When Did Social Networking Become a Job?
Posted by Nick O'Neill on February 13th, 2008 9:45 AMAs I spend an increasing amount of time on social networks, I have begun wondering when social networking stopped being something that you do for fun and became a daily chore. In 2002 I received an invite to Friendster which at the time was an invite only social network. I was excited and immediately began to connect with all of my friends that I knew on the site. Then MySpace launched and all of my friends shifted to the new and cool social network and I suddenly re-connected with the same friends.
Soon after MySpace launched I tried creating my own social network only to have Facebook, the network that I now obsessively cover, beat me to the punch. This story is not about how I got beat out by a formidable competitor but instead about how soon enough social networking would become more of a task than an enjoyable past-time. LinkedIn was the beginning of using social networking professionally but at some point last year, Facebook also became the network of choice for many of my professional contacts.
Once that occurred, Facebook suddenly became a chore for me. Perhaps I am to blame as I set up a blog that was specifically about Facebook. Facebook became my job and as such it became party of my daily routine. I have a feeling that this isn’t only happening to me though and is now a problem that many of us face. Has social networking become a job for you? Is it something that you do in your free time or have you now forced yourself to use it for managing you business contacts?
February 13th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
It became a “job” when you let it. If you’re not getting value out of it - making money, meeting interesting people, having fun, whatever - it’s going to be seen as work and likely not worth the effort. In fact, the more it’s “effort” and less “desire,” you might need to adjust.
Why or how to you feel compelled, as it seems you do, to put so much time or effort into Facebook, for example, that it becomes unenjoyable?
February 13th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Getting started with a social network is like getting a new computer–while at first it seems fun, you have to get it to a level where you can really benefit from it. It took work for me to happy with my various social networking sites (getting friends, editing my profile, figuring it out) and it was a heck of a time commitment. But after that, the maintenance and payoff has been easy.
With my blog there are expectations about how often I should write, but with social networking sites I could freeze all activity and the world would go on without much interest.
I think the only work for most people is if they really want to create content on the site–because any type of content creation takes time.
I spend a maximum of 15 minutes/day on linkedin/facebook and the only thing about them that I don’t enjoy is how easy it is to get distracted. But work? I suppose I care about it as a reputation tool, but otherwise I don’t really find it time consuming. Facebook and LinkedIn are what you make of them. You can use them to make money from them and work hard at that, you can use it as a reputation tool, or you can just use it to keep up with friends. Only the first scenario seems laborious…and I’d bet most people aren’t working too hard at that.