Why I am Socially Media Promiscuous – by Lisa Hickey

The following is a guest post by Lisa Hickey, who appeared in Lemonade and said what was, to me, the most profound line in the entire movie. “Don’t be the person out there looking for a job. Be the person out there doing something interesting.”  This is an excerpt from her article in The Good Men Project Magazine. Read the entire piece here.

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In December 2008 I walked into a Starbucks. “Are you Erik?” I asked a guy who was scanning the room looking for someone. “No, sorry.” We laughed awkwardly. I sat at a table and waited for my Chai tea to cool down. Finally, Erik walked in, recognizing me right away. “It’s been a while,” he said.

Erik Proulx and I had worked together—for a week—about 10 years earlier. We hadn’t talked since. But Erik had just been laid off from his job at a large advertising conglomerate and needed to network. “I don’t know why I called you,” he said, frankly. “I’m just trying to connect.”

Erik had started a blog called “Please Feed the Animals” to help laid-off ad people like himself. At the time, I had never read a blog. I was, however, excited about the potential for Facebook and Twitter as networking tools.

I had 300 “friends” on Facebook, an amazing number, I thought. My daughter Shannon laughed at my efforts. “How many ‘friends’ do you have today, mom?” she would say, using her favorite hand gesture, the air quote.

Admittedly, I was “friending” people for the wrong reasons. Was it was an ego thing, something I was doing to make me feel better about myself? Check. Was I competitively trying to rack up more friends than everyone I knew? Check. Was I sending friend requests to people I thought were funny, smart, clever, and popular in hopes that people would think I was funny, smart, clever, and popular? Check, check, check, and check.

More than once I was told, “Sorry, I save my Facebook connections for my “real” friends.” Ouch. (I soon recognized that if someone already had 400 friends or more, they weren’t so worried about “real” friends.)

“I’m having an online chat for out-of-work ad people,” Erik said. “Could you join and talk about your experience on Facebook and Linkedin?”

I stared down at my Chai tea and tried not to groan. The last thing I want to do is brand myself an “out-of-work ad person.” What will my Facebook friends think?

Erik wasn’t even a friend, not in the way I had previously thought of friends. I didn’t remember if he had one kid or two, or if he lived on the North Shore or the South Shore. Heck, I hadn’t even recognized him. But Erik was trying to help others, and he needed help himself. I could see how what I had learned might be especially helpful to out-of-work ad people, so I agreed; I logged onto his chat the next day, and told people about my experiences with Facebook and LinkedIn.

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Malcolm Gladwell taught me the value of “weak ties.” In his book The Tipping Point, Gladwell cited a study showing that most people got jobs not through friends, and not through traditional means like headhunters and ads, but through acquaintances—people they knew but saw rarely or occasionally.

According to Gladwell, 56 percent of jobs are acquired through these “weak ties,” while only 18 percent are found through ads and headhunters, and just 9 percent are found through good friends.

This is an actionable piece of information, the kind I like best. After reading Gladwell’s book, I spent 56 percent of my time working on my weak ties.

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Erik’s online chat was a bit of a dud. I was excited about where I saw social media going, but the other participants were less than enthralled with my contribution. “The last thing I need to do is join another social network,” one wrote. Then, Sally Hogshead typed four words that changed my life: “Have you tried Twitter?”

Sally (a speaker, author, and branding expert) explained why Twitter is so valuable—especially to job seekers. “You can follow influential people, see what they are talking about, and join in the conversation.”

Five months later, I was standing in front of a crowd of 70 people, where I had been asked to speak about social media. In just a few months, I’d been branded as a “social media expert.” I’m careful never to call myself that, but I didn’t have to. All I had to do, it turned out, was get 13,000 followers on Twitter and talk about social media a lot.

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I had been socially awkward for most of my life. I’d show up in social situations and not be able to remember if the person I was talking to was married or divorced, had one kid or three, was Republican or Democrat. They would ask me questions about their my life and I couldn’t think of what to say in return.

Half of me was worried I’d let slip something stupid about my life, and the other half was scared that I would totally screw up what I should have known about their life. In almost every conversation, I was filled with anxiety; usually, I would say as little as possible and leave the room. I rarely spoke on the phone. Work was a safe haven, because the conversations were safe, scripted and professional. I worked a lot.

In the summer of 2008, right before I made the decision to get on Facebook, I read an article in The New York Times by Clive Thompson called “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy.” Clive wrote about something social scientists call “ambient awareness”:

Each little update—each individual bit of social information—is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of ESP,” an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

Ambient awareness made perfect sense to me, and I felt that it had been missing my whole life. My fear of interaction and social situations meant many lost chances at making meaningful connections. A form of ESP—some way of knowing enough about people’s lives to be able to have a comfortable conversation—was exactly what I needed.

Like Gladwell’s concept of weak ties, the idea of ambient awareness was a piece of information I could act on. All I had to do was get in the rhythm of seeing what was happening in people’s life through status updates and other postings; that way, when I connected with them in real life, I could have a conversation. I knew where someone was working. I knew if his or her relationship was “complicated” or not. And not only could I recognize them, I could recognize their kids.

The running joke about Twitter was, “who wants to know what breakfast cereal you’re eating?” The answer? Me. When in doubt, I could have a conversation about Cornflakes.

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Lisa Hickey is CEO of Good Men Media Inc.