I was confused after two compliments came my way on a professional networking website. The first one spoke of my leadership skills: "If you were a dog, you would be the leader of the pack." The second one asked me - the big guy - to take it easy: "I honestly think you can do anything you put your mind to; but I know what kind of thoughts you have, so hold off on that for now."
Both compliments came from the same acquaintance. But why did he praise me? I could in no way advance his career or assist him. He knows, for the record, that I have no "weight" in office. So, what was his angle here?
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Also, I was at a complete loss to come up with a hidden motive for his praise. I mean, we work in completely different fields, and he has never expressed any interest in my work before, so it didn't make any sense to say something like that. Maybe he meant it. Who knows? That day, I came home to find an "add me" request from him on the site.
There are several factors that led me to decline his invitation, but for our purposes, I will focus on those that most heavily influenced my decision.
The guy had been using an interesting feature on the networking site that allowed professionals to endorse others for certain skills. In the past, I have been endorsed for copy editing, writing and reporting, and recently, I have received nods for storytelling and feature writing. But that guy endorsed me for office and data manipulation - skills of great significance, according to him, in the current professional world. I was shocked - not so much that he endorsed me for it, but that the site allowed for such endorsements. The site explained the unique feature: "In today's professional world, everyone builds an image that is larger than life. However, a few factors still remain unaccounted for in personal branding. These are office and data manipulation, Thai massage, romance, paranormal romance, personality dynamics, body dynamics, et cetera. According to our recent survey, office manipulation and Thai massage rank highest among all factors influencing employee-employer relations. We thought it was time to introduce these as skill sets, and put them up for endorsement. We expect it to help generate employment in the best possible way." Indeed: when I endorsed potential employers for being good lovers, they sought me out. But the endorsement feature led to a frenzy: many users across the world, especially India, started deleting their accounts to escape the deluge of office-politics endorsements. I, for one, left for Facebook.
Having migrated, I breathed a sigh of relief, and realised, in that moment, an interesting difference between Facebook and the professional networking site. Most of the time, I had been signing in to the professional networking site for an alert that said "three people viewed your profile last week". But after the thrill of knowing someone had looked at me, I would get nervous: if I could see her checking out my profile, she could see me gaining on hers as well. This caused me to limit my lurking. In contrast, Facebook let me lurk through without alerting anyone. It let me keep a close watch on high school chums, and it let me research whether those I had crushes on were single and/or worth pursuing. Flip side: I no longer knew when others peeked in on me.
ashish.sharma@bsmail.in
