Network With Twitter

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By Jessica, December 12, 2008 10:06 pm

This post started off as a comment on The Progression of My Identity titled What is Twitter good for?

Networking has traditionally been limited to face to face interactions with a person. Your network may have extended to people that you didn’t personally know, such as your roommate’s dad, but someone you knew personally knew them. Today networking has been made easier with social tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter. There has been a lot of talk about Twitter lately, so I am going to focus on that.

Every post I read about Twitter leaves me wondering why no one has pointed out the benefits Twitter plays in networking. Twitter allows you to grow, utilize, and maintain your network.

Twitter allows you to expand your network. Through people in your network whom you follow you can be exposed to some pretty interesting people and information. Guy Kawasaki and Dan Schawbel both share enough links to fill up hours of free time. My blog is syndicated through Brazen Careerist which has a wealth of knowledge from some really amazing bloggers, many of whom are on Twitter. By connecting on Twitter we are able to start up conversations with each other, offer advice, and interesting links. It allows for a relationship to be formed rather then just an acquaintanceship.

Twitter allows you to get more out of your network. Most bloggers stick with one topic but post a variety of information on Twitter. For example, Gary Vaynerchuk. I read his blog and I follow him on Twitter where he links to Wine Library TV, Live UStream times, and other interesting links. There are people on Twitter who I will probably never met in person (such as Barack Obama, Darren Rowse, John Byrne, Martin Sargent) but for example, by following John Byrne I can seen up to the minute updates on some of Business Week’s most interesting and viewed articles and his pod-casts which I would have never known about if not for him Twittering about them.

Twitter helps you maintain your network. When you only physically see someone once or twice a year it can be hard to stay up to date with what is going on in their life, but if you are following them on Twitter you can find out that they moved to another country before receiving your returned holiday card. It also allows you to more easily communicate with them. It only takes two minutes to pick up the phone and call someone, but it only takes 140 characters to say your thinking about them via Twitter. Twitter can be a bit impressionable like all electronic communication so it isn’t always appropriate to Twitter a message, but it can make maintaining relationships easier.

If you are unsure about Twitter then give it a try. If you don’t like it you can always cancel your account.

I think that Twitter also offers one more control of what information about them is being shown. From my Twitter page one can go to my website, where they could go to my Brazen Careerist profile or my personal web site, but they can’t access the same amount of information about me as they could through Facebook or Myspace. I know that Facebook and Myspace have privacy settings, but you have to block either your entire profile or sections of what you have put up instead of being able to just let certain content through.

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The Entitlement Myth

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By Jessica, December 3, 2008 10:04 pm

One of the words most commonly associated with Gen Y is the word entitlement. The word entitlement is defined by Merriam-Webster as “belief that one is deserving of or entitled to certain privileges”. Take a minute and think about how many times you’ve heard the word entitlement used in describing Gen Y. Now how many of those times was entitlement used in a positive sense? Not many, right?

The internet is full of articles claiming bashing Gen Y’s sense of entitlement; just try Googleing it. But is having a sense of entitlement really such a bad thing?

In Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers: The Story of Success he writes about a study by Annette Lareau in which she and her team followed a group of 3rd graders from various backgrounds in order to determine where social intelligence comes from. Lareau notes that the children from middle class families exert a sort of entitlement that is lacking form working class and poorer families. Lareau describes this sense of entitlement as a positive trait which assisted children in further developing social intelligence (page 105)

They acted as though they had a right to pursue their own individual preferences and to actively manage interactions in institutional settings. They appeared comfortable in those settings; they were open to sharing information and asking for attention…It was common practice among middle-class children to shift interactions to suit their preferences…Even in fourth grade middle class children appeared to be acting on their own behalf to gain advantages. They made special requests of teachers and doctors to adjust procedures to accommodate their desires.

Gladwell expands upon Lareau’s findings adding

By contrast, the working-class and poor children were characterized by “an emerging sense of distance, distrust, and constraint.” They didn’t know how to get their way or how to “customize” –using Lareau’s wonderful term– whatever environment they were in for their best purposes.

The sense of entitlement found in middle-class children offered them a sort of competitive advantage in comparison to their peers who were not raised in the same light. Gladwell ends the section with saying:

When we talk about the advantages of class, Lareau argues this is in large part what we mean. Alex Williams is better off than Katie Brindle because he’s wealthier and because he goes to a better school, but also because -and perhaps this is even more critical-the sense of entitlement that he has been taught is an attitude perfectly suited to succeeding in the modern world

“The sense of entitlement that he has been taught is an attitude perfectly suited to succeeding in the modern world”. While a sense of entitlement is seen as a negative trait which has resulted from years of gold stars and coodling, could it really be a positive trait which Gen Y has evolved into having?

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