The concept of ambient ties fascinates me and it became all apparent this last weekend. My wife and I were invited down the coast to a friend’s seaside cottage for the weekend. Our friend used to work and live in the small coastal town where the cottage is but has since moved to the city. This was her first time back in about 5 months and we shared the experience of returning with her.

I’ll put my social media hat on for a second and then I’ll get back to the weekend story. When my wife and I first moved to the city we live in now eight months ago we knew only a couple of people. I struck up a local Twitter network rather fast as the city of Melbourne I found opened its arms up to me and made me feel right at home both on and offline. After being here for only a month though I needed to go and visit the dentist. I asked my Twitter network if there was someone in my area who they could recommend. @emilyfreeman came to my rescue and let me know her dentist was great and really professional. Turned out she was right and my wife also went there soon afterwards. I had never met Emily before yet I knew some of the people who followed her on Twitter who I trusted.

Back to the weekend and my wife for that matter. Well the thing is our first baby is due in two weeks and going away for the weekend was a risk in our view. We knew the baby may decide to come any day now and being a couple of hours away in a remote town was not how we planned it. Did I mention my wife is German and she likes to plan? On our first morning in this delightful coastal town on the Great Ocean Road we sat outside a café enjoying the sun and tucking into a scrummy breakfast. At the table next to us were a couple with their one year old, crawling under the table. They recognised our friend Miranda who we were staying the weekend with and simply said “hi.”Obviously not that close I thought. Well I was right they had a loose tie relationship as they were friends of a friend. The woman at the table turned to my wife and asked her when we were expecting. We said any day now but the expecting date is in two weeks. The woman then replied with: ‘You’ll be fine, you won’t be having it this weekend as you don’t have the signs’. I have no idea what the signs are but the effect was extraordinary, we both relaxed and enjoyed the weekend without thinking about the possibility of the baby coming. Call it naivety, call it what you will but that ‘stranger’ affected the whole two days we were there and allowed us to enjoy our time away in a far more relaxed state than we would have otherwise. She affected our emotional state.

I’m sure you can relate the above to an online experience you have had where you read something a stranger has said and took it onboard. They may simply have said something about the expected temperature for the day and you proceed through the day expecting it to be as hot or cold as they tweeted or at least having it in the back of your mind. They had an effect on you.

On the Sunday we walked into the local deli and Miranda recognised the owner and began to chat to him. In came the owner’s daughter with a really tiny baby in arms and came right up to my wife who she saw with Miranda talking to her father. She began by saying to my wife, “I can see you are going to have a girl.” We have no idea what the sex of our child is yet and we are not fussed as long as it’s healthy, so a girl would be fine. What did cross my mind was had she considered (emotional awareness of others) that we may be really hoping for a boy and she may have made us really sad by saying what she did. She had obviously felt comfortable with talking openly to us given that we were engaging with her father at the time. We do this online all the time in our Social Media conversations when we say short sharp snippets to individuals who because we are familiar with their avatar we feel we know them better than we actually do.

Its so important to establish an emotional awareness before we engage! How much can we affect others in a tweet? Let me know if you have had any similar experiences online or off.