One thing that has been great about this move to being authentic on-line is that it has lowered the walls of some large organizations. We now know that living, breathing human beings occupy positions of employment within these organizations. We don’t have to guess because we can detect from their Twitter feeds whether they’re human or bots.
This is progress because there seems to have been an idea in the past that large organizations were run by nameless, faceless, soulless robots.
We are now able to connect, on-line socially, with people behind the machines of big business but that has also uncovered an ugly polarity between two distinct subsets who reside both inside and outside of large organizations. These subsets can be labeled: cool people and uncool people.
Cool people and uncool people have existed since the beginning of time, but it wasn’t until Oprah opened a Twitter account that we were able to see the disparity of these two distinct groups so clearly on the internets.
How To Connect the Dots
Since we’ve now defined the two subsets of individuals and the locations they can exist, the idea should be to somehow figure out how to connect cool people with one another. In my mind there are two distinct ways to accomplish this task.
be yourself inside the company If you’re cool and you work for a large organization, then don’t check your personality at the security turnstyles. Be who you are at all times. This way you should be able to easily identify other cool people at work and start a cool kids lunch club, or what have you. Seriously though, finding people of like mind, inside company walls, is a big deal in order to have any kind of influence on organizational culture and being yourself at work will help you attract others like you.
Joe Gerstandt is writing some great stuff on this topic that you should check out.
be yourself outside the company You don’t have to be a squeaky wheel to get people’s attention on-line. And if you’re cool, you should be able to figure out a way to connect with people inside organizations you care about easy enough. As a consumer nation, there are definitely some rules of engagement that we should probably lay out for ourselves sooner rather than later. In the meantime, don’t get caught up ranting about people who suck. Find the cool people inside company walls and befriend them.
What Do You Think?
Are there more than two distinct groups of people inside and outside large organizations on-line? Are you one of the cool or uncool kinds, and how do you interact with the people who are both like you and dislike you? What are your tips for finding other cool people inside and outside of your organization? Please let me know in the comments below.
There are many Chris Hall's in this world. This one blogs and tweets under the code name: hallicious.
