First, I start with Facebook. I scroll through to find anything interesting, especially posts from my three kids. Then I check out LinkedIn. Who’s invited me to connect? Who’s endorsed me? Who’s looked at my profile? I check out an article or a random post.

I don’t muck much with Twitter except to search on #stcorg and #stc13 . After looking at these two searches, I usually just close it. I might check out Instagram, but usually only because one of my children has posted there. Next, I check out the ST C Board of Directors site to read any new posts. And I check my iPhone to see if there is any pushed content I find interesting.

One morning, though, things were particularly active. I kept getting new posts all over the place. Bing here, ping there, bop over there. (Ok, not audibly; metaphorically, but you get the idea.) I could barely keep up. For some reason that I didn’t totally fathom, I wanted to check them all out. It quickly became took much, moving back and forth, forth and back, that it all became, well … chaotic!

When that thought hit me, it just brought everything to a halt. Is social media just chaos, and we’ve all been sucked in to the flurry? While my computer and smart phone kept pinging and popping, I began to wonder. What if social media is a manifestation of the chaos theory? Well, that just might explain a lot.

So off to the Internet to refresh my memory about chaos theory. First, I learned that chaos theory is a field of mathematics. Right away, I liked it. After all, I was a math major in university. A major concept of chaos theory is the butterfly effect. A small change in one place—the proverbial butterfly flapping—has a profound effect on some cataclysmic event somewhere else—a tsunami, for instance. And here’s the kicker. In math terms, such a succession of events is nonlinear. In other words, there is no direct connection between the two events.

Mathematics, of course, has a more technical explanation: something about dynamical systems being deterministic, but sensitive to initial conditions (I’ll spare you the details). Suffice it to say that even though one event might lead directly to another event, a tiny change in that initial event can cause all hell to break loose.

Okay, so back to social media. Does this make sense? Why was I getting all these posts in such a short period of time? Did some Monarch flap its wings somewhere? Maybe social media as chaos doesn’t refer to my particular situation at all, but to a larger condition of the greater social media, the one in which everyone plays.

One post can certainly cause various events. Tweet that ST C is holding its annual conference, and people register. That’s a direct and expected result. There have been times, though, when one small post results in completely overwhelming and unexpected results. I’ve seen it on Facebook and on Twitter. You probably have, too.

In the end, I guess, that’s the greatest attribute of social media: the power to engender cataclysmic social disruption and change. There’s not much that is loftier than that.

A final note: This is my last column as your social media columnist. It’s been a great ride writing this column. And Editor Liz Pohland has been patient (my favorite trait), thoughtful, and considerate. But for me, social media has become too big a distraction, and a convenient excuse to procrastinate. I act with purpose, and while some of my social media interactions are certainly purposeful, most of them are in search of purpose. Social media has become (I’m going to say something potentially blasphemous here) what television has long since become: titillating but ultimately forgettable. Or maybe I just got tired of waiting to see that completely overwhelming and unexpected result from one of my posts.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post originally appeared in my “Social Media Insights” column in the May 2013 issue of Intercom, the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication (STC).]

I started with Twitter. In the first hour, I received 206 tweets, or one every 18 seconds. I also received almost 150 updates from my LinkedIn connections, about 120 posts by my Facebook “friends,” plus the activity from connections on STC’s social network, MySTC. This is on top of 34 email messages. And this doesn’t even count the discussions posted on the several LinkedIn groups to which I belong.

I tried reading them all, but I was simply overwhelmed by the volume. I realized that I could spend the entire day reading, responding, and participating.

I talked to a colleague about this. I smiled at his response. “I spent about an hour the other day reading through my Twitter stream. Lots of interesting stuff, but nothing earth shattering. I could easily waste my entire day on this and not get anything done.” As in “not get anything important done.” Now that’s drowning in social media.

Keep Yourself from Drowning. Here are a couple of ways to consider staying afloat.

Limit your daily interaction. There’s a Toyota Venza commercial (www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUGmcb3mhLM) that shows the juxtaposition of “older” parents (who are outdoors riding mountain bikes) with their a twenty-something daughter (who is interacting on Facebook). The message of the ad is clear: get out more; socially interact in person.

Streamline your Twitter Experience. Save searches based on your preferences and then search on just those preferences. For professional use, save searches on these hashtags: #techcomm , #stcorg , #stc12 (about this year’s STC conference), and #stc13 (next year’s conference).

Create a few lists to categorize the people who you are most interested in, such as professionals in technical communication or instructional design or education. You can add people to your lists even if you don’t follow them. If you think you have a great list, make it public so others can subscribe to it as well.

You might be interested in following the MindTouch list of the top 400 influencers in technical communication: https://twitter.com/#!/MindTouch/techcomm-2012-influencers. Both will focus the tweets you read on technical communication.

Help keep the airways clear. Here’s a rule to consider following: if you can’t add a meaningful hashtag to your tweet, don’t send it. (For instance, what meaningful hashtag could you add to these tweets I received: “What is the future of virtual sex?” or “What is the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?”)

