If you take the social channels at face value, many claim they can solve all your problems with the purchase of their book or click of a mouse. Solutions can be buried somewhere between good intentions and snake oil.
Sign Up and Never Read
I was sifting through my in-box recently and realized that I was creating clutter by joining upwards of 100 different services, clubs, email blasts and news sites. Over time, I have subscribed to these services only to glance when the daily email comes in and never read it. Volume has replaced need. So I will unsubscribe to all of them in email form and go back to digesting the content through my reader. Quantity replaced quality and it all became white noise.
The average Facebook user has 130 friends and has joined 80 pages or groups. How much daily interaction happens after the "like" button is pressed? Something caused you to do it in the first place so there may be good stuff, or not, and if not, dump it. The onus is not on you to stay but for them to give you reason to want to stay. Could we see a social media diet plan in place over the next few years? Less will become more while we focus on actual connections rather than collecting numbers.
Ready Shoot Aim
So often we feel we’re going to miss something so we create clutter instead of progress. Companies adopt a new imitative for fear the competition will get a leg up. Someone on Twitter self proclaims some tactic and it makes us wonder if we should adopt it. Every one of our profiles on the social web has a counter on it and the numbers begin to distract us as if they are actually important.
In business, there will always be someone doing better than you and always someone doing worse than you. The critical issue to keep in mind is what is important to you.
Perhaps some thought to what is truly necessary may help.
Kneale Mann
image credit: brickhouse
originally posted: march 2011
