Temperaments and Social Media With Co-Author Tori Deaux
Social Media is a current hot topic just about everywhere. People are scrambling to “join the conversations” on the various services, but also finding themselves frustrated (see Tori’s article “Why I suck at social media…” )
One aspect of that widespread frustration can be explained through personality temperaments (for an overview, check out this interactive graphic from MindTweaks, or this text overview here on Elemental Truths)
Each temperament and combination of has a different approach to technology, different needs when it comes to socialization.
Extroverts are happy to seek out new friends and contacts, while introverts are more hesitant, preferring to just observe, or to let others come to them.Some temperaments are quick to embrace change, while others prefer more familiar, consistent, and proven technologies. Privacy is also a personality driven issue, as some temperaments need to feel safe and protected, in order to participate in a social environment, while others would be happy with their own posse of cyber paparazzi. Also important is the level of control people have over their use of the service, including visibility, profiles, spam, and so on. We all use the services for different reasons, too - many of them related to temperaments: find customers, build a network of new friends, stay in touch with existing friends, share and inspire creativity, get and provide answers to questions, or just be generally social with strangers.
The frustration appears because most of the latest, greatest social technologies only address the needs of *some* of the temperament types, and make others distinctly uncomfortable, or even anxious. So being successful at social media means knowing which services are best suited to our individual personality, and how to participate comfortably even on services that aren’t well suited to our specific temperaments - otherwise, we run the risk of losing touch with our existing social circles made up of a variety of personalities, and winding up only with friends and contacts in a limited range of temperament - which is not a good thing. The best and most effective social groups (for any purpose) are made up of a variety of personality types.
It’s worth noting that while the older forms of social media (message boards, chat rooms, and instant messaging services) didn’t provide the networking or portability benefits of Web2.0 applications like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, they did better provide a comfortable space for *all* of the personality types. Hopefully the new services will resolve the conflicts in time - meanwhile, we’ll have to find our own solutions.
So over the next week Reg and I will be exploring the topic of temperament and social media, considering the pros and cons of each service for each personality, from Supine to Melancholy, as well as offering advice on how the various personalities can best use the services for our advantage. We’ll be posting a series of interlinked articles addressing the issue on MindTweaks and Elemental Truths, but you’ll also be able to come back here, and find a listing of all of the links.
We’re hoping the result will be fun, useful, creative, productive, and reduce frustration levels. And *that* should cover just about all of the personality types!
This is a checklist I (Reg) came up with that will give you a fair overview of what YOUR TEMPERAMENT might be.
Other articles in this series.
- Temperaments and Social Media - ET
- Interactive Temperament Graphic -MT
- Social Media and The 5 Temperaments - MT
- In Social Media Measurable Doesn’t Equal Important - ET
- Supines and Social Media - ET
- Surviving Social Media:The Supine Struggle - MT
- Sanguines and Social Media - ET
- The Social Butterfly Meets Social Technology: The Challenges for Sanguines - MT
- Melancholies and Social Media - ET
- In Search of Intimacy: The Melancholy and Social Media - MT
- Phlegmatics and Social Media - ET
- Qietly Participatory: The Phlegmatic and Social Media - MT
- Cholerics and Social Media - ET
- Control and Conquer!: The Choleric and Social Media - MT
Open Source social media platforms we won’t address in depth (in no particular order). By the way, open source just means that you can read the programming code, change the code, modify the code and redistribute the code, usually free of charge.
- spree
- iSocial
- Mahara
- Yogurt
- VMukti
- The PeopleAggregator
- Appleseed
- Mugshot Project
- GetBoo
- Akarru
- Scuttle
- SemanticScuttle
- AROUNDMe
- Clonesumating
- BeWelcome Rox
- ICEcore
- Memephage
- InteractOLE
- Elgg
- CommunityNews
- OpenPNE
- MonkeyChow
- NewsCloud
- Feed Me Links
- WorldSpace
- Social Networking POC
- Zoints
- earth-life-simulation
- PHPizabi
- OzcodeOzcode
- TallStreet
- Jamss
- Dolphin
- Ospo
- AstroSPACES
- FlightFeather
- SNOSS
- OpenSocialNetwork
- S3B
- Facelift
July 6th, 2008 at 7:16 am
Reg & Tori: Will you guys compare these social media apps?
Being a software guy, I’m pretty interested to know the kind of apps that will be interesting to most of the people. Can’t wait to read further posts on this. It might a good idea to have the links to the online tests to find the temperaments.
Keep it coming.
July 6th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Joseph,
I do a survey of the platforms that would be most “friendly” to each temperament type rather than a comparison of applications. Tori is more technologically aware than I am. She may address those issues.
In relation to the test. The only fully developed one I use is for counselors and wouldn’t be of much value to someone not in the field. I’m still working on a an over view test for the general public. I have built a pretty fair one but, it is paper and pencil and I don’t have the skill to make it electronic. I’m sure Torie does but there is still the question of the delivery model.
Wow. I got wordy didn’t I?
Thanks for the great comment.
Reg
July 6th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
Hi Joseph,
I’m going to do my best to compare some of the features of the applications, based on gut instinct and feedback from others. It’d still need confirming with more specific market tests, but I think we may come up with some interesting ideas… please keep an eye on the comments sections, too! There may be some good stuff that turns up there.