Something has hit me tonight.
Something I think could cause a drastic change in how I perceive my interactions and relationships.
Something that, based on current technology, I have no current control over.
The digital age has transformed our lives-most specifically how we communicate.
An individual needs to view their relationships and interactions exactly how a company views their customers and markets. The segmentation of your relationships, and your communications and interactions with these defined segments, will affect how you are perceived in each of your segments.
These segments can be very broad (personal vs professional) or very specific (based on interests, roles, locations, industries, etc.)-it is solely based on how you want to interact with each of your relationships. Then, controlling how you communicate with each of these segments is important.
In today’s social media environment, there is a lot of noise. This noise goes both ways-the updates you share being read by everyone else and the updates you read that are being shared by everyone. I think it is safe to assume that we only care about 10 percent of the updates we read in our news feed, and only 5 percent of these updates are actually practical or useful. The rest? Simply noise. On the other hand, it’s beneficial to assume that for typical updates, only 5 to 10 percent of your followers actually care about what you are saying.
The updates you make can also be damaging to your perception. If you post a professional update, the odds are your friends from high school will roll their eyes and think you are boring. If you post a personal update, one of your professional relationships could have a negative reaction.
By segmenting your relationships and controlling how you communicate with each segment, you have full control of how you are perceived.
In my next post, I will overview a strategy you can use to segment your relationships and how you can use Facebook to control what you say to your different segments.
Let me know if you agree or disagree if one benefits by segmenting their relationships or if everyone should act as an open book-by sharing all opinions, thoughts, and events with everyone.
Good Stuff Mr. Stigall. I agree that segmenting between the different realms of a persons life should be done to a degree… however I also think that to a certain level Professional and Personal networks/relationships can blend and benefit from each other. Looking forward to Matt’s ways of segmenting and using these different networks to their fullest.
Although you burst my bubble in thinking more than 7% of my followers care about my updates
Haha.
Thanks for the comment, Blake. Although there are times your professional and personal lives can be blended, I think its a safe assumption to keep them separate until you are comfortable with sharing the different parts.
Beyond just professional vs. personal, imagine if you could control the communication on a more specific level. In your case, when it comes to video production or Georgia State.