Having a presence in the social space is a time commitment. But how do you avoid social media overload, and is there a third option that streamlines the networking process?
Expressing yourself in the social space is a commitment made on many levels.
Committing oneself to a specific social network represents an investment. It's an investment of confidence -- that your friends and business associates will also be active and reachable on the network, and that the tools and applications we use to connect to our social circles are meaningful and useful. It's also an investment of time and effort. Increasingly, our social media commitments need to borrow time from other things that we're doing.
The industry pundits remind us frequently of that commitment. They tell us not to blog unless we can post at least X number of times a day or a week, and that we commit to responding to comments. They tell us not to bother setting up a Twitter feed unless we can update at least a few times a day. And they question how many abandoned social network profiles are out there, left to rot in the social sphere after their owners changed jobs or lost interest.
The pundits are generally right, but that doesn't stop a lot of us from overcommitting ourselves. Between social networks, blogging and microblogging, social news aggregation and all of the other time sucks inherent in Web 2.0, it's easy to overcommit.
I'll be happy to use myself as a case study. After messing around with blogging in late 2003, I installed Movable Type at Hespos.com in early 2004, and I committed to posting at least one piece of commentary every business day. I was pretty good at delivering on that commitment, until I started getting into other Web 2.0 phenomena.
It became important to my understanding of social media to be active on a number of socialnets. LinkedIn and Facebook seemed to have the most people from our industry, so I set up profiles there. Twitter captured my attention, and I set up a profile there, too, and started sending out at least half a dozen updates a day. TotalFark, del.icio.us and Digg became a great way to follow news stories and other phenomena that were threatening to bubble up in the mainstream media, so I started submitting and voting up links there. Later, I added Reddit and StumbleUpon to my list of social news aggregators.
The time spent with these services had to come from somewhere. The blog suffered. It wasn't long, though, before I started experimenting with how to make each of these services work with one another, if for no other reason than to save time by eliminating redundancies.
For instance, Twitter updates serve pretty much the same function as status updates in Facebook. So I implemented an application on Facebook that would update my status there based on my Twitter updates. That saved the time of having to enter the same update into both services.
But I think the best application thus far in terms of saving time and effort has been FriendFeed. Simply put, it aggregates your activity across all of these social networks and applications, and puts it all in one spot. Much like Twitter, friends and associates can "follow" your profile and your activity on FriendFeed, so they can see which links you think are worthwhile, what updates you've made to your blog or status, and much more.
Moreover, FriendFeed information is portable and usable elsewhere in the social sphere. Now, people who follow me on Facebook see all the aggregated information about what I'm doing on my Facebook newsfeed. Much of that information is populated by Friendfeed. So when I submit a story to Digg, Friendfeed picks it up and disseminates that information to Facebook.
FriendFeed and its competitors represent the first serious attempts to pull together all social web activity. It's a time saver in that it eliminates redundancies and keeps me from having to update each social application separately. More importantly, though, it's helping to move us toward seamless social networking, where our actions have the potential to affect all of our friends and contacts, regardless of which networks they participate in.
When social applications become seamless and effortless, we'll see a surge of activity that will make the rush to Facebook look tiny in comparison. And the commitment necessary to have a meaningful presence in the social space won't be so intimidating.
Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com.