David Lee King: face2face with Social Media and Social Graces

The fact that Facebook has more than 1 billion registered users doesn’t in any way suggest that there are more than 1 billion skilled users of social media tools worldwide. So a book like David Lee King’s face2face: Using Facebook, Twitter, and Other Social Media Tools to Create Great Customer Connections has the potential to upgrade the social skills—and social graces—of those still struggling to improve their online social interactions at the business level David targets…and at a personal level, too.

David’s ability to communicate engagingly and well—a skill that attracts many of us to his presentations, his blogging, and to the work he does as Digital Services Director at the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library—serves readers well in face2face as he dives right in with on-target advice. He starts by reminding us that we need to be human rather than standoffish and mechanical on the Web. We need to listen; respond professionally and as informally as we can to nurture the levels of interaction that accompany successful engagement via social media tools; and think strategically so that our use of videos, blog articles, and other online postings consistently lead us to productive and positive results.

His honesty also helps us understand both the positive and the negative approaches into which so many of us fall in our use of social media. In telling the story of his online interactions with people at what he calls “the Snarky PR Agency”—omitting the company’s name because “they ended up being very professional”—he describes the agency’s initial spam that raised his ire; openly describes his own snarky online response (a tweet about how the agency “mass spammed me hoping I’d review a kids book. Obviously NEVER read my blog, so why would I read your book?”); and after leading us through the series of exchanges they had, notes that there was a positive result: “We ended up having a nice chat about small businesses discovering and using social media. The PR agency turned the conversation around from a negative one to a positive one” (pp. 130-136).

None of this, however, would mean much if face2face didn’t work from a wonderful foundation: helping us understand how to create and nurture community connections that interweave onsite and online interactions rather than viewing them as unrelated activities. He reminds us that Tweetups—face to face meetings of individuals who originally met via Twitter—and numerous other onsite encounters mean that what starts in Twitter (or Facebook or Google+ or any other online setting) doesn’t need to stay in that setting; those of us who attend conferences and other professional gatherings are abundantly aware of how online interactions seamlessly extend into those face-to-face encounters just as relationships that begin face-to-face in conferences, workshops, and other settings become richer, deeper, and unbelievably sustainable through online extensions of those conversations.

Which brings us to the playful foundation of David’s book—the understated yet implicit redefinition of our concepts of what the term face to face means in our onsite-online world. As we read through David’s sections on “business casual,” “where and how to begin,” “measuring success,” and “applying what we’ve learned,” we can’t help but see that effective use of the tools under discussion make us realize we can just as easily be face to face online as we can in the original sense of the term—when we’re onsite with someone.

My own experiences with onsite and online learners convince me that we’re even struggling to have our language catch up with the evolving nature of our interactions in something as simple as defining the first time we meet someone.” Those who remain inexperienced or uncomfortable with online interactions still don’t think of themselves as having “met” someone until they have their first onsite face-to-face encounter. Yet the immediacy of interactions via Skype, Google+ Hangouts, Blackboard Collaborate learning sessions that are well facilitated, and numerous other tools more and more frequently find that the quality and depth of interactions in those settings help us understand that the definition of meeting someone is shifting subtly and inexorably as more and more of us become comfortable with the idea that we’re living and thriving in an onsite-online world. And works like face2face can only help to make that process smoother for anyone who takes the time to read and absorb all that it offers.