Digital Silence

Two Eyes One Keyboard

It is fascinating to read the blogosphere and the Twitter stream. Both are crammed with endless opinions and insight, useless links and life changing information. As the cliché goes, we all have an opinion and that doesn’t mean we’re right, we just have one. Many have been vocal about our collective impatience with taking chances. We push companies to get deeper into the social web, embrace digital business intelligence and try stuff but we are often quick to scream #fail the moment there is a misstep.

It is imperative to have a plan, a policy and some guidelines when you are navigating the online world but these don’t have to be encyclopedias filled with legalize no one understands. It is critical to remind stakeholders that if they reference the company on any of their profiles, they represent the company. But it doesn't have to be a restrictive environment that stifles creative thought.

Not a Digital Issue

No matter what spaces you interact, business decorum shouldn't be loosened but you can still be personable. Find your voice, find your company's voice but don't be irresponsible. There are countless examples where people have shot from the hip in a moment of emotion and that causes damage.

Any one of us two billion people online has a choice to share our voice. But what if we chose to find our silence for a while?

Listening is Frowned Upon

Some will claim that’s lurking and we should let others know we’re in the channel. With more than 600 million Twitter search inquiries and half a billion signing onto Facebook daily along the multitude of monitoring and analytics options, we can’t be tweeting all the time. We need to find time to invest in the immense power of data mining now at our keyboards.

And if we are researching, reading, listening, watching, consuming, does that mean we aren’t interacting with each other? If we want others to pay more attention to what we want to share, we need to find equal time to take in what others are sharing.

Some say the two sides to a conversation are talking and waiting to talk. Do you spend time in digital silence?

Kneale Mann

image credit: photobucket