As a good friend of mine says, we are like the people who we surround ourselves with most of the time. That made me wonder if as an introvert, is our effectiveness from who we are, who we FOLLOW, FRIEND or add as CONTACTS in online social networking talk, or a combination? Just how effective are we as introverts that it helps with Social Networking? How is who we are like the canary in the mine?
We get more practice at listening. We listen to ourselves and we listen to other people. Tools like PeopleBrowsr.com, TweetDeck, Monitter.com help us do this more easily and with more time and energy for ourselves. It’s actually going to build on our strength of listening already in place. We’ll build listening online for helping the offline conversations too.
We need time to recharge. There’s much discussion about Twitter on whether to automate DMs (direct messages) or not, whether to auto Follow or not. It’s just tiring in itself. Was the conversation started with extroverts? There’s no rule or one right way. As introverts who need time alone, why would we auto-follow? Yes; it’s time saving in the beginning if you want thousands of followers, but how does following every one who follows you serve your innate need to eventually get that time alone? As far as automating DMs, if it’s appropriate, not self-promoting and adds value, why not DM? Automating a DM for new followers does NOT mean you can’t then take the time to find something about someone to a) decide if it serves you best to follow them too and b) reply with something personal that you find interesting or attractive. We’ll make smarter decisions with our thinking things through that will allow us the time to recharge.
We prefer deep conversations. Aimless small talk, or chit chat, can sometimes be seen on the Twitter stream just as it’s heard in person. There’s value to us to listen to our followers/following, friends, contacts as well as to honor our time to recharge. We get to choose who we want to take conversations to a deeper level with. It can be as many as we want, as long as we respect our need to maintain our effectiveness with our energy.
We’ll get better at listening. We’ll make smarter decisions to take time to recharge and not follow rules in the making. We’ll take the relationships we build to deeper and more meaningful levels off line, on our own time line. If we listen to our own canary in the mine, we won’t gasp for air.
What do you think? What are we already good at that can help us with online social networking?
Pat,
Great post. As an introvert, the way I have dealt with these issues is:
Small talk: hate it. Avoid it. Move on. But…(introversion taken too far is a weakness) I do miss a lot by doing that, so I am doing a little of it at my speed. I do a little small talk with friends. (don’t tell anyone, but i act like an extrovert sometimes.) and I un-followed an extrovert that must have been talking to the whole world and no one could not get a tweet in– even with DM.::0
I am taking conversation lessons(by watching them tweet)from a close friend who seems to have interesting conversations with a reasonable number of people. Maybe I could learn something from an extrovert… I will listen and keep you posted.
Getting overwhelmed:
My purpose on Twitter is to build a brand (helpful, learning professional), so I put interesting learning related info in my tweet stream. Yep, I do most of the talking… you don’t see me having a lot of conversations. That is how I handle it.
The issue of too many followers and overload I handle with software tools. I follow most people back and the list can be thousands without making the introvert in me uncomfortable — I am not having a conversation with them, but micro-blogging: they are reading what I write.
I use software tools to separate out the few close friends from the thousands… this is the group I have conversations with.
Lastly, you hit the listening on the head with me. I do a lot of re- tweeting… which is basically listening and nodding my head in agreement.