The Value of Community Participation for Web-workers

There is a perception of the web-worker as a very lonely person who spends all their time in the home office, lonely, with nobody to talk to, no social life, no family outside the office door.

Of all the web-workers I know, this picture applies to none of them. They have fine social lives and spend time with their family and friends once they’ve clocked off for the day. But one thing that rings true is that web-working can be a lonely experience, since you don’t have the office environment that allows you to interact with others throughout the day. Sure, you interact with people on a professional level — emails back and forth about a project with your client, for instance — but the multiple levels of interaction that occur in a typical workplace aren’t present.

That is, unless you make them present.

This was, by the way, the post I set out to write the other day, which inadvertently turned into “How to Stop Wasting Time at Twitter Without Giving it Up“ — if I start drifting off-topic, just yell at me, okay?

Instant Messaging is a Poor Choice

All forms of instant messaging are obtrusive and hold very few possibilities for networking. They’re meant to emulate real-time conversation in text form, so they’re inherently distracting and if you’re trying to get serious work done it’s impossible to do so with these windows bouncing, flashing and making popping sounds at you.

Furthermore, the contact-based model seriously limits the power of instant messaging for networking. You can’t meet new people using any of these messengers without being introduced by a third-party.

All that said, instant messaging is a useful and powerful tool for the web-worker. They’re perfect for scheduled meetings between yourself and a client or employer. But when it comes to keeping some social interaction in your day and meeting new people… steer clear, unless you want to become perpetually distracted and never get any work done.

Unobtrusive Communication is Important

The reason I love Twitter so much is that it’s fast-paced communication, emulating conversation but nowhere close to real-time. It doesn’t bounce at you, glare at you or make noises at you unless you download a third-party application and forget to turn the notifications off. In that case:

If you use a third-party application for Twitter, turn the notifications and sound off.

Third-party apps are great. They prevent the need for endless page-refreshing, which can be tempting and takes a bit more time than letting a desktop app grab the latest tweets. If you turn the notifications off, it won’t distract you so much and the only obstacle to productivity left is your self-discipline. You can check the app when you have a quick break, or need to step back from your work for thirty seconds to get some perspective.

Leaving notifications on, and allowing an unobtrusive form of communication to become obtrusive, is where many users fall down and end up becoming totally unproductive.

Before you think I’m writing another post about Twitter, let me move on - I’m just covering all the options. The next option is also a good one as far as unobtrusive communication goes: blog commenting. You can interact with others through discussion in the comments section of a site without it stalking you around the web and demanding you come back whenever something new is posted.

Even if you use Subscribe to Comments, the notifications are sent to email — not popping and bouncing on your desktop — allowing you to go back when you’re ready.

There are plenty of other ways to participate in the online community — for instance, there are forums for just about every topic. Unfortunately, forums don’t provide access to as wide of a community as Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk and other related services, or the sheer simplicity of commenting on a blog.

Open Communication is Important

The other problem with instant messaging we encountered was that it requires an existing relationship in order to work. That makes it great if you need to hunker down and hold a meeting with a client or colleague, but less useful if you want to socialize while you work and, of course, meet a few new folks, which is the most enjoyable part of all social media.

The nature of many new web services is such that you can go from having no contacts to plenty of friends within hours or days, depending on how you do things. And, of course, on how genuine you are — this is probably where I should stop to say that unless you’re genuine about this stuff, don’t bother. Nobody wants to be ‘marketed at’ any more than they wish to be ‘talked at’.

This openness is the case with all the services that I mentioned earlier — and furthermore, this is the nature of the web. It’s what makes it such a cool thing and the reason it has grown to become a huge part of our lives, whether you’re a web-worker who spends all day at the computer or just someone who likes to check Facebook before bed. It’s about connectedness.

Becoming a part of the online community isn’t just great because you can ease the feelings of web-worker loneliness and have some laughs, it’s great because it leads to long-lasting relationships and even new opportunities as far as that work-from-home career goes.

Does it make sense at all to work on the web and remain insular? I think not.

Why Bother?

We’ve talked about easing loneliness, and we’ve talked about recreation, and even networking (to put a rather stiff name on what is simply building relationships - traditional marketers like to do this).

And there is one thing that ties it all together I wanted to mention before we wrap this up. There are two women who you’ll find comments from on pretty much every post of this blog, and if you go explore a bit elsewhere, you’ll be hard-pressed to find somewhere they haven’t left comments. They’re some of the warmest people in the blogosphere — I’m talking about Vered and Marelisa, of course.

The other week I offered some advice on getting your copyright notice in your WordPress footer to update itself automatically — one less thing to worry about on New Year’s — and Marelisa tried it out. In the process, something broke and her footer disappeared.

Well, it was my advice that got her in this situation to begin with, so it was probably my job to help her fix it anyway — and help her fix it I did. But had she not built a relationship with me by participating in the community, I may not have had the time to help her out. You can’t provide support for everyone, but in this case the only thing required was her friendship.

That’s why you should bother putting some time and effort into the community — whichever one you happen to be a part of — because the benefits aren’t just social, they’re not just professional; they span every part of your life as an individual who works online.

So here’s to people like Marelisa and Vered (and a host of others, like James, Dustin, Shilpan and Alik) who put in the effort to participate in the community and build relationships — look to them to see how it is really done.

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