Expressions – inside, outside, sideways

I spend a good deal of my life expressing my thoughts and feelings on all sorts of online communities.

Some of those communities are inside the organisation that I work for, a good deal of this expression, like this blog, is done outside the organisation.

I wrote the other day about all of the ways in which I could waste my time, I did this as a bit of a joke. Truth is that all of the places of expression take time, but there are lots of other challenges to working this way. Here’s my top 10:

1. Am I repeating myself? – it’s difficult to know what I have said where, sometimes I have to check, sometimes I’ve got it wrong.
2. Am I saying the right thing? – there are different audiences so I need to make sure that what I say is relevant and doesn’t reference something I said somewhere else.
3. Am I breaking confidence? – I can say things inside the organisation that I can’t say outside.
4. Am I giving people the attention that they deserved? – I’m not writing very often on this blog because I’m spending so much time writing inside the organisation. Am I being disrespectful to my external audience, and does it matter?
5. Are my comments relevant? – Comments are a particular challenge. If I comment inside the organisation I shouldn’t expect people to know about me outside the organisation and the same is true the other way around.
6. Where do I aggregate information? – If I send my Twitter updates to Facebook are they relevant in Facebook?
7. Some people will see more than others – some read only one thing that I write, others read a lot of things.
8. Does the real me come across in a single stream? – If someone only read my Facebook what impression would it give? If they only read my blog would the impression be different?
9. Should I consolidate? – It’s always better to do one thing well. Would I be better dropping Twitter, Blog, etc.
10. How do I prioritise? – Is inside more valuable than outside? Is the number of readers significant?

In summary; I sometime feel like I’m in the middle of a social experiment; an experiment that will radically change the way we work over coming years.