Will Facebook make me or break me?
Posted May 6th, 2008 | No Comments
Until Monday 5th May I was one of the 14 people left in the world without a Facebook account! Actually, that’s not strictly true, I did have an account, I’d joined a couple of years ago when it became ‘the next big thing’ but it had been inactive since the first day.
Facebook rebel
I hadn’t even added any friends. I didn’t have a need for it at the time, I was using MySpace and it was perfectly fine. Being a web designer I actually preferred the fact that MySpace allow proper customisation unlike Facebook. Late 2006 and the whole of 2007 was also a very busy time for me with house moves, career changes and new additions to my family, the last thing I needed was another distraction.
Attention span of a…
I’ve always been easily distracted, offline and particularly online. Facebook reminded me of the hours and nights I would spend on BBS systems in the 90s and IRC in the early 2000s. Hours, days, weeks of my life that I will never get back! There was no way I was going to get sucked into Facebook.
It was all going so well….
So why on May Day Bank Holiday (UK public holiday) did I give in and reactivate the account? It wasn’t due to pressure, my ‘real life’ friends had long given up on getting me involved. It was because of ‘personal branding’.
Impersonal
I’ve been designing websites for my company Jigsaw Internet Solutions for a while. It’s been going well in terms of business but as I chose to trade under a business name and quite a corporate one at that I felt I couldn’t really be myself. I blog for the companies clients and other website owners and I don’t even use my name. It just feels so impersonal.
And then I see people trading under their own name and wonder if I made the right decision. They are their own brand. Displaying their picture and their real name builds trust.
Good Business strategy
I wanted a piece of this personal branding. Research suggests that it’s actually a good business strategy! Maybe I will make more money as myself than a company! That’s what this blog is all about and why I’ve made much more of an effort on social networks. I’ve reactivated my Last.FM and Twitter accounts and there is no social network bigger than Facebook at the moment so I couldn’t ignore it any longer.
So far so good?
On Monday I had a To-Do list of 17 items. The only one that could be crossed off by the end of day was number 1. ‘Reactivate Facebook account’. The remainder of Monday was spent adding friends who I had forgotten existed (no offense ;) ) and then talking to them. This continued until 3am.
When I got up at 8am the next day feeling like crap, with a To-Do list longer than my arm the first thing I do is log onto Facebook. 1998 all over again.
Will Facebook make me or break me?
Who knows if i’ve made the right decision? Only time will tell. I’m still hopeful it will help me on my quest for personal branding but I’m going to have to learn some serious self restraint. No wonder companies all over the world are banning Facebook at work. I’m going to have to do the same. It’s just hard when your work is your home and you are the only employee.
Technorati Tags: facebook, real-life
