Can Social Media Give You an Overinflated Ego?
Lately, I have been spending some time thinking about how people react to social media fame. What happens when you reach 1,000 Twitter followers? 5,000? 20,000? 100,000? How do you react when your blog is suddenly getting significant traffic and people are hanging on your every word? Some people can take it in stride without letting it go to their heads while other people end up with enormous overinflated egos.
Compare this to the reaction to fame that professional athletes, actors, musicians and celebrity CEOs face. Some people completely change (new house, new cars, new friends, new spouse, etc.) while others continue to live in their old neighborhood with existing friends, and remain grounded despite their fame. While social media fame isn’t the same, I see similar reactions.
I was reading a Harvard Business Review blog post by John Baldoni where he was talking about egos in sports and applying the same ideas to business. He mentioned this quote: “It’s okay if other people think you’re God, but you’re in trouble if you start believing it.” This really resonated with what I’ve been seeing in the social media industry.
For some people, it may already be too late. Those enormous egos may have already taken over their bodies like in the episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” where alien entities take over the bodies of Troi, Data and O’Brien and control their every move. Are they too far gone, or can we still save them by exorcising that enormous ego and replacing it with a normal-sized one?
For those you you who can still be saved, here are a few tips for keeping that ego in check (these are Baldoni’s recommendations, modified to apply to social media):
- Remember that your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn friends or fans are not your real friends (take Danah Boyd’s experience on stage at Web 2.0 Expo as an example of when your “friends” can become a mob). Real friends are the people that stick with you during tough times.
- Don’t take yourself too seriously. When people butter you up with praise and tell you how awesome you are, politely thank them, but don’t believe it.
- Everyone has shortcomings — I certainly have my share. Whenever your ego starts to take over, think about something that you need to improve and remember that you are an ordinary human being who makes mistakes and has weaknesses.
What are your thoughts on how social media fame gives people inflated egos?
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I think that for some people, the amount of followers does give them an overinflated ego. For me, it doesn’t. I know that there usually the people with only 20 followers and probably get more interaction than someone who has 10,000.
I feel like this is extremely common, especially in the search marketing and blogging arena.
The way I try to think of it is this, if I said to my friends or anyone in the general public really, “I have 15,000 followers on Twitter/subscribers to my blog/facebook friends/etc”…what would that mean? Absolutely nothing. I would probably get laughed at.
Twitter and Facebook followers don’t really mean anything to me. I have significantly more followers and friends online that still don’t visit or read any of my websites…not really sure why they’re there honestly…they don’t comment on anythign I write either…
I suspect that the inflated ego is required before one fully partakes of social media – especially if it’s twitter we’re talking about.
While it may not be so obviously phrased as thinking “Bugger me, I’m wonderful”, the implicit assertion in spreading one’s views so widely is the belief that these views are worth spreading – whether the subject under discussion is politics or poetry or one’s bowel movements.
Good post and dead on..here’s the reality as well and we’ll use twitter as an example. If you have 5000 followers, half of those are spam and only half of that half are actually utilizing twitter to any degree. take that half and multiply it times 1% and you get the amount of people that are actually reading your tweets in real time. the bottom line is there is nothing really there for your ego to stand on, regardless of what you claim to be in your bio…the cult of personality in social media is greatly over exaggerated..
You are telling it like it is, Marc.
Ego can be a major weakness. It’s possible to lead someone around or manipulate them through an overinflated ego.
What’s Twitter? ;-)
It’s a valid point, and I’ve seen way too many folks with an increased sense of importance for it to be just coincidence. Mind you, I do believe that most people bring their offline persona to the online space, so it makes you wonder what a lot of them are like away from their social spaces…
Great post. Follower lists are not leading indicators of anything. I’ve been quoted often saying, “I deserve every porn star, PR flack, and motivational life coach I have.” Really, people. In 2010, I hope we all begin to get over ourselves.
Uhhhhh, I’m the guy with 96k followers.
I have a bit of an ego, okay huge ego.
But, it’s not because of my follower count on twitter. I’ve always been a bit over the top. Love me hate or hate me I try and talk to everyone. With that said, I see people with 1 million, 2 million and more followers and they just don’t get twitter. @Alyssa_Milano only has 500k followers, but she gets it. She fights for causes, talks to the normal twitter folk and is a really nice person.
I’ve recently dumped 40k spam/inactive followers, because it more about quality vs. quantity.
I was into the numbers game, but relationships and people are king in the twitterverse.
Like I said, I’m just a guy lovin’ social media.
I like Marc’s point, because it’s an analytics approach. For websites, analytics gurus like Avinash have stated that few people come to a website to take the actions intended by the website owner. So it is no wonder that few Twitter followers mimic similar stats of disengaged, zombie traffic.
It is a bit wonderful to get more traffic for a blog, but the key is engaging the traffic enough to make a sale or sign a form.