Streamline Your LinkedIn Experience. Whenever I used to open LinkedIn, I’d be inundated with updates from my connections. For many of these updates, I thought “So what?” That was before I edited my Update preferences. There are 18 update categories. LinkedIn’s default is for all 18 to be checked. I now only have 10 checked. Basically, I’ve removed any updates that are simple status changes (such as when a connection changes their profile photo). Consider what is most important to you and remove the rest. Then you can receive only information you consider important.

While you’re at it, manage your advertising preferences by clearing the checkbox about displaying ads on third-party websites.

You can also easily drown in emails sent by the groups you belong to. Do you really need to receive an email to announce each new discussion? Or would a daily digest suffice? If even that is too much, consider the weekly digest option. Your selection depends on what you are getting out of interacting with, and contributing to, the group.

One Final Life Preserver. In my previous column for Intercom , I wrote that I spend 20 minutes each morning on social media. Some mornings, I will admit, I just want to get started with my work, so I wait until the end of the day. With a day’s accomplishments behind, I feel less inundated (a word that interestingly enough derives from the Latin for flooded) and a bit more buoyant.

Well, that’s enough social media for today. Think I’ll go for a hike.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post originally appeared in my “Social Media Insights” column in the March 2012 issue of Intercom, the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication (STC).]

While cloud computing is a metaphor for the Internet, its breadth and range are much more significant and ground-breaking. Cloud computing is a complex infrastructure of software, hardware, processing, and storage that is available as a service. Cloud computing offers immediate access to large numbers of the world’s most sophisticated supercomputers and their corresponding processing power, interconnected at various locations around the world, proffering speed in the tens of trillions computations per second.

All of this is available through a simple Internet connection using a standard browser. Services range from the sublime—financial analysis, medical information and diagnoses, and document creation and collaboration—to the whimsical—computer gaming. Cloud computing is comprised essentially of applications running remotely (in the clouds, so to speak) that typically reside on personal computers and local servers.

A little background. The term ‘cloud’ first referred mainly to large ATM networks. Cloud computing began in earnest less than eight years ago with the advent of Amazon’s web-based services. Within the last two years, Yahoo and Google announced plans to provide cloud computing services to some of this country’s largest universities: Carnegie Mellon, University of Washington, Stanford, and MIT. IBM, followed immediately by Microsoft, quickly announced plans to offer cloud computing technologies. More recent entries include Sun, Intel, Oracle, SAS, and Adobe. All of these companies invested mightily in cloud computing and infrastructure to provide vendor-based cloud services to the masses.

Cloud services. Much has been made of the potential multitude of services that cloud computing can and could offer. In essence, though, these services break out into three main areas: storage, processing, and software as a service (or SaaS).

• Storage. The storage capacity available through the cloud is simply enormous, seemingly endless, and growing every day. Instead of owning and maintaining your own computer storage, vendors offer you the choice of storing your information in the cloud, on their servers, accessible whenever you want.
• Processing. Supercomputers, with the world’s fastest processors, form the basis of virtually all cloud computing sites. First, these supercomputers must handle the huge storage requirements. More importantly, however, they offer the kind of processing power that few companies can afford yet many critically need.
• Software as a Service (SaaS). For users, SaaS offers the greatest appeal. SaaS delivers benefits that are simply not available from applications running locally on your own computer. With cloud computing, you potentially have access to applications that you could never own. And a burgeoning number of SaaS applications enable you to create and collaborate on projects with people scattered around the globe simply by basing your information (think documents and proprietary data) in the cloud where everyone can access it.

A fundamental change in the nature of software. SaaS alters the basic premise of software. Think of the complex applications that you use every day: Word, FrameMaker, InDesign, Photoshop, RoboHelp, PowerPoint, and Flare. Each offers an incredible array of features, with its requisite learning curve. And how many of these features do you actually use, or in some cases, even know about?

SaaS applications will not be delivered as one huge chunk of code, but rather as a set of individual services. This method of building applications allows you to use the features you need, as you need them, without your having to understand all the available features first.

Take, for instance, Google Maps, essentially a map of the world. Individual services attached to Google Maps include locating real estate for sale, rent, or lease; hotels and other accommodations; restaurants and other eateries; and points of interest such as museums and historical sites. Add to this the services of driving directions, urban planning, land management, and scoping out street level views of many cities, and you’ve got a robust set of applications that are accessible, informative, and interesting.

Social media channels. Cloud computing drives the many social media sites that you access virtually every day. When you realize that you have been using cloud computing every day to send messages, store photographs, upload videos, and a myriad of other tasks, the promise of cloud computing brightens considerably. When you upload a video to YouTube, that video is stored in the clouds; when you store your photographs on Flickr or post them to your Facebook page, those photos are stored in the clouds; when you collaborate on a project through LinkedIn, all of your information is stored in the clouds. And being in the clouds means that anyone with an Internet connection and appropriate privilege can access this information—which is exactly what you want.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post is one of our position papers originally published in 2012.]

Social media has drastically changed how we communicate. Not too long ago, we communicated through the mail, on a land-line telephone, and in person. Today, we send text messages; leave voice messages; use instant messenger; send emails; talk through headphones, cell phones, and online video phones; and, of course, interact through the Internet where a plethora of social media tools has redefined communication.

