Heard Around the Water Cooler

“Did you see what happened to Derek and Meredith last night?”

“Are you planning to go to the movie about Facebook?”

“I just signed up to attend a great new seminar next week.”

“How ’bout them Rockies!”

Whether it’s chatting by the company water cooler, grabbing a smoke outside, talking over your neighbor’s fence or the myriad of other places we engage in small talk, conversations like this take place millions of times every day.

When we have these conversations, we often find out that we have similar interests with others. We like the same TV shows. We go to the same movies. We attend the same business meetings. We root for the same baseball teams. And, of course, we sometimes find out that we don’t like the same things! However, in making these discoveries, we develop friendships.

Do these communications look familiar to you? They could have just as easily been on your Facebook page, Twitter feed or even on LinkedIn. Whether in the “real” world or online, snippets of our everyday lives are what binds us all together.

I know this seems silly—and to be honest, it is—but “small talk” is how many business relationships get started, whether in person or online. This is why I’m a big advocate for including personal posts in your business social networking efforts. It boils down to this: we choose to work with people we share common interests with.

Several months ago, I “liked” the Fan Page for the TV show, Dr. Who, and it posted on my Facebook feed. Within 10 minutes, one of my “friends” contacted me to say that he was also a big fan of Dr. Who, had gone to my Profile page and discovered that we had more in common than he thought. Since then, we’ve had several discussions about how we can support each other’s businesses.

Businesses “personalize” their posts by including things that aren’t strictly related to their business. I saw the following post on Southwest Airlines’ Fan page: “Remember to grab your reusable bags when you go grocery shopping! Don’t fret if you forget—here’s some alternatives to keep those plastic bags out of our landfills. DING! You are now free to be Green.” They then linked to their blog post about uses for plastic bags.

Does this pertain to what Southwest actually does? Of course not! But, it does show that they are good corporate citizens—and, if that’s important to someone it may make them more likely to want to fly Southwest. It “humanizes” the company.

What do you think? Do you like it when you see a combination of business and personal posts?