Face to face, tweet to tweet ~ Management 2.0 developing social capital

Wednesday, 25 February 2009

Face to face, tweet to tweet

I’ve been reading quite a lot about social media over the last few weeks, and as a result, I’ve been considering my own investment in and use of this technology.

I’m still spending a lot of time blogging – writing, reading, and commenting. The reading part at least has been made significantly easier now I’ve got an iphone, and have downloaded Google’s Reader onto it. This means I can catch up on the latest feed updates in any spare five minutes, and love the ability to quickly scroll through all the latest posts from the fee hundred feeds I’ve subscribed to.

I’m putting more time into podcasting, although I still feel very much an amateur at this. But working with Krishna on TalkingHR is great, and I’m slowly beginning to feel more confident with this, and able to start planning new developments as well.

And I’m also starting to get hooked with Twitter. I think what made the difference here was abandoning the desire to only follow those people I know (not many of whom use Twitter). I’m now following most of the HR people I’ve been able to find (using lists provided by HR Zone and Steve Boese to add to those I was already following). But I’m also following the great and good of the social media world, and following their conversations has highlighted many interesting points, links and resources.

All together, I grow increasingly convinced that social media provides a great basis to both increase knowledge / the rate of learning, and to develop relationships.

So, I’ve been thinking about a recent post from Matthew Taylor on his RSA blog, contrasting the use of social media to the power of face-to-face communication:

"The big question is whether on-line collaboration will always be much weaker and shallower than off-line or whether it is simply that we haven’t yet developed the tools to compensate for the absence of the kind of face to face dynamics seen yesterday in Washington."

I don’t think it is shallower. I probably actually know a lot more people through social media than I do through having met them in person (meaning that I have some sort of relationship with them, and that I could call them up, email them, or DM them on twitter, and they’d have some sort of understanding of who I am – as opposed to someone I met at a conference a year ago who has probably forgotten the fact that we even met). And some of these connections have grown quite deep – I feel I could trust the person, even though we’ve never actually met.

The tools are here, and you're missing out if you're not using them.