This is another follow-up to the article I wrote about on-line social networking:
http://theintegratedlab.com/2009/07/should-your-lab-care-about-on-line-social-networking/
In that post, I started the discussion by posting 5 common questions people ask about on-line social networking’s use for the lab. I already wrote about the first one:
Here, I will write about the next one.
Question # 2: There are so many sites for on-line social networking, now. How do I know which one(s) to join? Should I join them all?
Answer:
Let me start with the easy part, “Should I join them all?” The answer to that is, “No, absolutely and unequivocally not!!!” There are too many sites out there for you to physically join them all, for one. After all, you have a job, a life, and your own sanity to maintain. Even if you did try to join them all, you can’t participate in and keep-up with a multitude of sites. My advice is to try a variety of sites, see what works best for you and put your time and energy into a select few.
Being Responsive is Seen as Good Manners
In fact, you should drop out of the ones you don’t participate in so that people you know don’t think you’re active. It can be annoying when you try to network with someone in a group and they never respond. There’s no way to know that person isn’t active in that group. Some people will feel snubbed by a lack of response or a response that takes too long.
Because of that, and since there are some groups I stay in because of a single feature that I use or group that I want to stay in-touch with, but that I don’t use on a regular basis, I have all my social networking sites set so that I get e-mail when people try to connect with me. That way, I can respond quickly to those people that try to contact me in those few sites that I don’t go to very often.
What to Join
But then, how do you know which ones to join? First of all, each site or tool has some underlying purpose. Although tools such as FaceBook and MySpace are primarily for your personal life, they can be used professionally, as well, although I’d suggest being careful about blending personal and professional profiles, just as you’re careful about what you share about your personal life when you’re at work.
Tools such as LinkedIn, eCademy, Plaxo, Rzye, Viadeo, Xing and LabRoots are all professionally-based tools, although some do have personal aspects to them, as well. LinkedIn is heavily populated with people from the US, but does have a strong international population and is possibly the largest of the professional networking tools, right now. Xing has a heavy European member population, as does Viadeo. eCademy seems to be popular with people in the UK. LabRoots is strictly for laboratory-based networking.
What to Keep
So, with these few examples, based on what you want to do and who you want to be in-contact with, you might belong to more than one. I’m a heavy user of LinkedIn. I find many, many laboratory informatics people in LinkedIn, which is why that is where I felt I should start my LIMS/Laboratory Informatics group – that I could reach the most people in our industry, that way. But I belong to Xing because of a networking group I keep in-touch with in Berlin, and to Viadeo because many of the French people I know seem to rely on this site.
Every once in awhile, I “prune” what I belong to, where I will drop-out of tools I really don’t use. For example, in LinkedIn, you’ll see I belong to many groups. If you watch carefully, you’ll see that the list of groups I belong to changes over time. That is because some groups sound interesting to me but, once I’m in them, I find they’re not active or find that they’re full of advertisements.
Sometimes, if I think a group could be really useful if it had some activity, I will create a post as a kind of test, where I say something like, “Hey, I want to use this group but it doesn’t look active. What should we use it for? What’s appropriate in here?” If I don’t see some interest from people in response after a couple of weeks, I drop the group. The reason I drop the group is, once again, because I can only truly keep-up with a certain number of groups. Belonging to groups with no value merely distracts me from those I really care about.
And for the ones that I do remain a member of, I focus my energies on participating in those groups so that they remain active and viable. By doing this, I help perpetuate the groups that are useful to me.