Such a redefinition has had an enormous effect. The entire paradigm of social media has altered the basic rules of communication, especially between business and their audiences. The one-way communication methods of the recent past—business-to-customer and business-to-business—have been replaced by a more robust multidimensional communication model. That model is collectively called social media (also referred to as Web 2.0).

The rules of social media. To communicate effectively in the social media world means understanding the new rules of the road.

People want:

To have a say.

• Meaningful dialogue.
• To be engaged and involved in the process.
• Personal interactions with others.
• To be listened to.
• To help shape what they find useful.
• To connect with others engaged in similar activities.
• Plain talk.
• Communication to be genuine and relevant.
• To conduct business with ethical companies who work transparently.
• To be in partnership.

Understanding social media. While the tools and kinds of social media are many and their implementations seemingly boundless, they all share a common set of characteristics that meet the rules of social media (stated above). Herewith, then, are the five C’s of social media:

Conversation. No longer is the communication one-way, broadcast or somehow sent to a passive audience. Social media is at least a two-way conversation, and often a multidimensional conversation. Social media engages everyone involved.

Contribution. Social media encourages contributions and reactions from anyone who is interested. ‘Encourage’ is the key here; social media solicits an interaction, positive and negative, by making it easy to contribute.

Collaboration. Social media promotes an exchange of information between you and your audience, and among audience members, by inviting participation. Creating a quick and simple collaborative platform requires that information be organized and easily distributed.

Connection. Accessing information on the Internet only takes a click. Social media thrives on connections, within its own Web vehicles and through links to other sites, resources, people, and automatic feeds. People can even create their own personalized site of connections.

Community. The fundamental characteristic of social media is the creation of community: a fellowship and relationship with others who share common attitudes, interests, and goals (such as friendship, professionalism, politics, and photography). Communities form quickly and communicate effectively. Communities build goodwill from members to the hosting organization and among members. While these communities are only virtual, with members seldom meeting each other in person, they are no less robust than the physical communities in which we live, and in many ways more robust from the simple fact that barriers are removed.

Generational perception of social media. Three generations occupy today’s workplace. The three generations can essentially be broken out into those over the age of 50, the so-called Baby Boomers; those in their 30s and 40s, known as Generation X; and those in their 20s and younger, known as Generation Y. Baby Boomers have the most difficulty comprehending the phenomena of social media, so the perception of social media between the outliers—Baby Boomers and Gen Y—bears consideration.

Baby Boomers essentially grew up in two-parent households (almost 90 percent of families). For the vast majority, dad worked a job, mom worked at home. This family unit, with its incumbent network of extended relatives and neighbors, was the foundation of their lives. Boomers grew up with black and white televisions, party-line telephones, newspapers, mail, double-feature movies, and mom-and-pop corner stores.

Only about 45 percent of Gen Y grew up in two-parent households. For the vast majority, dad and mom both worked a job, essentially disintegrating the basic family unit of relatives and neighbors. Gen Y grew up with color computers constantly connected to the Internet, cell phones, digital media, email and text messaging, movies at home, and big box chains. Gen Y is inherently more comfortable using the tools of social media to communicate with their network of peers and friends because they have lived it their entire lives.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post is one of our position papers originally published in 2012.]

Social media has forever altered the way we communicate. Blogs, tweets, wikis, social networks, professional networks, online news wires, RSS technology, podcasts, videocasts, and other social media tools necessitate a revised communication strategy.

You can employ these social media tools for a myriad of reasons:

• Communicating with employees and empowering their collaboration.
• Engaging your customers and prospects to attain the results you desire.
• Building your reputation and brand, and shaping your perception in the marketplace.
• Influencing behavior, increasing awareness, and growing a community of supporters.

Social media is fragmented and personal, and yet is a more effective means of communicating. Information is garnered from many different sources; you are no longer in control of all the messages.

Understand the five C’s of social media. All social media share a common set of characteristics, the five C’s: conversation, contribution, collaboration, connection, and community. Through social media, people state and discuss their thoughts and opinions, their experiences and expectations, and their perspectives about your company, your employees, your products, and your services. How you engage in this dialogue fuels your social media community, toward ill will and goodwill.

Grow your communities and engage them. You must manage your social media communication to achieve the greatest benefit from your company’s efforts — essentially the collective efforts of your executives, management, and staff. Your target audiences are now your communities. You must engage them.

Set guidelines for interaction. Since messages can come from anyone in your company, setting guidelines is wise. Employees must be responsible and respectful, consider their obligations to the company (especially about disclosing confidential information and keeping the right of privacy), speak with authority only when appropriate, and maintain common decency in their language and word choice. Policies can attend to participation in enterprise and employee blogs, social media networks, and online communities, perhaps even setting time limits so that staff don’t get so involved that they shirk their daily responsibilities. All of these issues, and more, must be addressed in your social media guidelines.

Measure and monitor social media channels. You must listen. This is key to setting your strategy for participating and responding and planning. You listen by measuring and monitoring.

