I was reading a self help column today (not because I need it) and saw and letter written in from a young man who had friended his girlfriend’s mother on Facebook. His girlfriend was livid at this and demanded the he de-friend her. The columnists counseled caution and said to ask his girlfriend why she was so emotional about his including his possible future mother-in-law. The columnist made some good points, one of which was that maybe the girlfriend did not want all the pictures and wall to wall communications to be “G” rated from this point forward. I had been thinking for a while about the concept of “friending”, and the variations, because I often get frustrated questions from audience members about the awkwardness of mixing business contacts with family and friend contacts. Once again, technology innovation is creating a new social problem that we will have to form new rules to solve.

Let’s be clear about all the variations of the problem.  There is the basic issue of who I should friend, and who I should ignore.  Do I friend people I barely know just to pad my statistics, look popular, or have some outside hope they might be valuable to be someday?  What about the obvious problem if mixing business contacts, with family, and friends?  How many times have we seen that good old buddy that posts a high school picture of us with long hair and polyester shirts that our business partners would probably like to not have burned into their retinas.

Then there is the more complex scenario list: What to do about LinkedIn and Plaxo Pulse?  These contact networking applications are meant to help you be able to NOT lose track of anyone – no matter how tenuous the relationship.  But c’mon, there has to be a line drawn somewhere, doesn’t there?  I have people sending me contacts that I met once while at an event and will very likely never contact, and certainly will not even remember two days after seeing their name.  Now Twitter creates an even more perplexing problem.  Who should I follow, and should I let everyone follow me?  Right now, I am following one person for every eight that follow me.  It is so bad, a friend of mine that I do follow told me that he got a call from someone that wanted to know how he rated being so important that Scott Klososky had him on his follow list.  Because Scott does not follow hardly anyone!!

I would love to say there are some logical, hard and fast rules to what should be done in social networking land.  But after thinking about it, I have decided that it completely depends on what your goals are, and what kind of job you have.  For some people, it is really advisable to create two persona’s and simply separate business from personal.  Since all of the applications are free, there is no cost reason not to do this.  The only argument against having a split online personality is that you will have to maintain two profiles.  That may be a small price to pay if you are a federal judge and don’t relish people from your past posting “funny”stories from the old days where the court clerk and DA will see them.  For others, it is fine to just toss everyone in to a “get to know me” free for all.  If your goals are to get widely known, and you don’t care if that means by total strangers, then you should light it up and connect to every contact that sends an invite.

On the Twittersphere, you have to really do some thinking.  There is some value to having tons of people following you because they might respond to one of your eloquent posts with some answers or additional observations that could be helpful.  And following tons of people can give you a fast glance into what many people are thinking and saying that moment.  Of course, that is if you use tools that help you sort out the chatter of a mass of people tweeting all day.  One of the most interesting things I have done lately is to search on Twitter for mentions of my name to see who has referenced me.  The oddest was to see Guy Kawasaki mentioning me because I respect Guy, but have never met him.  Yet, this made my day somehow.

The long and short is that we all have to give conscious thought as to what we hope to accomplish using social tools.  It does not make a lot of sense to just set them up, then accept every invitation that comes your way, without having some plan in mind.  I suspect we will soon have technology tools that help us manage these other tools, so if you just hang on for a few days, things will change!!  Oh, by the way, I am at @sklososky on Twitter, if you are bored and want to know what I am doing tomorrow.

Scott Klososky
scott@klososky.com