Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives (17 page)

Let’s change what it means to be professional in the Internet age, and let’s admit what’s already obvious: the time when your personal identity was a secret and you needed to keep it separate from your work is pretty much over and done.

This is a good thing. By choosing to be myself, I can eliminate worries my colleagues may feel about opening up. And there’s no reason that any of this makes me a less effective manager or partner. If anything, being my authentic self online makes me a better leader at work.

Research has shown that when you refuse to share personal details on Facebook with your colleagues, it reduces your likeability in the office, when compared to people who do share. A white paper released by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School showed that because information exchange leads people to form stronger bonds with one another, people who shared personal information with their work colleagues and bosses, and seamlessly blended their offline and online lives, were thought of as better workers. People like to work with someone they can relate to.

Of course, there is a place for LinkedIn and other strictly professional social media sites. I am personally a huge fan of LinkedIn and find it to be an incredibly powerful platform. But until it can accurately capture the full picture of who I am, the 360-degree Randi, it will always be just a piece of my online identity rather than the soul and lifeblood of it.

So, going forward, what do we do? How do we make the most of this new terrain and avoid being embarrassed or overwhelmed?

Living an authentic identity online that includes our work lives is possible with a little common sense, a few risks, and a deft mastery of privacy controls. If social media is making mini celebrities of us all, we might as well be our own publicists.

First off, since we’re all going to be exposing more about ourselves online in our careers, we need to start being a bit more tolerant of what we learn about our colleagues and professional contacts. Employees are people too, and most (or at least
some
) of their lives are spent outside of the office. Pretending that people don’t have lives and interests outside of work is a ridiculous approach to take. As the distinction between public and private behavior changes, so should our expectations of one another.

Second, just as our personal lives increasingly blend into our professional lives, our professional lives will also blend into the personal. What happens when e-mails from the boss start flooding in at eleven
P.M.
?

According to a survey by Right Management, nearly two-thirds of workers say their bosses e-mail them over the weekend and expect a response. And in a survey of U.S. workers by Good Technology, more than 80 percent of people said they continue working after physically leaving the office. On average, people claimed to work an additional seven extra hours each week from home. That’s basically another full day of work. That same survey revealed that 68 percent of people check their work e-mail before eight in the morning, 57 percent check it on family outings, 38 percent routinely check at the dinner table, 40 percent do work e-mail after ten at night, and 50 percent find it difficult to put their phones down to go to bed, admitting to reading and responding to work e-mails long after climbing under the covers.

In this new always-connected scenario, we need to be sure that we respect one another’s tech–life balance, just as we would our own. I always make a point to tell my new hires, “You will get e-mails from me really late at night. I do not expect you to respond to them late at night. That’s just when I work best, so that’s when I attack my in-box.”

If your boss does expect you to respond to e-mails at any hour of the day or night, any day of the week, and it’s negatively affecting your life, you may need to have a conversation that sets some rules and boundaries, based on a sense of mutual respect of everyone’s tech–life balance.

Given that your work colleagues will also be your friends on social media, there could come a time when you are still waiting on a response from them relating to a work matter and see that they have had time to post something on Instagram or make a move in Words with Friends. At these times, it’s important to keep in mind that everyone has a life outside of work that they’re entitled to. Just because someone is doing something online, it doesn’t mean they’re always working. If we want to achieve tech–life balance ourselves, we have to grant it to our colleagues and friends alike. If you don’t get a response to your e-mails or texts right away, cut the other person some slack.

This also applies in the world of our friends. With texting, in particular, it
feels
as if we should get a response instantaneously. But demanding an instant reply to your messages is like tapping someone on the shoulder and interrupting a conversation they’re having with someone else. Unless we want our friends to be always alone, we shouldn’t maintain an impossibly high standard for replies.

Give people time to get back to you, and don’t feel pressure to get back to someone immediately if you’re paying attention to someone else. We need a kind of social detente in the arms race to reply faster and faster. The smartphone makes it theoretically possible to be connected to everyone instantaneously, but the human mind can’t handle that kind of demand.

There’s a software company called FullContact in Denver, Colorado, which has started giving their employees a $7,500 bonus if they don’t take their phones with them when they go on vacation. The reason? When you briefly disconnect from being always online and restore some of the tech–life balance in your life, you return to work refreshed, invigorated, and more productive.

Studies have borne this out. According to a 2006 internal study of their employees, Ernst & Young found that the year-end performance ratings of their employees improved by 8 percent for every additional ten hours of vacation the employee took.

If all else fails, you can always move to Brazil. In November 2012, Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff approved legislation that said checking your smartphone for work e-mail after hours qualifies you for overtime pay.

When you maintain a single authentic identity online, as well as a proper tech–life balance in the workplace, and grant the same to your coworkers, you not only become more well-regarded and trustworthy at work, you also become more productive.

Plus, who doesn’t like baby photos of kids on vacation? There’s nothing more adorable than watching little Asher try to walk in the sand. I think I have a picture of it, somewhere.

Building an Online Brand

Posting personal photos or videos online is only half the story. The Internet lets you do so much more. You can advance your career and career prospects by harnessing the concept of an authentic online identity and establish for yourself an online “brand.”

You can’t just wake up one day and declare yourself an expert, though you might not realize that from the thousands of people who refer to themselves as things like “influencers,” “thought leaders,” “social media legends,” and “idea accelerants.” It takes time, energy, and results to build credibility. There are lots of talented people out there who truly
are
experts, but most of the time you’ll find those people don’t need to declare themselves as such.