There are dozens of tools, sites, and companies that help you listen. Some are free, some cost; some are effective, some a waste; some complicated, some simple. With this myriad of choices, contemplative investigation and analysis are needed. For instance, while there are numerous methods to monitor Twitter, success is not so much about the method, but about the characteristics of what you monitor so that you achieve meaningful results.

Blogs, of course, come with built-in monitoring tools, accepting comments from anyone and allowing you to reply. But do you review comments before permitting them to be posted? Such are the strategic decisions that must be made.

Establish your communication goals. While it’s true that you no longer control the entire message, you can establish your communication goals and create strategies to send messages you want heard. Use your blog, your web site, and your responses to convey those messages. A well-written, polished news release is appropriate for established media channels. But trust in corporations has eroded. More human, seat-of-the-pants, open and honest messages are received better through social media channels.

Your return on investment. When properly implemented, social media enhances your company’s brand and reputation, and ultimately your bottom line. But first, you need guidelines and a plan with clearly identified goals and strategies for an enterprise-wide effort that delivers measurable, positive results.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post is one of our position papers originally published in 2012.]

Still, I found keeping up with social media to be difficult at first. Over time, I’ve developed a process that works for me (most days, at least). Before I get into details, let’s back up a bit to consider the larger perspective.

First, let’s talk rationale. Why engage at all? Two big reasons. One: social media is one of the primary uses of the Internet; it has exploded over the past few years. And two: your engagement can enrich your professional career.

Second, let’s talk strategy and answer a most relevant question in communication: Where are you going? Define the overriding goal for your social media presence, then make sure that everything conforms to this goal. For example, because I am an independent communication consultant, my goal is to be perceived as an enlightened, knowledgeable expert. I know this is a lofty goal, but it certainly gives me something to continually pursue. In that respect, George Bernard Shaw has motivated me when he wrote, “I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.”

Now that the foundation is set, let’s talk process. I spend at most 20 minutes each morning on social media. It’s time that I can more easily fit into my schedule if I do it first.

When I open my browser, I double-click a folder I created that bookmarks my pages on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and my Toward Humanity blog. This causes each bookmark to open in its own tab. You can set up your folder anyway you want (for instance, Europeans might want their Xing page to open). I could have set my browser to open these pages on start up, but I only want to open them once, and creating the folder enables me to control when they open. Once open, I spend some time on each one.

There’s so much to do on these social media sites; here’s a list of ways to engage on the three that I use most often: LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Choosing different ones every day allows you to diversify and actually is more fun.

LinkedIn. You can appreciably enhance your experience on LinkedIn by adding applications. Currently, I use Reading List, Events, Polls, WordPress, SlideShare, and Tweets. I will refer to these in the list below. Consider these as well as all the other LinkedIn applications. (While I don’t subscribe to it yet, I’m intrigued by Google Presentation.)

• Review your profile summary and consider editing it to ensure its accuracy.
• Write an update and share it on Twitter (the first 140 characters, at least).
• Review the People You May Know section and invite five to connect. Or search for people to invite as connections.
• Scroll through your All Updates feed and find something that inspires you. Then do something: Like it, leave a comment, send a message, share it; click a link in the entry and investigate it. If the entry was also tweeted: retweet it, favorite it, or reply to it. Or click the hashtag (if there is one) and check out those tweets. Doing just this can easily consume your 20 minute allocation.
• Write a recommendation for someone.
• Ask for a recommendation for one of the entries under Experience and Education in your profile. Consider working toward at least one recommendation for each entry.
• Join a group (or leave a group you are no longer interested in).
• Click a link under your LinkedIn Today headlines; read and comment on the post. Today’s interesting headline was: “What To Say on LinkedIn When You’ve Been Laid Off.”
• Review the people who have viewed your profile recently. Consider connecting with them.
• Follow a company or engage with one of the companies that you already follow.
• Add a book to your reading list; be sure to write a comment to accompany the book. Watch someone’s reading list in your network. Check out a connection’s reading list. Of course, if you have written a book, add it!
• Browse the events of your connections, comment on one, RSVP to one (as Attending or Interested). Today, in my profile, there is a free Webinar: “Better PDFs with FrameMaker-to-Acrobat Time Savers.” I’m interested!
• Add an event that you are planning to attend or present at in the future.
• Check out a presentation on SlideShare. Comment on it, recommend it, favorite it.
• Answer a question; ask a question.
• Start a discussion in one of your groups.
• Read and comment on a group discussion. (You can tell a lot about someone by what they write in their comments, so consider your words and tone.) Like the discussion. Follow the author if you find them particularly provocative. With enough activity in a group, you can become one of the group’s weekly top influencers.
• Peruse the promotions in a group; see if there are any that interest you. (Not all groups have a Promotions tab.) Again, comment on it, like it, follow the author. Or post your own promotions.

Twitter. Get the most out of your Twitter experience by carefully choosing the people you follow—unless, of course, you want an audience for your tweets, then you probably want to get as many followers as you can. Just make sure that you balance the number of people you follow with those that follow you.

And, consider this division of your tweets: one-third about your industry; one-third about tech comm and your company; one-third about you.

