Angela Crocker

Write. Teach. Organize.

Figure Out Your 3P

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Digital Cleanse Day 14:

Figure Out Your 3P

Your 3P is my solution to one of the most common social media objections.  People worry about sharing too much online and the resulting loss of privacy. I understand the concern.

If you’re using social media in your private life, nothing obligates you to share on a social network.  What stays offline, stays private.  It’s your choice to share with  family and friends or to interact with others who share your hobby.  What you share is your choice. However, if you are using social networks for business purposes, you’re going to have to share something. I recommend you divide yourself into three parts, your 3P.  These parts are professional, personal and private.

Professional

Your professional part is fully public. You share expertise, experience, anecdotes, details about your job and information about any products or services you work with. Sharing about your professional life can help your brand with sales and marketing. It can also position you for your next job or entrepreneurial venture. What you share publicly helps establish credibility, cultivate a network and demonstrate authority.

Personal

To be successful online in business, you also need to share another part of yourself that I call the personal part, the next third of your 3P. Your personal part might include a love of hockey, a passion for rescue dogs and commitment to tennis.  This is the part that humanizes you. It makes you a complete person not just a selling machine. It allows you to establish rapport and garner trust.

You share to find mutual interests as a lead into in-depth conversations. Your willingness to share more than just sales messages and marketing banter make you a whole person. This is really important. Who you are and how you related to people has to be more than shop talk. You can’t be all about business all the time.

Through your online posts, comments and interactions you must blend your professional part with your personal part. Remember this is SOCIAL networking, even if it’s conducted digitally, you are still interacting with real people. The personal things you share can make it more enjoyable to do business together.

Private

The private part of yourself stays offline. You decide to keep details of your hemorrhoids, money troubles and off-color humor private. Politics and religion are often kept private, too, just like at a dinner party with the extended family. If you’re not sure what to keep private, ask yourself two questions:

  • What do you want to hide from your Mom?
  • What would embarrass you if it appeared on the front page of a newspaper?

The answers to those two questions make up your private life. If you want to keep it private, keep it offline. You choose. If you don’t share it, it’s not online. You are in control. (Well, almost in control. Remember that others can quote your contentious comments and share photos or videos of other embarrassing moments.)

Divide and Blend

How to express the divide and the blend between the professional, personal and private parts of your life, is entirely up to you. Every person’s answer will be unique. As an example, here’s a snapshot of my 3P breakdown:

  • Professional: communicator, writer, instructional designer, teacher, speaker
  • Personal: parent, home owner, Star Wars fan, doodles with fine art supplies
  • Private: asthmatic, struggled with postpartum depression
    [Although, I have now made these private parts into personal parts in the interests of illustrating the 3P.]

Angela Crocker - 3P - professional, personal, private

Share only what you’re comfortable sharing. Don’t create an artificial self online. I’d rather you shared a minimal amount and were true to yourself. Faking it will not get you anywhere online or in life. Authenticity is the nobler path.

More on the 30 day #digitalcleanse tomorrow. Hope to see you then!

(If you missed yesterday’s installment, take a couple extra minutes to explore Schedule Digital Tasks and Digital Fun. For links to the complete Digital Cleanse series, click here.)

Schedule Digital Tasks and Digital Fun

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Digital Cleanse Day 13:

Schedule Digital Tasks and Digital Fun

Take time to schedule your digital activities. You get to decide when to use technology. In turn, this affirms when you’re NOT going to use technology. You don’t have to use it all the time. Frankly, a 24/7 digital life would be terrible for your physical and mental well-being and it can disrupt your sleep. You are in charge of your digital life. You also get to choose when you’re going to be offline, away from your computer, ignoring your smartphone.

I recommend you separate your digital tasks separately from digital fun. Digital tasks are things you do for work or your own projects. These might include writing blog posts, checking social media feeds, creating illustrations or editing copy.  Digital fun includes all your leisure activities. Movie night, browsing Instagram, video games, Instagram and other social media outlets are all fun digital activities. Of course, for a movie reviewer watching movies is work not play. That’s OK. You decide how to define the activities in your digital life.

