Last week, a friend of mine shared a news article from the Cleveland Scene. I couldn’t believe what I read. The article was about a woman named Kelly Blazek, who runs the Cleveland Job Bank and had taken to sending very rude emails to people in her database who sought help with job hunting. This seems quite strange for someone in charge of a job bank!
By the time I had read the article and shared my shame at being from the same region as this woman, the story was already spreading wildly. Later that day, Peter Shankman, author of Nice Companies Finish First, not surprisingly expressed disbelief that someone in a professional position and in a professional setting would act so irresponsibly. He asked on his Facebook page how a person gets to that point.
Social Media Power – It’s Like a Drug
Peter Shankman’s question got me thinking. What, indeed, would push a person in a position to help many people actually turn on those same people? I reread the email that got Blazek into so much trouble. The first paragraph struck me in particular:
[H]ow about starting with NOT presuming I would share my nearly 1,000 personally-known LinkedIn contacts with a TOTAL stranger? How bush league to pull that stunt. It’s what kids do – ask senior executives to link in to them, so they can mine contacts for job leads. That’s tacky, not to mention entitled – what in the world do I derive from accepting a stranger’s connection request? You earned a “I Don’t Know ______” from me today, for such an assumptive move. Please learn that a LinkedIn connection is the equivalent of a personal recommendation. If I haven’t heard of someone, met them, or worked with them, why would I ever vouch for them on LinkedIn?
It seemed odd to me that Blazek would so specifically mention how many LinkedIn contacts she had. Then an idea hit me. What if Blazek’s blasé attitude was the result of an unfortunate power trip caused by a seemingly large online following?
To be sure, Blazek would not be the only person who has made me wonder if a little online success is actually one of the worst things that can happen to a person. Over the short time that I’ve participated in online communications (relatively speaking) I have watched people undergo massive personality changes as they started to experience increasing amounts of success.
I am not the only person to note that social media success, or lack thereof, can deeply impact a person’s sense of well-being. In fact, an article recently appeared in the Huffington Post regarding how the perpetual rejections we accumulate on social media platforms (a lack of reciprocal connections, a lack of shares or retweets, etc) can truly make us feel miserable. By the same token, positive feedback, like rapidly accumulating followers or getting a lot of shares of your content can make you feel really good.
I liken this reality to that of a drug addict. While that may seem extreme, the dynamic is actually very much the same. Consider a woman like Kelly Blazek. She starts out as a successful professional, clearly, and takes that success to the online world. Her database, her LinkedIn connections, her Twitter followers, all begin to show signs that she is gaining traction and success. Just as it is said that a drug addict’s first high will always be the best, the first time you begin to see signs of success in social media will always be the best. For some people who can’t handle their every day lives or the rejection involved in social media, chasing that high, that feeling of success and power, can become all-consuming. Trying to get to the next level of success means amplifying your sense of importance in front of others, which can result in the exact kinds of emails that Ms. Blazek sent to desperate job seekers.
Social Media as a communication tool can be an amazing thing, but as this communication tool continues to age, we must also begin to take account for how this new kind of interaction affects us personally, emotionally, and psychologically. Could we end up with more cases like this, where a person in a position of power abuses that power and abuses people who are depending on them? It seems plausible.
Then again, perhaps we could be wrong. Maybe there is an entirely different explanation for Ms. Blazek’s inexplicable actions. What do you think?
Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/warmnfuzzy/323204936 via Creative Commons