• Tweet something every day. You can get ideas by reading what others tweet. I get tweet fodder from various email lists I subscribe to plus STC’s News & Notes.
• Tweet about what you are reading (for example, an Intercom article or column), what you have learned, what you are doing so long as it is important to your followers (such as a conference you are attending, or a webinar or presentation you attended).
• Include an appropriate hashtag on your tweets if you want: #techcomm and #stcorg are good ones to use. Use #stc12 for tweets concerning the 2012 Summit in Chicago.
• Find and follow ten people whose tweets would fit your goals.
• Tweet an inspiring quote.
• Scan your Twitter Timeline and retweet something interesting.
• Reply to a tweet or send a direct message to its author.
• Create a list and add people to it. This makes it easier to follow the tweets from a certain group of people that you decide.
• Follow someone else’s list for a while and read their tweets.

Facebook. While I use LinkedIn and Twitter almost exclusively for business and professional endeavors, I use Facebook mainly for personal issues. So why include Facebook as part of my professional social media presence? It gives me an avenue for pursuing a personal part of my life. And besides, even with Facebook’s privacy settings, in reality, everything you post can be viewed some way or another. I “friend” a select group of people for my Facebook account, and certainly enjoy their repartee. Besides, Facebook enables me to have a bit of fun.

• Update your status. Think about doing it every day.
• Add a couple of new friends.
• Scroll through your News Feed and share items of interest. (I particularly enjoy this.)
• Add a new photo or two.
• Post on a friend’s page.
• Ask a question.
• Post an event.

Of course, there is a lot more you can do, but this list ought to keep you busy. Choose a few to do everyday. And reap the benefits of actively engaging in social media.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post originally appeared in my “Social Media Insights” column in the December 2011 issue of Intercom, the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication (STC).]

Valid questions, I thought. So I explained.

Project Management. A LinkedIn group would allow everyone to exchange information and to discuss issues openly. We could all see who else was involved in the project, and we could review everyone’s background. That would allow us not only to appreciate each other more, but also to call on the most appropriate person for a particular topic. We wouldn’t have to know each other’s email addresses; we could just communicate through LinkedIn. And everything discussed on the project would reside in one place where we all could review it and access it from wherever.

The group would be members only. People would have to request to join, and I would pass any names not associated with the project to the project manager before I allowed them to join. Ultimately, it would give us all a sense of purpose, ownership, and camaraderie.

I could see that the project manager was ruminating on that a bit, so I waited. What he said next brought a smile to my face.

“If we are going to use LinkedIn to better manage the project, what about using another social media tool for topics that demand more immediacy, like Twitter.”

“Actually, using Twitter is a great idea,” I said. “We could create a hash tag for the project and communicate using that. We’d be able to communicate quick messages to each other, and,” I added with a smile, “it would allow everyone else to watch an interchange and comment when they have something of value to offer. That increase of knowledge sharing can only enhance the final product.”

He mulled that over for a moment, then said, “Okay. Let’s do it.”

Most participants were reluctant at first, mainly because they had never worked on a project this way before, but they all eventually got onboard. Some are actually intrigued about how it will go and anticipate using social media for future projects. At the very least, using social media has brought a sense of togetherness to the project.

Managing projects is just one way that technical communicators can use social media. What it requires, of course, is that you set up a LinkedIn account and take the time to fully describe your professional self.

Engaging in the Greater Conversation. Another way to use social media to stay competitive is to contribute and learn from the greater conversation. This enables you to get outside your box and engage with other technical communicators from around the world. You can also watch trends evolve, which can help you ride the crest of future developments as they unfurl—a true measure of surfing the net. If you are not seeing what you need, start a discussion and see where it leads.

Begin by joining the following Facebook groups:

• Society for Technical Communication, https://www.facebook.com/STC.org
• Technical Communication, https://www.facebook.com/ontargetcommunications

Many of you have already joined the Society for Technical Communication’s LinkedIn group (one of the largest with over 2,500 members). Join your local STC chapter’s LinkedIn group as well as relevant SIG groups. Be sure to set your “digest email” setting to “daily digest email” for “delivery frequency” so that you’ll see activity every day. Join some of the other technical communication groups as well.

And while I find much of the Twitter stream meaningless, I recommend following the #stcorg hashtag. Search for hashtags once, then save them for future use. STC’s feed generally contains up-to-the-minute information about STC goings-on and other information relevant to technical communication. It is really a wealth of information.

Set a reasonable amount of time every day (I spend about fifteen minutes every morning) reading through the discussions that seem most pertinent to you and contribute when you can.

The social media conversation has truly changed—forever. To stay competitive, you must participate.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post originally appeared in my “Social Media Insights” column in the June 2011 issue of Intercom, the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication (STC).]

He was pointing to something floating in a nearby stream, swollen from the spring melt. However, by the time I made my way to the stream, whatever it was had floated on by, out of sight.

“Oh, you missed it,” Bill said. “It was really cool.”

We stood there for a brief moment, a mild look of chagrin crossed his face. “Well, tell me about it then,” I said. And he tried, but just couldn’t describe it in a way that did this mysterious object any justice.

“You just had to see it,” he concluded.

“Well, I suppose I could jog down the stream bank and catch up to it,” I said helpfully.

