I’m as big a proponent as the next business dork on social networking and the latest greatest way to stay in touch with the people I meet and friends I make, but things are getting out of control.
The three main social networking sites I use on a constant basis are Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. During the course of business and networking events I come into contact with all sorts of people that I’d like to remember and stay in touch with and find these tools to be extremely useful, but now that these social networking tools are becoming mainstream and Searchable, I am getting followed by all sorts of strangers on Twitter, requests to be friends with people I’ve never met on Facebook and requests to be contacts with people I’ve never heard of on LinkedIn. What are these people doing?
I suppose they think I have something interesting to offer, or maybe their lonely and looking to expand their circle of friends? I guess it doesn’t really matter as I currently just reject their requests; from my perspective, the circle of people that I am in touch with on these platforms should fit some larger purpose or should relate somehow to my life and the people I interact with and the projects I work on.
I was recently at MashUp here in Austin and from across the room I ACTUALLY RECOGNIZED a guy that follows me on twitter with whom I have no contact, no relationship and no professional or social connection to. So having a couple of drinks, I decided to ask him who the hell he was and why was he following me on Twitter?
He had a video camera in one hand filming the event and a fistful of MnMs in the other hand so he couldn’t shake my hand, but he did tell me that he searches Twitter for keywords of things he is interested in and follows those people.
A day after MashUp I got a Facebook friend request from Karen Hartline who apparently has something to do with the MashUp? I’ll let her request slide because I figure she looked me up on Facebook and couldn’t resist adding me as a friend after seeing my picture =)
I’ve given a Facebook example and a Twitter example, so one LinkedIn example is needed.
I and several of my coworkers recently joined the Agile Austin LinkedIn group. The head of the group is a guy named Boris Portman who is constantly posting about setting up Austin Agile events and things like that and he automatically requests to be your contact if you join the Agile Austin group. Seems normal. But when you send him a message or a response to his outcry for networking events, you get no response….What is the point of utilizing the LinkedIn network if you aren’t going to participate?? My guess is that he is just creating an advertisement network so he can spam me at some point down the road.
So if I don’t know you and you don’t have anything to offer and you aren’t willing to talk to me….why bother?
I have no idea why people add me as friends on Facebook and then never say anything. It’s like, are they just trying to make their friend count higher?
That’s all I wanna do. I want my friend count to go up, Up, UP! Just kidding. But I do understand it. I get a little buzz every time I get a new friend . . .
I seen the friend count go as high as 10,000 on some facebook accounts. I’ll be glad if i remember 1/10 of those ppl.