Confessions of a Digital Ghost

It occurred to me recently that I may have a personality problem online.

The real-life version of me long ago overcame the awkward anti-social tendencies of my youth. I go to meetings at work. I talk at parties. I even spent some years on the public speaking circuit.

But if someone was acquainted only with my online presence, what then? Would I come off as having social skills more commonly associated with Asperger syndrome?

That’s the question that came to mind as I was routinely erasing an inbox full of emails. Cleansing emails from my overstuffed inbox has become a morning ritual. They are legion, and these are just the emails that worm their way through my finely calibrated spam filter.

Nor am I talking about impersonal junk mail, like the latest deal from
1–800-FLOWERS. These are from photographer’s reps that want to work with me. Film production companies talking up the new directors on their rosters. Music houses. Software companies. Tweets. Status updates from friends on Facebook. Finding a way to manage it all is out of the question, there are so many. So I tend to delete everything.

It’s such a simple procedure, just a finger on the delete key. But somehow that’s not the same as tossing a direct mail postcard into the recycle bin. Or letting the phone ring at dinnertime. Email isn’t so anonymous. So I wondered. What exactly are the social obligations that come with having one’s toes dipped in the vast digital ocean?

Fortunately, I work in an office with some of the smartest digital and social people on the planet. Expertise is a cubical away.

“Email is different from social.” That’s the first piece of advice I get from Annie Riley, Digital Strategy Director at the Spong Public Relations Firm. She has plenty of experience on both sides of the email marketing equation.

“Organizations who send mass emails, they all know we mostly don’t read them,” she told me. “They just keep sending, in the spirit of optimizing abysmal open and click rates. It’s an inelegant, for the most part, exercise in futility.”

I clicked on one anyway. Just to see what happens.

EMAILER: I’m going to be in NYC this week so I’d love to find a time to have coffee or a drink and talk about our new CRM platform. Would Thursday or Friday afternoon work?

ME: I’m in Minneapolis, not NYC.

EMAILER: Then let’s hop on a call Friday. Would 9:00 AM work?

ME: I’m a creative guy. I wouldn’t know what to do with a CRM platform.

EMAILER: Thanks for the insight! Could you potentially point me in the right direction?

And so on, and on. What happens when you click on an email is a lot like what happens when you admit a stray puppy into your home. It’ll take more time than you can imagine.

Lesson learned. Guilt absolved, even if I never catch up with my unsolicited emails. On to the more thorny question of social media.

“Ghosting” is the word Felicia Johnson uses to describe my uneven presence on the social channels. “People go dark for a while, just go into a hole, then reemerge. They’ve ghosted.”

Felicia is a Senior Engagement Specialist at Spong. She talks about social media like someone born into a language. My side of the conversation plays more like the tourist who’s trying to pick it up late in life. Her use of the word ghosted it doesn’t sound like a compliment.

Cavan Reagan Reichmann, Partner and Social Engagement Chair at Spong, agrees. “In our business especially you can create a lot of embarrassment if you don’t know how to handle these things.”

The social space as Cavan describes it feels like a place filled with opportunity rather than obligation. “Take Tweets,” he tells me. “It makes people feel especially good if you’re up on their Tweets because it’s so temporary. It’s hard work to stay on top of it. Snapchat, even more so. If I’ve seen yours, it’s a sign that I’m staying on top of your life.”

I’m intrigued by the possibilities of so human an approach to things digital. Yet as with everything in human nature, it gets complicated. Annie points out that unlike email, in the social space there’s no guarantee of reaching anyone unless they opt in to your posts. She describes the process as “Simple, but mentally hefty. It’s a new cultural experience.” For instance, you don’t want to be the first one to “like” someone’s posts every time. That sends a message in itself. But if you try and play it cool for too long, it ends up forgotten in the ever-updating newsfeed. “This is a whole power dance equivalent to 15th century hand fan language.”

And then there’s LinkedIn, where I seem to have amassed a huge network of connections almost by accident. I’m not looking for a new job, so what do I do with LinkedIn? I asked Ruth Glover, who’s an author, speaker, trainer and President of Career Consultations.

“LinkedIn has been my friend for years and years, far more when I was a recruiter and outplacement counselor.” Then she proceeds to give me a tutorial on how she’s currently using LinkedIn to help with the book she’s writing. Tracking down sources. Connecting with publishers. Joining writers’ groups. It appears that LinkedIn is its own land of opportunity, if one makes the effort. And in my case, I’m told some effort is needed. “Your profile is woeful.”

So OK, I have work to do. It’s ironic. I’ve created campaigns for my clients that went off the charts in social media, but never seem to find time to put my own digital house in order. The shoemaker’s children, as my Grandmother used to say, go shoeless.

But I’m also beginning to see a few bright rays of sunshine. “On the topic of obligation,” Annie Riley tells me, “I think for the most part we invent it. The platforms are set up to create this anxiety for you. It’s entirely imagined. In fact, if you post too much, you will be viewed as a narcissist.”

And then, this: “But you’d better keep Tweeting if you want to keep up your Klout score.”

Wait, what? Klout Score?

Klout is a sort of Richter Scale that measures how seismic your presence is on the digital landscape. At Spong it’s used all the time to check out how influential someone might be as a spokesperson for the brands we represent. I never thought about applying it to myself. We look up my Klout Score, and I’m relieved to see it expressed in positive numbers.

My Klout Score is determined by an algorithm. So, it seems, is most everything else that happens in the social media. The machines running the system come up so often in this impromptu research project of mine that I’m reminded of the moment in A Charlie Brown Christmas when Linus turns to Charlie Brown and says, “Christmas is run by some big East Coast syndicate, you know.”

Keep your profile fresh and your posts humming and the algorithms reward you with prominence. The numbers game is never far from the minds of those who understand social media best.

So maybe it’s appropriate that in the end my quest for a way to keep up with the ever-expanding social universe comes down to a little cold calculus. Consider the number 150. It’s known as Dunbar’s Number, after the work of anthropologist Robin Dunbar. According to his research 150 is the maximum number of casual friends that you can keep up with and not exhaust your social capital. He did his calculations before the advent of the Internet, and there is loads of debate over how that exact number applies to the online space. But the basic concept of is a good one. I need to work within my limits.

“It’d make sense to have fewer social media to stay on top of,” Cavan tells me. “Figure out what you’re getting the most gratification from, and do them right. It’s better to cut them off if you don’t use them.” Since it’s part of my job to check emerging new media, I tend to sign up for these things almost as fast as they proliferate. Some pruning sounds like sage wisdom.

My colleague Felicia puts it this way. “Like our clients, every person needs their own content strategy. If you spread yourself too thin, it’s painfully obvious.”

There is the answer to my question. The social media don’t come attached to some unspoken obligation. But neither are they like an old pair of boat shoes that you can throw in a closet come fall and dig them out again next spring.

The vast potential of the online universe to connect us in new and astonishing ways comes only when we stay on top of it, and that requires focus. In my case it means looking at each one of the proliferating, morphing social channels that I’ve gotten myself connected to, and asking the question humanity has always asked when pondering its place in the universe. Why am I here?