Dennis D. McDonald (ddmcd@ddmcd.com) consults from Alexandria Virginia. His services include writing & research, proposal development, and project management.

McDonald's Rules of Personal Connection Behavior

By Dennis D. McDonald

Members of the Social Media Collective are blogging about Twitter. To see what I mean, go to the Collective’s front page and search for “twitter” or use this Social Media Collective Search Engine I set up using Google’s custom search service. (I’ve already blogged about the topic here.)

This Twitter discussion got me to thinking about the decisions we make about connecting with others during the day. Choices are involved. On my own, for example, I’ve cut back on email newsletters and I’ve become very choosy about accepting more invitations to join new social networks where I will have to create another profile, maintain another password, etc. etc. Some have called this social network fatigue.

I’ve come up with some “rules” about personal connection behavior to begin understanding this.  I don’t have any data to back this up, I’m just tossing these rules out to get a discussion going (use the comment feature below if you would like to add your own thoughts):

McDonald’s Rules of Personal Connection Behavior

  1. There are only 24 hours in a day.
  2. Some of these hours are devoted to work and some to play.
  3. During these hours we make decisions about connecting with others and about allowing others to connect with us.
  4. How we make these connections are driven both by (a) our willingness to connect with others and by (b) the identities of the people we are willing to connect with.

 

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