I’ve always been leery of self-promotion. Whenever I have to talk about myself, I feel a little bit dirty.
Many people feel this way. It’s a part of our culture to discourage immodesty and applaud the humble.
Generally, this is a good thing. No one likes the jerk who talks himself up.
But there is a kind of self-promotion that shouldn’t receive this kind of reaction. If your self-promotion would be helpful to people, aren’t you doing them a disservice by being humble?
Sometimes this is obvious. When you’re pitching for a piece of business, you don’t want to half-describe your accomplishments and give an “aw shucks” when you receive a recommendation. Same thing for applying for a job, to an academic program, and so on.
But what about the regular folk you deal with? If you know about something great that has nothing to do with you, you’ll readily tell everyone you know. But when you’re involved with that something great, you feel like you have to be careful talking about it.
Social networking profiles are an awesome tool to get past this issue.
When you put together a profile, you’re supposed to be talking about yourself. You list your past work info, details about your college, even a list of your 10 favorite movies. Every piece of information on the web page is about you.
And people read that? Yes, and they love it.
Because the people in your network love to hear about you, and they love to know what’s going on in your life.
They just don’t want you to be the one to tell them.
Social networking profiles don’t trip those modesty emotion wires, because the whole point of the profile is to talk about yourself. They provide a conversational shortcut; people who want to know about you don’t have to bother to ask, they can just look it up.
Don’t occupy your face time with people telling them everything about you. Make it easy for them to find out for themselves.
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