis, think if you have this person on your friend list? You grudgingly decide to accept the person, and he becomes part of your virtual social life. Then you’re bombarded with constant updates about who he has a crush on and invitations to play poker.
Then there are the awkward Twitter moments. As someone in my network once mused, “What’s up with someone blocking me but continuing to follow? Do we call that stalking?” As a newbie to the Twitter universe, I noticed that a nice girl from Denver, Colorado began following me only to stop a few days later. My first reaction was to wonder what I did to turn her away. (I responded by promptly blocking her as well.) It’s like she walked away mid-conversation, which would be considered quite rude at a cocktail party but perfectly acceptable in the virtual world.
I learned this as I started following one person and then realized that I could not keep up with his 40 tweets a day and had to stop following to leave more airtime for others in my network. But I took a moment to feel bad before pressing “remove” and to wonder, What if I offend him? Maybe it’s because of my attachment to the old rules of face-to-face networking, but why should I feel bad about possibly offending a guy from Vancouver I’ve never met and likely will not meet in the future? (And I guaranteed that by removing him from my list.)
Then there is your list of followers to consider. They are a direct reflection of your personality, since you will generally attract people with interests similar to your own. The common practice for choosing someone new to follow is to take a look at their followers list to see what sort of company they keep. So what does it mean when a guy from Phoenix, Arizona, who uses Twitter to promote his two porn sites, starts following me? How did he find me, and what was I broadcasting that made him think, This guy wants to check out my porn sites! This new follower sent me into a rapid review of my posts wondering what sort of signals I was sending. I concluded that I wasn’t the issue—this guy was just spamming.
Or consider the case of another tweeter who had the honor of having a Playboy playmate follow him. He blocked her, as he uses Twitter exclusively for business (he runs a social media consulting company). Like me, he scoured his recent updates to find out what he said that got her attention. Coming up with nothing, he decided it was because, as he put it, “I still got it!” And he proudly told his wife the same.
The most socially awkward moments are when your jokes fall flat, or worse, are considered offensive. In the olden days of face-to-face conversations, it was easier to gauge your audiences’ acceptance of your pithy quip, making damage control instantaneous. If the group in front of you didn’t laugh at your remark, you could quickly change subjects to save face, and apologize if necessary. Now failed attempts at humor can be distributed to thousands of people in a matter of seconds and archived for years. Peter Shankman (@skydiver) blogged about a fellow who called him fat (and not “phat” as the kids say). It turned out to be a poor attempt to make people laugh, but about 50,000 people had the opportunity to find out that the individual a. is not very funny and b. has poor judgment. When the first impression you make on a vast network is a bad one, you may never recover.
So how do you avoid the socially awkward moments that can creep up on you in the virtual networking world? I like to think that social media tools are much like the dreaded networking cocktail party where the golden rule is to have some fun but always remain professional. Mix in some personal chatter with shop talk, and it’s good to be witty and funny, but keep it clean and appropriate. The risks are higher when networking online because you instantly lose control of the message, but the benefits of being part of a strong online and global community are huge.
Jay Averill is manager of corporate communication at Stantec, a 10,000-person engineering/architecture design firm with more than 130 offices across North America. You can follow him on Twitter @bluejaypr. |
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