The Botox Effect: Five Ways to Cope with Online Silence – Conversation Starter

I met Jen, a beautiful young woman who had just been promoted to a senior creative role at a major consumer goods company, at a quintessentially New York cocktail party. She had a generous smile and animated way of speaking when she talked about her company and her job. Then she asked me about my job, and as I started talking, Jen’s face fell flat and her sparkle faded. I panicked a little. Was my discussion of online strategy really that boring? I found myself rambling through a perplexing conversation that produced sparkle when she talked, but nothing when I did. I left the party baffled.

Months later, a mutual friend mentioned she had just returned from Jen’s birthday party: her fortieth. “Jen is forty?” I asked, astonished. “Oh yeah,” my friend assured me. “She’s just a big Botox user.”

Suddenly, the cocktail party made sense. Jen wasn’t uninterested. She was cosmetically compromised, made passive by anti-aging injections.

In a way, your online audience is like a Botox user. Even if you have an enthusiastic audience for your blog, your Facebook page, or your Twitter feed, the enthusiasm is invisible.

via blogs.harvardbusiness.org