Put your digital time in your calendar. Here’s an example from my own calendar. Events in blue are digital tasks related to my professional life. Orange events are digital snippets from my personal calendar.

A digital calendar excerpt showing digital tasks separately from digital fun.

You’ll notice my digital fun happens in early mornings, evenings and weekends. From Monday to Friday, I schedule my work related digital tasks, for the most part. What you can’t see in this example is that I have flexibility to move my digital appointments around other events. For example, if I’m a parent volunteer parent for a school field trip on Monday morning, I’ll reschedule my blog writing time for the afternoon.

There’s power in writing something down. It helps you set boundaries for how long and when you are going to do a particular activity. It also helps you prioritize that activity so it gets done. If you schedule a conflict, you decide if you can cancel the digital activity or reschedule it. Formalizing your digital appointments can also help you stick to it, especially if one or more digital tasks is a swallow the frog moment for you.

More on the 30 day #digitalcleanse tomorrow. Hope to see you then!

(If you missed yesterday’s installment, take a couple extra minutes to explore Give Up On Toxic People. For links to the complete Digital Cleanse series, click here.)

 

Give Up On Toxic People

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Digital Cleanse Day 12:

Give Up On Toxic People

Toxic people hide in plain sight. Online and in person, they’ll undermine your confidence, ruin your concentration and detract from your life’s work. Toxic people can also make you cry, raise your blood pressure and cultivate frustration. Don’t let toxic people surround you.

WITS - Walk Away, Ignore, Tell Someone, Seek Help
Courtesy of http://www.witsprogram.ca

School children are taught to use their WITS to deal with peer conflict.  This simple four-step program develops conflict resolution skills around a common vocabulary.

  • Walk Away
  • Ignore
  • Talk it Out
  • Seek Help

Adults can follow that same advice when dealing with toxic people online. It may seem simplistic but sometimes the simple solutions are best.

To walk away in a virtual environment you can unfriend and unfollow.  Depending on the level of toxicity on Facebook, you can unfollow, make a friend an acquaintance, curate a “toxic friends” list, unfriend or even block a toxic person.  Similarly, on Twitter and other tools you can use lists, unfollow or block.

If you have to sift through hundreds or thousands of names, unfriending and unfollowing can be a time consuming activity. To make the task more manageable, you could unfriend/unfollow next time you see that toxic person in your feed. Or, you could set aside some blocks of time to systematically work through your lists from A-Z. If you do this, work in small batches.  In addition, there are tools like Manage Flitter that allow you to set criteria to unfollow a bulk batch of Twitter accounts. For example, you might unfollow any account with the generic egg profile photo or any account that’s been inactive for a year or more.

To ignore a toxic person online takes a certain amount of discipline on your part. When they turn up in your newsfeed skim right past whatever they have to say. Not always easy to do but worthwhile if you’re better off without the toxic person.

It’s possible you have to interact with the toxic person. You could try the talk it out strategy.  An in-person conversation would be ideal so that you can read body language and hear tone. If a face-to-face meeting isn’t practical, a phone call is the next best alternative.  Your last resort should be written feedback. Too often sensitive issues can be misconstrued in writing and you end up aggravating the problem rather than resolving it. Also, remember that the toxic person may not realize their actions are offensive or negative. Proceed as diplomatically as you can.

Finally, if all else fails, you have the option to seek help. Most social networks have functionality to report abusive users.  Twitter Support offers a helpful how-to as does Facebook Help Center You may also be able to reach out to an administrator for assistance.

I hope you have zero toxic people in your life.  If you are dealing with them, know you are not alone! It’s a frustrating, maddening thing to experience but you can take step to give up on toxic people.

More on the 30 day #digitalcleanse tomorrow. Hope to see you then!

(If you missed yesterday’s installment, take a couple extra minutes to explore Get Over FOMO and Embrace JOMO. For links to the complete Digital Cleanse series, click here.)