He gave me a wry smile. “It was cool,” he replied. “But it wasn’t that cool.”

And so it is with your Twitter stream. Tweets flow down your Twitter stream continuously, and many of them are cool. But unless you are there, on the bank so to speak, they just flow by unnoticed and unappreciated. Yes, you could “run down” your Twitter stream’s bank to peruse all those past tweets, but are they really worth it? Most likely, no.

Why am I telling you this? Because for the vast majority of us, Twitter is not a way to obtain meaningful information. Rather, it is a broadcast mechanism, a way for us to relay information to our followers, hope that they will respond, and then retweet our information so that we gain a larger audience. But what are the chances of that happening?

A recent study by Sysomos (http://sysomos.com/insidetwitter/engagement/) showed that few tweets are actually read or seen, and only about 1.5% of all tweets generate a conversation of at least three levels deep (a reply to the original tweet, a reply to that, and a follow-up reply). That’s about the same response rate as direct mail. For me, with 640 followers, I can expect 7 people to engage in a conversation over a tweet. And if you are expecting a reaction to a tweet, it’s going to come within the first few minutes. Retweets generally happen within the first hour of your original tweet as well. After that, it’s essentially gone, too far down the stream to chase after.

This also means, of course, that you respond to only 1.5% of the tweets you receive.

When I mentioned this at the Practical Conference on Communication (PCOC) recently, an audience member told me a Twitter story about David Pogue. Pogue, a technical communicator for the New York Times (and keynote speaker at the 2009 STC Summit in Atlanta), demonstrated the capabilities of Twitter during his keynote presentation at the TechKnowledge 2009 conference. He tweeted: “I need a cure for hiccups… RIGHT NOW! Help?” Almost immediately, he began receiving responses. In his column about the event, Pogue listed about 30 responses. Considering that David Pogue has 1.3 million followers, though, and given the 1.5% response rate, he should have received over 19,000 responses.

While Pogue marveled about the power of Twitter in his column, he also offered this sobering statement: “I realize that this demo might not be as effective if you have, say, 20 followers instead of hundreds.”

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not trying to whet your appetite for Twitter (pun intended). There certainly are circumstances where Twitter can be and is a powerful, useful communication method. Hashtags used at STC and other conferences come immediately to mind, as do constantly monitored customer service Twitter accounts of major service providers (such as JetBlue and Zappos) and the viral, grassroots power of retweeting a socially cataclysmic event (such as the Brazilian Police’s shantytown drug raid in Rio de Janeiro this past November). It also helps if you’re famous.

While I’m not famous, I use Twitter on a regular basis. It’s just that I’m realistic about my expectations.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post originally appeared in my “Social Media Insights” column in the February 2011 issue of Intercom, the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication (STC).]

The purpose of LinkedIn is, of course, linking to other professionals. It is these connections— and the extended contacts that it engenders— that form the robust network from which you all can benefit. To get the most out of LinkedIn, you must grow your connections.

Cultivating these connections takes time and consideration. It is, however, time well spent. Why? Your connections are a valuable resource that can assist you with professional dilemmas. But, as with all social media, this assistance is a two-way street; be prepared and open to help the contacts in your network as well.

Your LinkedIn network includes your first-degree connections (your direct connections) and your group connections, plus your second- and third-degree connections (people in your connection’s immediate network).

How Your LinkedIn Network Can Benefit You. You can add connections in many different ways. I’ll discuss a number of ways and present a rationale for each method. But first, let’s look at how you can benefit from your network. You can:

• Get introduced to someone in a connection’s network.
• Ask a connection a question to help solve a problem.
• Learn from a connection’s expertise and even get advice.
• Engage in a discussion about a topic of mutual interest.
• Recruit a connection to help you get a job or contract in their company. (Your connections can tell you who hires technical communicators, the names of key people on the front lines, of the types of jobs that are being offered, and where you stand after you’ve submitted a resume or project offer.)
• Request that your profile be forwarded to one of your connection’s contacts.
• Ask that others keep you in mind when they see projects of interest to you.

With benefits such as these, you can start to see the value of a large, robust network.

Add Connections. Start with LinkedIn by connecting with people you already know. These can be work colleagues, friends, classmates, other STC members, even neighbors. These are the people you know best, who can form the foundation of a strong network.

Next, delve a little deeper to link with people you know, but who are not in your immediate circle of friends and colleagues. People you know in this second tier generally share some of your same interests but also engage in other professional endeavors that can potentially help you.

Finally, you can push the networking limits to link with people with whom you could form a mutually beneficial relationship. In my network, these are the people at the outer reaches (and some beyond that) who share little of my closest interests, and yet have some relationship that can benefit me. For example, the most valuable of these arms-length connections work in companies I market to and are in a position to help me wend my way through the corporate hierarchy to that key hiring person.

Before you start adding connections, consider the suggestion from my previous column: fully complete your profile. LinkedIn uses this information to help you locate potential connections.

Join Groups. When you send an invitation to connect, LinkedIn asks how you know the person. You must then provide a company, school, email address, or LinkedIn group that somehow links you. What is accepted by LinkedIn, however, depends on how completely both of you have filled out your profiles. By joining groups, you expand your potential network.

