Managing Your Social Media
Posted by Joseph Thornley on June 23rd, 2007
We are becoming overloaded with a surfeit of social media sites and tools. We can either break under the load of options or we can find ways to cope, to manage our social media.
Bryan Person came all the way from Boston (6 hour drive) to talk to Podcasters Across Borders about how he manages these tools – and we’re glad he did.
First, you have to make hard decisions. Make choices among the essential tools.
Develop a routine to allow you to cover things quickly. For example: Email; Twitter; Facebook; Calendar; Blog Reader. Then you’re good to go.
Using Tagging to save items associated with terms that are meaningful to you.
Prune your feedreader subscriptions. In fact, think of deleting all of them. You’ll quickly re-subscribe to those feeds that really matter to you.
Trust your network for recommendations. You don’t need to subscribe to or read everything. If one of your friends spot something that he or she thinks is important, they’ll pass it along to you.
Finally, be prepared to step away. Turn your computer off. Enjoy life. Then you can come back to the computer refreshed.
June 23rd, 2007 » 3:04 pm
Glad you enjoyed the presentation, Joe. Based on the number of comments after my main talking points, it’s pretty clear that I’m not alone in fighting the battles of managing my social media.
June 26th, 2007 » 3:43 pm
Your comments are right on. Helping folks – particularly those just becoming familiar with Web 2.0 tools – to find and monitor what is relevant to them has become the challenge. We’re now having to set up brown-bag sessions in my company to tell marketing/communication professionals where to find the best aggregator, how to tag, etc. And the volume of information will only continue to increase. Will be interesting to see if the “community” will continue to develop new and better ways to get the info we want and need.
June 27th, 2007 » 1:12 pm
Let me add one more suggestion: keep one “network slot” open for experimentation. Sometimes, you find a use or great value in a network that wasn’t readily apparent at first. Twitter comes to mind, as I have practical professional benefits a couple of ways.
The important point is that a network is only as good as the time you invest – and half-assing your way through several serves no purpose.
June 27th, 2007 » 9:30 pm
How refreshing to read this. It’s what I’ve been thinking for some time. I really don’t have to read the whole internet? Thank you for the post.
July 5th, 2007 » 3:57 pm
Net Debris…
I have felt so behind lately. I’ve been doing my best to keep up with the newest tools and social networks out there, to see what I can use professionally. I’ve been on LinkedIn, MyRagan, just joined Facebook, have arguably the coolest Tw…