By Sree Sreenivasan
DNAinfo Contributing Editor
As I talk to journalists about how they can use social media, one of the most common criticisms I hear is that they don't want to keep telling folks about everything they are doing all day.
To me that attitude represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how to use social media properly. Somehow, people believe that if they are on Facebook or Twitter, they will be forced to share the details of their lives.
The fact is, no one is forcing folks to share anything they don't want to.
But share — and overshare — they do. Take a look at two sites (there are others, I'm sure) that show just how much oversharing is happening these days: WhatTheFacebook.com and Oversharers.com. Both catalog the awkward, the funny and the downright yucky (to use a technical term) details of what people are posting online.
The example in the screengrab above, about one of those annoying Facebook quizzes that someone took, only to have close family members see the results, highlight how what used to be private journeys around the web are becoming increasingly public. I am sure if you were "in the top 5% of all lovers," you wouldn't necessarily want everyone else to know (a former or current lover could post: "No, you're not").
In the old days, i.e., a few years ago, it wasn't Facebook quizzes or apps such as Farmville or Mafia Wars that people were wasting their time on, but games such as Solitaire and Minesweeper. The difference is that your boss and your relatives didn't get an alert every time you played Solitaire.
With social media, they can.
It isn't these social-media services, however, that are making people give out too much information. It's that people aren't paying enough attention to what they are doing. I think oversharing is contagious. As folks see their friends and contacts talking about their lives in ridiculous detail, they might be more inclined to do so as well.
And sometimes, even when you don't want to share too much, you are expected to. Here are two examples from my own experience.
I spent part of 2009 working with a terrific group of folks to help create DNAinfo and never once tweeted or Facebooked about any part of the process. Not as we finalized the concept, not during the hiring, not during the practice runs. When the sent went live, I simply tweeted the URL and Twitter handle (@DNAinfo - you are following, right?). Many people I know were surprised that I could quiet about keep such a major project. After all, many of us, including me, share much more mundane stuff. But we had decided that there was little value in talking publicly about the project until it was ready.
A few weeks ago, as I was about to start a workshop on social media, one of the attendees noticed I was limping. I explained that I'd hurt my back playing racquetball.
"But you didn't say anything on Facebook about it," came the incredulous response. My attitude about social media is that I'd only talk about my back problem in public if that would somehow fix the problem or somehow be helpful to other people.
The problem of oversharing isn't new. Back in 2008, Webster's gave "overshare" the title of "Word of the Year" and described it thusly: Typically a verb, but also used as a noun, it is the name given to "too much information," whether willingly offered or inadvertently revealed. It is the word for both the tedious minutiae on personal Web sites and blogs, and the accidental slips of the tongue in public.
While they were right to call attention to it back then, the problem of oversharing has only accelerated since then, thanks to social media and the millions of tweets and postings we see every day.
Journalists, of course, can benefit from others' oversharing. Sources, and would-be sources, are talking too much these days online, and if we use social media to listen (and not just broadcast our own thoughts, ideas and work) we can learn a lot from those loose lips.
To help me think through what and when to post online, I came up with a list of attributes that I think all tweets and Facebook posts should have. They should be: helpful; useful; informative; relevant; practical; actionable; timely; generous; brief; entertaining; fun; occasionally funny. The more attributes you hit, the more likely you are to find long-term success on social media. I certainly don't manage to make every one of my tweets fit all these criteria, but I try as hard as I can to hit as many as possible.
When journalists say to me that they are having trouble getting followers on social media, I put them through a simple exercise. Take your last 50 Facebook postings or tweets and cut-n-paste them into a Word document or Google Doc. Then print out that list and put tally marks next each post for each of those 10+ attributes listed above. You will then come up with an overall score that can be as high as 500 (50 posts times 10+ attributes), but many will find themselves with way less than 100 or 150. Incidentally, if you approach 500, let me know — I'll have you teach my social media workshops.
What do you think about oversharing? Let me know in the comments or via Twitter @sreenet. A must-read item about this topic is Steven Berlin Johnson's essay, "In Praise of Oversharing."
Every week, DNAinfo contributing editor Sree Sreenivasan, a Columbia Journalism School professor, shares his observations about the changing media landscape.