As a reader of Intercom, here are some groups you might consider joining:

• Society for Technical Communication
• Documentation Managers
• The Content Wrangler Community
• Technical Writing Professionals
• Technical Writer of Writers

Consider joining other groups that interest you, too. For instance, I also belong to these groups: Learning, Education, and Training Professionals Group; Apple Macintosh; Professional Speakers and Seminar Leaders; and Linkin [sic] Hawai‘i. You can join up to 50 groups.

Search by Name. The quickest way to find someone is to type their name into the People search box on your LinkedIn home page. Depending on the name, this keyword search could get a few results, dozens, or even hundreds.

You can further refine your query through the Advanced People Search tab. Try entering the person’s first and last name and any of the number of other options. I find location (searching within a certain radius of a zip code) to be the greatest help.

Through the Add Connections link, you can search by email address, as long as the person uses that specific email in their LinkedIn profile. I’m wary of importing my contacts from my email application. Instead, I simply list email addresses of the people I want to invite because I’m more comfortable with this, and it allows me to control the email addresses in the search.

Find Second-Degree Contacts. The Add Connections link also allows you to search by colleagues, classmates, and my personal favorite, “people you may know.” The Colleagues tab lists potential connections by the companies listed in your profile; the Classmates tab provides contacts from the schools in your profile.

The People You May Know tab starts by listing your second-degree prospects (in other words, the first-degree connections of your first-degree connections), with the number of connections you share. I enjoy scrolling though this list, frequently finding many gems. What’s best about this method is that it is a bit happenstance.

Want something more organized? Then scan your first-degree’s connections. Simply click the number link next to a name when you list your connections. Frequently you’ll know a handful of the same people.

Also scan members of your groups. Every group lists its members for you: first by your first-degree connections, then by your second-degree connections, and finally by group members not in your direct network (up to 500 members). Listed on the left of the screen are the group’s newest members. I look for people I know, as well as people I share other connections with.

Send Invitations to Connect. Whenever I send an invitation, I emphasize the way I know that person, and I customize every invitation because a personal note goes a long way toward having your invitation accepted. LinkedIn gives you 300 characters for personal notes.

LinkedIn makes it easy to “get linked,” and yet I find it curious that they only allow you to connect with people you already know. As I alluded to earlier, my more distant connections travel in circles other than my own, and thus open doors that would otherwise be inaccessible to me. For me, this is important.

If you want to add these types of people to your network, you essentially have two choices. First, find a connection to a distant person through your established connections, and then ask those connections to introduce you. This is a circuitous route, one that LinkedIn recommends you use.

The second option is to introduce yourself directly to this distant person by sending them a well-written invitation explaining some common ground you share (such as you are both STC members or in the same LinkedIn group). Understand, though, that this route is a bit risky. Your invitation can be accepted (most likely) or it can be ignored (somewhat likely). After ignoring your invitation, that person can click the dreaded I Don’t Know (IDK) button, an event that LinkedIn notices and frowns upon. If you receive a few IDKs over a short period of time, LinkedIn scolds you in an email. Continued IDKs can result in your account being suspended, which only takes a humble apology to get reinstated. Clicking I Don’t Know takes two steps, and as such, rarely occurs. I have invited numerous people using this explanatory invitation method, and no one has IDKed me yet. Instead, four out of five accept and the rest simply ignore the invitation.

I think of these two choices this way: when I’m at a professional gathering and want to meet someone, I don’t ask someone to introduce me; I respectfully approach and introduce myself. Rarely am I shunned. Instead, the vast majority of the time, we have a rousing discussion. I walk away with a business card, and then, back in my office, invite that person to connect on LinkedIn. Through LinkedIn, this process is reversed, but the outcome remains the same— a robust network of professional colleagues.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post originally appeared in my “Social Media Insights” column in the September/October 2010 issue of Intercom, the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). That was over four years ago. While some of the specific LinkedIn buttons and menu items have changed since then, the overall concept discussed in this post is still worth considering.]

As it turns out, it’s all of these reasons and much more. I’m just enthralled with social media, as are many of you. In fact, I asked a number of colleagues to share their thoughts on social media. Some are from New England where I live, a few others scattered across the United States and Canada, and a couple from around the world; some older, some  younger. They had a lot to tell me.

So here, for your edification, enlightenment, and enjoyment, I present a treatise on social media and its role in communication.

Is Social Media Preferable to Face-to-Face Communication? Social media enables you to broadcast your messages to a larger audience, not just a single person, in an electronically social manner. You can:

• Easily start a dialogue or a group discussion.
• Use services like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
• Use blogs, wikis, and other collaboration tools.
• Post photos, audio files, and video files.

Social media allows you to interact with thousands of people who share similar interests regardless of time, distance, schedule, language, position, or experience—people you do not know and would never know. This is simply not possible with face-to-face communication.

Social media is especially well suited for one-to-many communication, something that is more difficult in face-to-face communication even when such a situation is scheduled ahead of time. Social media allows you to send your message to a select group of people, either a group that you invite or a public group that any interested party can join. You can also monitor the messages of these groups or other groups simply because you find them interesting. You can participate or just listen and learn. In this way, social media is a powerful method of communication.

