Conversations

The effectiveness of the conversations happening in private

I've been joining many premium communities, and I can't say I'm innately a people person. However, I always loved when someone more extroverted than me took an interest and pulled me out of my shell. But, now that I'm older and a little more comfortable in my own skin, I've decided to force myself to create the possibility of opportunities with interesting people I find.

So now I reach out via direct message when there's something notable and maybe a question or comment that doesn't make sense to do publicly. I'm of the mind that's inclined to think everything should be public. Still, I have slowly given in and acknowledged why there's a difference between a private conversation and a public one.

In public, people have to wear multiple masks, one for each community or sub-culture they participate in. Some people can have very few, while others have many. Facebook's initial precept was that we should drop all our masks and become integrated as one universal identity. Still, I would guess the person you are in your hobby groups is different than the person you are at work. The flexibility and adaptability of the human persona are easily accessed and hardly noticed when we switch.

When you're putting your thoughts and ideas out there, after a while, you notice patterns of what your followers like and dislike, and it can start to affect how you post over time. However, in a direct message, they can drop most masks and filters and potentially be closer to their unified self, though your identity may fall in a community or two. They still have to respect those masks.

In my early days of social media and microblogging sites, I would hear, see and sense all these private conversations going on, and I thought it was just poor taste. Why build these private gate-kept networks where not everyone is invited. But, after many years of reflecting on this, I'm starting to see why this is important and how it's not necessarily exclusionary.

First, there are many immature or just dumb humans on Twitter, but people all look the same. You can spend a day arguing with someone half your age or IQ. You may not want to share an idea you're struggling with to the mobs online.

Then there are so many lurkers that never say anything. They may agree or even have something to add, but they don't feel good enough to reply. The art cycle of "being able to criticize your own actions is stronger than your ability to do "cycles with "being able to do better actions than your ability to critique." This leaves all learning efforts sometimes in the stage of imposter syndrome.

Then there are just people that are introverts like I used to be. Happy to be in the background, not to be bothered. They have all sorts of things to say and share but only to those that ask them directly.

So when I started joining these premium communities, I joined all the calls I was interested in. Too many calls eats up a lot of time, not enough calls, and you won't get the value you're paying for. From these more general, public-like calls, I'll find a couple cool projects people are working on that I want to hear more about. And I started to direct message people and have conversations.

Some direct messages are ignored or lead to a short conversation, but others bear lots of fruit. People like attention and interest. You share bits of your life and experience, and they respond by sharing bits of theirs. I've made a lot of friends and created a lot of business opportunities.

Every now and then, I get the confidence to direct message people on Twitter, and I've also made some good connections there.

I only covered some reasons why direct messages or more personal conversations work better than public ones. Still, I'm just surfacing the points that currently come to mind. There are a couple different topics here, and I'm only lightly touching on them. Again, I don't mean this to be a comprehensive list, but if you're looking for one, feel free to direct message me, and we'll talk. I'd love to understand these interactions and reasons better as I build communication tools and love to make myself a more effective communicator.