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.