Building a personal brand doesn’t have to be a negative thing or turn other people off. You can harness the tremendous broadcasting power of social media to tweet, post, and blog about new ideas and developments related to your field of interest and make yourself known as a smart, interesting, and ambitious person.

Access is all-encompassing. If your boss can see your baby photos, he or she can also see your blog posts. So, why not make those posts count for something?

This is a capability that we’ve never had before in our careers. The sophisticated search tools and social networks, the massive increase in Internet users over the past decade, and the ease of building and engaging with communities of real people online make it easy to find an audience. If you can’t blog, tweet. If you can’t tweet, then retweet. Build a name for yourself. Some of the Internet’s most successful blogs were built up from an audience of zero. Everything from the Daily Kos to the Drudge Report started out as a one-person operation. If even one of your posts goes viral, you could secure a permanent readership.

And even if you work hard on a blog and still can’t attract traffic, if there’s a link to that blog on your Facebook page, your employer is going to read it, and that may be all the audience that matters.

Perhaps at one time, photocopying and handing your bosses and fellow employees a self-produced newsletter about the goings-on in your industry would have been seen as a little too ambitious, and maybe a little weird. Now leaving those same items on your blog for your workmates to discover will communicate the same message without the awkwardness. You don’t need to schedule a thirty-minute one-on-one with your boss to brag about your achievements. You can just go and achieve.

I’m always impressed by initiative and ambition. I do worry, however, about how my company could be negatively affected by something an employee of mine does online. This is why I believe it’s critical for employers to empower their employees to use social media freely, but to also train them how to use it wisely.

Most companies wouldn’t dream of having an executive go on TV or do a press interview without hours and hours of media training and prepared talking points. Well then, in a world of smartphones, where every single person in your company is speaking to a public audience, why wouldn’t you train your employees as well? Why would you just send them out into the world as potential mouthpieces for your company without arming them with some skills and a few key things to say?

Empower your employees to be good ambassadors for your firm. Instead of just having one corporate identity, remember that your employees are part of that too, and they can help strengthen and augment it online, plus humanize and develop it into a living, breathing brand.

Social media skills are going to become necessary in the new job marketplace. Employers are going to want to hire people who know how to use social media, rather than those who ignore it or are bad at it or do not appreciate its power. Every employee who is online is now a kind of PR representative for his or her firm. A smart employer will use this talent to its advantage, rather than just see it as a liability and try to silence it.

The same holds true for whole companies. Back when Facebook was getting started, companies would usually hire a college student to run their Facebook pages and manage their social media presence, if they bothered to have one. It was an afterthought to their real marketing efforts.

Nowadays, senior marketing teams have dedicated, full-time professionals managing companies’ offline social media. There’s even a new kind of job that didn’t exist a few years ago: online community manager, which is an Internet-savvy marketing and customer-service position. These professionals are responsible for helping the Old Spice guy respond to people on YouTube, contacting customers who have posted bad Yelp reviews, and calming angry Twitter storms, to find out what went wrong and make everything all better.

Now that everyone has a megaphone, people have started shouting. The only way for companies to respond is to go out and listen—and to know how to start a conversation.

What to Do Now That Your Voice Matters

I learned a great lesson about the newly democratized power of words online when I first began to step out onto the national stage.

It was the fall of 2008, a pivotal moment for American politics and social media. Facebook had just passed the point of being thought of as a thing college kids used to Poke one another and was emerging as the vital platform for political discussion, analysis, and candidate-liking that it is today. As Facebook’s marketing lead, I was in charge of coordinating our response to the Republican and Democratic national conventions. We were careful to treat both conventions equally, as well as both candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama. As a place for people to share their lives, Facebook had to be a neutral, nonpartisan platform. My job was to make sure both parties could easily call on Facebook support for their online campaigns and convention coverage. So, in the last week of August, I duly made the trek with my team to Denver, for the Democrats, and then a week later to St. Paul, Minnesota, for the Republicans.

Although we resolved from the beginning to treat both events equally, my experiences in Denver and St. Paul were night and day. At the Democratic National Convention, social media folks were in high demand. Everyone wanted to meet with us, we were asked to do a lot of press, and we were invited to every hot party. “How should we be thinking about social media?” “How can we use Facebook to connect to voters and donors?” In every room I walked into, I was peppered with questions by hungry young activists and community organizers. And I stood less than ten feet from Kanye West at his private performance at the Google–Vanity Fair party. The atmosphere was hopeful, optimistic, curious.

In contrast, the Republican convention was somber from the start. The party was meeting just days after Hurricane Gustav had devastated the Gulf Coast states, forcing the main conference proceedings to be pushed back by a day. A lot of the party’s grassroots members were deeply ambivalent about McCain too. But there was also just a general apathy toward Facebook, social media, and technology. People didn’t want to hear about what we had to offer and weren’t interested in making use of the tools and resources at their disposal. I was only able to secure a few meetings with middle-ranking party officials. I ended up spending the majority of my time e-mailing from my hotel room in a futile effort to get people to meet with us, before finally giving up and taking my colleagues Adam and Simon to the Mall of America.

A few weeks later, after the election was over, I sat on a panel organized by a venture-capital friend of mine named Dave McClure, discussing the interplay between technology and politics. When it was time for the audience Q&A, I was asked whether I saw any big differences between the way the RNC and the DNC thought about Facebook and reacted to social media.