“Online interactions offer the potential for asynchronous conversations that transcend both time and location,” notes Tom Johnson (www.idratherbewriting.com). Social media is asynchronous: when you are ready to send out your message, you do it. Those receiving your message can listen to it—or not—when it is convenient for them. Face-to-face, on the other hand, is synchronous: you can only send out your message when those receiving it are physically present.

Through social media, you focus more on the person—what they say, who they are—than on physical indicators of looks, dress, nationality, and other factors that tend to create judgments and perceptions. That’s a good thing. Unfortunately, you cannot focus on some extremely valid communication indicators such as body language, tone of voice, and inflections. That tends to mislead sometimes.

In addition, social media offers an archival, historical, searchable record, something that face-to-face communication cannot provide. For some, face-to-face interaction is more efficient; for others, social media is preferable. While I prefer face-to-face, real-life interactions, that is not always possible. In fact, it is rarely possible since many of the people I communicate with do not live anywhere near me. In fact, I have no idea where some of them live. With social media, that physicality is not necessary. You send out your message and people respond if and when they want.

Social media is immediate communication without borders. Social media is exponential and viral, allowing people to pass along messages to an ever-growing circle. Telephones and email didn’t replace face-to-face communication, so social media will not either. Social media isn’t necessarily preferable to face-to-face interactions, it’s just another method of communication (albeit one that alters the landscape considerably).

Some People Prefer Social Media. Social media allows you to keep in touch between those times when you can actually meet. And during that time, you can build a more solid relationship with strong and constant communication; then there isn’t so much catching up to do when you do meet. You can even build relationships with people you have never met, and probably never will. I meet a number of people every year at the STC annual conference. I then see many of them a year later at the next conference. In between, social media allows us to keep in touch.

You can carry on conversations using social media, just as you might while sitting around a table. Indeed, you can enrich a conversation with social media. There is no constraint of time and space—you can contribute at any time, from anywhere.

Some people use social media to communicate with colleagues who sit just down the hall at work. Why? It’s concise and succinct, and eliminates the need for small talk. (I, on the other hand, enjoy small talk, as it gives me the opportunity to widen the conversation to more engaging and revealing topics. Besides, I get to watch body language and facial expressions, gauge gestures, make eye contact, listen to intonations, and feel someone’s presence. All of this is missing in social media.)

Some people are simply better at communicating in writing, photographs, video, or audio. For them (introverts, I’m calling your name), communicating through this media feels effortless. As such, social media levels the playing field for introverts. “I would rather a sharp stick stuck in my eye than make small talk at a public event, but I can be very gregarious in social media,” says Rahel Bailie.

“There’s a certain ‘push’ to the technology,” states John Hedtke. You wouldn’t call someone at 11 in the evening, but you can certainly contact them through social media. And if they happen to be online, you can have a synchronous conversation.

Finally, people prefer social media because they can control the level of intimacy and reaction time. As Sherry Michaels (www.docntrain.com) notes, “I know people who text instead of calling because it allows the arm’s length to think through issues before responding.” You don’t need to be spontaneous; social media allows you the time to be thoughtful.

How People Act in Social Media Settings. Social media has opened a rich electronic communication experience, so people are much more open. “By integrating text, photos, and video to a targeted audience, I see a tendency to share more information in richer formats than would ordinarily be shared with that same social set,” opines Lori Fisher.

“‘Social weather’ is more difficult to discern in social media settings than it is in the real world,” says Anne Gentle (www.justwriteclick .com). For example, consider a five-star restaurant replete with white table cloths and a live harpist playing softly. With some rudimentary auditory and visual observations, you would know how to act. When you enter a forum or other social media setting, the process isn’t as obvious. You must observe for a while and read quite a bit before accurately interpreting the social weather for that particular forum. Then, you can participate at a level that everyone else expects.

Understanding that there is another person reading your message is sometimes forgotten. That happens when people are too bold or cutting with their messages, or simply not careful with how their message is crafted. Tone is inferred when none was intended. As a result, people are insulted and offended, rightly or not. Repair can oftentimes appear disingenuous.

Anonymity can also be a problem, with people hiding behind an alias rather than their true identity. Age, gender, and true intentions are easily masked. This contributes to a release of pent-up hostility and becomes exacerbated on blog commentaries and forums. Social media becomes a tricky medium under these highly emotive circumstances. Even something written in jest can easily be misinterpreted. While there is great opportunity in social media, there is also great danger in miscommunication.

As Char James-Tanny (www.helpstuff.com) points out, “The world is listening, even to your ‘private’ conversations.” Social media messages and conversations are permanent. Everything that you post is stored on a server somewhere on the planet and is easily retrieved through search engines.

Social media presents an incredible communication opportunity in which the world is your audience. You can meet all sorts of people from all walks of life who share a common interest. What you write can quickly traverse the planet. You expand your horizons and gain a global viewpoint.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post originally appeared in my “Social Media Insights” column in the March 2010 issue of Intercom, the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication (STC).]