Social Media Use

Public

Discussion:

Hello Kathy,

I think the struggle you describe is a small portion of the struggle most people have in adapting to this new medium for human interaction and shared human experience. I imagine the conversations were similar with every other technological advancement in the past. Did people say the telephone was impersonal to face-to-face conversation? What do you think was said about email? Yet, today, organizations conduct business via email. People break up with eachoter via text messages! People are getting married having met eachother playing online games! This is the story of history and we are living through the next evolution in how human beings connect, communicate, and share human experience. The struggle you describe is the same struggle society has always experienced as we adapt and make sense of things as we live through it.

Now that everyone has the power to publish, you naturally will get trivial information. However, Career Advisors must train themselves to be able to recognize when seemingly meaningless information can actually be golden.

The example in the module regarding strategic engagement points this out. Some graduate tweeting about their love for music for instance can be viewed as useless information unless you train yourself to consider how social media allows us to be flies on the wall to make observations of peoples' activity, their interests, their motives for behaviors, what's going on in their lives, who their influencers are in their network, etc. We must ask ourselves how this data which we have never had the opportunity to collect before can be used to transform our insight about people into strategic engagement to build rapport and to ultimately, improve collaboration to accomplish our objectives.

Your question regarding filtering. There are many ways to filter but no way will be perfect. For instance, even with email, we want to filter spam but will you be able to fully stop spam? You'd have to stop using email all-together if you wanted it to completely stop. These are things that come with the territory. The idea of the PLN is one solution to filtering. If you use Twitter for instance and want to reduce the noise, that is primarily determined by who you follow and how you organize your streams of information using lists. If people on Facebook are sending you app requests and you don't want app requests, shut them off. Here's how - http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=202866049749634. Each platform has different features that allow you to filter - it's just a matter of learning the tools.

Thanks for your questions and thoughts - you have added to the learning for the group.

Robert Starks Jr.

Hello Kathy, I think the struggle you describe is a small portion of the struggle most people have in adapting to this new medium for human interaction and shared human experience. I imagine the conversations were similar with every other technological advancement in the past. Did people say the telephone was impersonal to face-to-face conversation? What do you think was said about email? Yet, today, organizations conduct business via email. People break up with eachoter via text messages! People are getting married having met eachother playing online games! This is the story of history and we are living through the next evolution in how human beings connect, communicate, and share human experience. The struggle you describe is the same struggle society has always experienced as we adapt and make sense of things as we live through it. Now that everyone has the power to publish, you naturally will get trivial information. However, Career Advisors must train themselves to be able to recognize when seemingly meaningless information can actually be golden. The example in the module regarding strategic engagement points this out. Some graduate tweeting about their love for music for instance can be viewed as useless information unless you train yourself to consider how social media allows us to be flies on the wall to make observations of peoples' activity, their interests, their motives for behaviors, what's going on in their lives, who their influencers are in their network, etc. We must ask ourselves how this data which we have never had the opportunity to collect before can be used to transform our insight about people into strategic engagement to build rapport and to ultimately, improve collaboration to accomplish our objectives. Your question regarding filtering. There are many ways to filter but no way will be perfect. For instance, even with email, we want to filter spam but will you be able to fully stop spam? You'd have to stop using email all-together if you wanted it to completely stop. These are things that come with the territory. The idea of the PLN is one solution to filtering. If you use Twitter for instance and want to reduce the noise, that is primarily determined by who you follow and how you organize your streams of information using lists. If people on Facebook are sending you app requests and you don't want app requests, shut them off. Here's how - http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=202866049749634. Each platform has different features that allow you to filter - it's just a matter of learning the tools. Thanks for your questions and thoughts - you have added to the learning for the group. Robert Starks Jr.