Are you conservative, friendly, open or promiscuous?
People use social media sites to network online in different ways, and you can classify them in roughly four categories.
Conservative: If you’re a conservative networker online, you’ll connect only to people you know in real life. It might even be just the people you know well and like.
Friendly: You’ll connect to people you know or have at least met in real life, even if it was only on a conference call, regardless of how well you know them.
Open: You’ll connect to anybody you’ve had some sort of contact with, online or off, even if the contact was as limited as following their tweets (or them following yours).
Promiscuous: You’ll connect to anybody, even complete strangers. You’re always looking for an excuse to send that invitation to link, always willing to accept one.
Ex-conservative becoming more promiscuous
Over time, I’ve progressed from the conservative end of this spectrum to promiscuous. Why? Because it’s on that wide-open end of the spectrum that online social networking is so powerful.
Here’s what I mean. On the conservative end of the scale, where you’re connected to a relatively small number of people who you already know pretty well, social networking sites such as LinkedIn or Facebook aren’t that much more useful than Microsoft Outlook. They give you a way to keep in touch electronically with people you already know, but that’s about it.
But as you make your online network wider and deeper, it becomes more and more difficult, and eventually impossible, to have the kind of personal relationship with each individual that you had when you were conservative. The connections in these broader networks are looser, the personal communication increasingly infrequent, the relationships weaker. But they are still connections, still relationships.
You can send out your status updates, pass along a useful link, maybe ask a question. Most of the people in your loose network may not pay a lot of attention, most of the time, but your status update — your ping to your network — is a way of maintaining at least a weak connection, but without being intrusive. Everyone is opted in. Anybody can opt out.
Sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, Twitter, our blogs and the rest of the social media universe allow you to maintain more relationships at a greater distance, something that wouldn’t be practical for most of us offline.
Why would you want to maintain these weak relationships? Because when you need something (like a job), or want to know something (like an obscure piece of technical information) or have an idea you want to spread (maybe about the value of social networks and ‘weak’ relationships), you can tug the strings in your network and get more feedback than you ever could in your conservative real world network. Even though those connections are weak, if you ask the network for help, at least some people will respond.
So I’m becoming more promiscuous online. Want to follow me on Twitter? Go here. Want to connect to me on LinkedIn? I welcome it, find me here. Feel like friending me on Facebook? I’m friendly – go for it.
What about you? Are you a conservative networker online, or a prolific and promiscuous connector? Tell us about your online networking style, and why you’ve chosen that style, in the comments below.
Update: I’ve tweaked my approach just a bit. Please check out this post about my approach to Facebook. (Feb. 14, 2010)
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In no particular order, I'm a writer, MBA, ex-journalist, blogger, geek, strategic communications pro, father, struggling novelist 
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m certainly conservative when it comes to Facebook. That’s where I keep my personal interests, photographs and connections with people I went to high school and college with.
As a recent graduate, I’m just now testing the boundaries between business and social connections. I think a lot of young professionals are becoming guinea pigs for how these relationships are going to mix in the future. When Facebook started, it was a place for college students only and none of us thought twice about what we posted on our own little piece of the Internet. We are learning (some a bit too late) that everything online is open for all eyes to see and, fair or not, we can be judged in the professional world because the pictures from that party three years ago just won’t disappear.
(I think I’m about to make another step towards promiscuity by connecting with you on LinkedIn)
Well put, Mark. I love those categories.
Well, I’ve been somewhat promiscuous on some sites and mildly conservative to friendly on others. My categories have essentially been “professional” and “personal.” Then I realized there really is no distinction because everything you do is out there for all to see so I just try to manage my image appropriately. The one thing I won’t do, is endorse someone on LinkedIn just because they ask. If I was never a fan of their work or would never write them a recommendation on actual paper, I just ignore the request. However, when I communicate with a person on a blog or via e-mail and they seem pretty smart, I seek them out in many social arenas.
This is the first time I’ve ever congratulated someone on becoming promiscuous, but congratulations.
As you know, I struggled with this shift a couple months ago and shared it on my blog. I was a friendly conservative, but not open and definitely not promiscuous. I kept my personal friends on facebook and my professional contacts on LinkedIn and twitter. After getting a lot of opinions on the matter that suggested everything from ultra-conservative to ultra-promiscuous, I decided to go promiscuous.
Why did I choose that style? Because a random opportunity presented itself and reminded me of the power of connections – about being able to bring the right people together, regardless of the reason. Whether it’s helping two old friends connect for a beer in Chicago or helping someone find a digital strategist in Austin, Texas, it would benefit both myself and the community at large to be able to come through and help from time to time.
Welcome to promiscuity, my friend. Hey, maybe we should start a group on facebook.
i like it
i do concur with varying my level of promiscuity (man that’s a handful to type) depending on what space I’m in. it does create non-homogeniality amongst each of my networks but isn’t this the purpose and one of the possibilities of being online?