From a very interesting take on how Facebook creates multi-faceted personna’s.
“A friend’s like on an anti-gay-rights page. A comment making fun of your musical tastes. A vegetarian friend linking to an article about the evils of eating meat. A complaint about how Apple (or Facebook?) can’t innovate anymore. A picture of some friends enjoying a get-together that you weren’t invited to. The incessant posting of cat, dog, and kid pictures. We weren’t exactly meant to see these, but they weren’t exactly hidden from us, either. One man’s meat is indeed another man’s poison: these and a variety of other un-code-switched signals in our news feeds cumulatively etch away at our morales.”
Code switching – or ‘bein’ real with people like you’ means many things to all of us. We code switch all the time… going from group to group always with an eye toward not offending – fitting in – being ‘real’ to the group we are in at the time.
“The alternative to broadcasting your unfiltered multifaceted self is presenting a more dilute version, one that’s tempered or, dare I say, code switched, to appease all of your Facebook friends. This version doesn’t stand for anything, likes everything, shares conservatively, and presents a diabetes-inducing timeline of studio-quality photos. While this can be a more successful strategy on Facebook, it can leave both the broadcaster and the receivers feeling let down because everyone, especially those who know the broadcaster well in real life, can see the big, fat elephant—reality—in the corner.”
These temporary switches from one personna to another is becoming more and more difficult. And it will continue to make us kinda nuts…
I prefer a more authentic approach. And it may make me less “popular” than the cool kids who code switch all the time. I am not a code switcher and you see what you get.
Me. Authentic and flawed. Deal with it. Or don’t.
Code switching will eventually lead to marginalizing those who are not part of that ‘code’ you are exhibiting… and in the end, it will gain you nothing.
As an aside on business:
Facebook is a challenge that may need to be looked at more closely by those of us who use it for more than pure marketing. In fact, as a marketing tool, Facebook is beginning to totally suck. I predict a large defection from their ad space in the next 12 months.
As they continue to tighten the reach, there will be a point of no return where the funnel is too small and the advertisers will leave.
