Fundamental Friday: My Values for Online Presence and Sharing

In a previous entry regarding my personal Facebook profile, I explained why I felt quitting the site was a good idea for me.  And yet, there was a time when I wanted to share my life with the people who reside and inhabit the internet. It was such a renaissance time, but now I have found all the long lost friends and acquaintances and caught up with their lives,  but I am left with the ‘now what’ status. I do not live a life that needs any hiding. However, it feels unauthentic to share every last detail and picture or even an overview of my personal life. There is something sacred in sharing with those closest in your life. It is a gift that I want to share with people near me, people who understand me.

I have moments that are so wonderful that I want to share and would have previously on Facebook.  Instead I treasure the moments of joy for all that it is and realize that sharing is good, but intensive sharing is just for more validation and attention. Maybe the moment of appreciation and joy is meant just for me and  my closest circles. Perhaps it will be a great conversation piece when I see an acquaintance, instead of the ‘I already know, because I liked it on Facebook’.  The strange tension that this person already knows everything you have shared and there is not much to talk about unless they divulge that they were stalking you.

With all of this said, it is a beneficial way for a business to build a presence in the case that facebook decides to change their user navigation flow. It is the cheapest and quickest solution for your current and future customers to research feedback and updates. People actively search on Facebook for businesses to view their specials, posts, and any pictures listed on the page. Yet, it rarely converts to sales. Think of it like a magazine. People go to skim but rarely buy directly from a magazine. It does enhance the decision making process though.

So, if I have terminated Facebook profile, why would I continue on any social media platform? I do not like instagram, but understand its usefulness for promotion and fun for youth. In my daily life,  I like twitter, because I follow venture capitalists, media moguls, and business savvy people that share their insights and links. These types of posts  are frowned upon on the FB platform and deemed as self promotion or uppity.  With Twitter, I can check one or two times a day or week, and enjoy the links or motivational quotes. I appreciate the value of aggregate information from many sources that  I may not have known otherwise. I also follow hundreds of blogs, but Twitter is a great way to get an overview before diving into the articles and intense research.

Many say that Twitter information or tweets gets lost in the data pool. You are correct. This could be a good thing if you are hiring an employee. This is an open platform to see how the person presents himself over time. When we were hiring for positions, I read an impressive resume and then checked his twitter feed. It was poorly written and fragmented. He even claimed that he did not really know the skill he had claimed to know on his resume. He was having marital problems because he would not study. Thank you Twitter. You saved us the time and trouble of finding out the hard way.

See, this is the dark side of the online world. Once you have posted and built your presence, you are then judged by your posts. In the human experience, we are growing. Our views may change and we hopefully learn from our mistakes, which are all documented online for all to see.  Maybe this process should be more private because it could affect your future self and its opportunities.

Social media platforms will change every few months. Next month, Facebook may launch a feature that re-ignites the joy I once had for the site. I may need to hop on the Facebook train. Perhaps, instagram or another site moves in a direction that I love. However, in the meantime, understanding your values and your online presence to be exactly that: an objectification that will be essentially shared and judged over time should assist you when you are opening up your life for online platforms.