Having recently started a blog, and being a Twitter, Facebook and Flickr user, as well as a user of a few classic Internet forums, I had been thinking about the integration between the three, and how the “venn diagrams” of those various social groups overlap, and how that overlap affects what I post where, and how I should best cater to that – through aggregation or by keeping worlds apart?
Jim Goldstein’s excellent article on social media connectivity set my thinking off again; thanks Jim!
Our online social networks come from a variety of places. In the days before “Web 2.0″ and the social web, my main way of getting to know strange people on the Internet was through forums. If I was interested in a specific brand of car, I’d find forums where like-minded people would talk mainly about cars, but sometimes also about other interesting stuff like computing, photography etc. As an active member of several forums, I ended up with a few separate and disparate social networks, with little overlap save for the few people who were on more than one of the same forums as I was, and when the inevitable forum split happens, and some people decided to join both camps. The overlap of various groups had started.
Some of those forum friends pointed me towards Flickr, and once there I found people from other forums I was involved in; more overlap.
I started on Facebook at the invitation of an old friend from college days, who now lives in Canada. It seemed like an interesting way to keep in touch with groups of people, so much easier than email. I found a few disparate friends who were also Facebook users, and then family members, and extended family members and over time, groups of friends from those forums, and people I’ve worked with, including (frighteningly) ex-employees. The venn diagram got yet more complex.
I’ll admit I first looked at Twitter when I found out that @stephenfry uses it; must be worth a peek if a technophile such as he is using it, surely? Having gone through the stage of posting trivia about my daily activities, I found people that I knew from Facebook or Forums, and then some people I’d never heard of started following me, and curiosity led me to look at their Twitter feeds and start following some of them too, and their other followers and followees.
The diagram of various social networks, and where they overlap is now getting beyond something I can easily visualise in my head! This in itself presents some interesting issues about managing your social media output. Should you post about your weekend adventures with late nights and alcohol for the enjoyment of friends, when family members are following your feed? Disabusing your parents and aunts/uncles of the notion that you’re still that sweet little child they remember is one thing, but when impressionable younger members of your family are also following your feeds, you find yourself having to mentally check off every update against all those lists of people.
And then there’s the people you know. I know of an incident fairly recently where a Facebook user who I know from one of those forum groups (but isn’t a Facebook friend) posted an innocuous status update on Facebook, and was quite thoroughly and crudely ‘graffitied’ in the comments by a group of people from the forum, in a way that wasn’t compatible with family Facebook friends. Mix your social networks with care; would you invite your drinking buddies round to a family gathering like a christening or wedding? You’re possibly doing the equivalent thing online…
And then we come to blogs. I’d like to blog about photography, because that’s a hobby of mine, and a Tweet is just too short to say it all. Besides, I’d quite like to be able to steer the discussion elements of that process a bit more than I could on the likes of Twitter or facebook, or even Flickr (the home of “Oooh and aaah” feedback on even quite poor photographs that have been added to the right groups). I also might like to blog about my adventures with Linux, networking, virtualisation, and making web servers and blogs work. I might even be compelled to blog one day about my passion for cars, my love for my car and how motoring fits into the world of recessionary and environmental restraint. I’m certainly going to want to stand on my soap box and put the world to rights at some point!
So, do I have one blog like this, with a mixture of posts on a mixture of topics, or do I have multiple blogs, some of which will end up with only a very few posts? Where is my aggregation point? Is it Twitter where I have a subset of all my social contacts following me? Or is it really my blog(s), and then advertise those on Twitter, Facebook et al? Would people follow a mixed blog if they’re interested in photography and not Linux? Will people be able to sift their preferred content from what they see as noise?
In short, should my online persona across those various media be me, or a carefully managed set of me-brands across various topics? Is the topic the be-all and end-all, or by specialising would I be closing doors to my readers finding new things and exploring new avenues they might not have otherwise considered? I don’t propose to have one Twitter account for me the photographer, one for me the car enthusiast, one for me the family member and one for me the ex-college student. Why should I have separate blogs for those things?
RSS looks like a potential answer. I looked into having multiple blogs, one per major subject area, and then aggregating those plus general soap box content into a master blog, to give the reader the choice – follow the master ‘me’ blog, or just follow a specific narrow-market one. Wordpress doesn’t seem to be geared up to do this natively, though there are ways I could think to do that with a few code tweaks. RSS would let me set up those separate blogs and just import the topic-specific ones into the master one. It doesn’t give me single logon and administration though, but it does allow different branding of each, so there’s a mixed set of ups and downs to this approach.
If I could provide an RSS feed per category (I haven’t even looked to see if Wordpress can do this yet), that’s an alternative method, and allows one post that covers multiple subjects to reach both audiences (say I took photos of my car for example). This doesn’t give me the option of branding different categories differently though, although some reseach again shows a few Wordpress tweaks could do just that.
That just leaves the non-technical questions of how much overlap I want between those various groups, and if I want to have multiple online personas, or if I just want the world to see one view of me.
Recent Comments