I met Natalie Stanfield Thomas at Faffcon 2 but I knew of her work before then.

She’s a wonderfully creative voice talent who brings alot of life experience to her voice over work and it make her audio great.

We were talking one day (as we New York State neighbors often do) and she mentioned how she felt how she was upset with herself and her faux communication skills. She said she’d been using social media as a way to communicate with her friends and family more than actually speaking with them.

I said you’ve got a blog post in that idea and you need to write it. She finally did. Here is my friend Natalie Stanfield Thomas:

In the past six months, I’ve witnessed the birth of my friends’ grandchildren on one side of the country and children of another within days of each other on the other side of the country, I’ve been there to offer support when a marriage fell apart a continent away, crashed a wedding and reception I didn’t even know about until some friends told me, gave moral support to a friend who was dealing with a child with emotional/behavioral struggles, cheered from the sidelines while another friend launched her book deal, drooled over the latest cuisines and tastings some of my cohorts saw fit to share, and witnessed countless career-making deals be made between friends in the entertainment industry.

I did all of this, and never left my desk, in fact, for the most part many of these exchanges occurred without any real human contact at all. I had all of these interchanges with my close personal friends and family members, through Facebook and Twitter.

It suddenly occurred to me that I have been lulled into the false sense that I was actually cultivating my relationships.

It was so astonishing, as a matter of fact, that one of my friends remarked in an email exchange that he too had just realized that since we often comment on one another’s pictures or status updates on Facebook, he had not realized until that very moment, in that very email, that this was the first intentional contact we’d had with one another in SIX MONTHS.

Our job is communication, it’s what we’re supposed to be good at, so why then am I sitting here making a ‘to do’ list of intentionality?

I am reminding myself that PERSONAL contact with the people important to me, friends and clients is something I have to cultivate. The electronic media that makes networking so simple, also has an insidious side. It has the ability to afford a false sense of connectivity, to make you believe you are staying involved, when in reality you are on auto pilot. Remember, the only time you can coast is when you are going down hill. So I’m awake now and pedaling forward. I’m making personal contact with the people I interact with in my social media.

So how about you?

When was the last time you had a real conversation with the people in your network? Think about it, and do me a favor will you? If you see yourself in any of this, don’t ‘tweet’,’plus’ or ‘like’ it until you’ve first called someone and told them about it.

Tags: commentary, facebook, linkedin, social media, twitter, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover blog // 2 Comments »