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Just read a fascinating article on the link between time, money, and happiness.
The article cites some psychological research which looks at how time, money, and happiness are related. You can read the whole article, of course, but if you don’t have time (!) let me summarize the main points. People experience different degrees of happiness based on how they perceive time and money.
When people are thinking about time, they tended to socialize more and work less. When they had been primed with the concept of money, they tended to work more and socialize less. The implications of the study suggest that people who think about time tend to be happier and more connected than those who think only about money.
When people think about time, and how they spend their time, they tend to behave in more connected ways. Being more connected and having more connections tends to lead to a greater sense of happiness.
As people become increasingly concerned about the return on investment of social media, it may be wise to focus on both time and money. Of course, as a business, your main focus may need to be on money, at least most of the time. But if you are using social media to build your personal network and connections, you may feel happier and more contented if you focus not just on the money you make from social media, but, also, on the connections and contacts you build and grow.
This has important implications for how satisfied you feel with your social media use.
What I’ve seen in my business is that personal connections are worth cultivating because they, very often, lead to new opportunities and new business.
If you want to be happier, focus on time and how deep the connections are with your social media networks. I believe this focus on time at the beginning will bring you more money in the end.
Filed under Psychology by
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I’m not in the running for Ms. Manners’ job, or anything, but I did want to write a quick post on the etiquette of Facebook chat. Now, for those of you who use Facebook often (and there are more than 450 million people doing that each day), you know that Facebook offers a chat function, which lets you send instant, quick messages to whomever you happen to be chatting with.
I think this is a fun way to have conversations with your friends, and can take the place of instant messenger, text messages, and other similar modes, provided that your friends are on Facebook and have chat enabled as well.
I recently disabled chat on my Facebook account- and here’s why:
It’s mainly because people have poor chat etiquette. On multiple occasions over the past month, each time I’ve logged in, I’ve been bombarded with chat messages from random men. This is the downside of having a reasonably open social network. I tend to accept most friendship requests on Facebook, figuring I’ll worry about the 5,000 friend limit when I get there. That being said, I am starting to use my fan page more, and may shift to just using my personal profile for direct friends and people I’ve met.
But I digress.
Let’s talk about the reasons I disabled Facebook chat. As I said, it was because I was getting annoyed by the constant, intrusive instant messages from random men which all seemed intent on asking me for a date or something even less polite. I’m not sure why there was this uprush of attention, all of a sudden- I didn’t suddenly change my profile pictures, get incredibly better looking, or anything. But it was starting to happen so much that it was irritating me. It was annoying to login and get these rash of messages constantly popping up on my screen. It would make a “quick check” of Facebook take much longer than it needed to.
So here’s the thing. If you are using Facebook chat, I would submit that basic rules of communication etiquette still apply. If you are attempting to chat with someone you don’t know, I suggest you think twice about doing that. But, if you do reach out, why not start by saying hello and checking in with that person about whether or not it’s a good time to chat? If you truly want to make some kind of connection with that person, tell him or her why you wanted to connect, and give them the option of connecting with you in some other way.
Just like if you were to call someone on the phone, you might make sure that it was a good time to connect; I suggest that Facebook chat etiquette should follow these same rules. Similarly, if you are involved in a Facebook chat and need to end it, give the person some warning that you’ll need to sign off shortly.
While all this may sound obvious, I have observed people throwing common sense and good manners out the window as they take part in social media.
And that makes you look like a complete jerk.
Filed under Best Practices by
