One of the biggest challenges to operating on the social media stage, I am beginning to realize, is figuring out how to optimize the use of the tools not to listen and interact, but to FILTER. You simply cannot follow everyone and everything out there, and you could spend 24/7 just looking for the info that you want or need. (Who has that kinda time? - Even if it is your job, which at the moment, it isn't, so lob at least 50hrs of the week off my free time right there.)
Take, for example, that I found more value this week in reading an issue of Marketing magazine (print copy) called Brave New World (June 15, 2009) that discussed how marketers can learn to thrive in a new digital landscape, than I did spending hours and hours sorting through Twitter hashtags, links to blog posts and websites and reading my various carefully selected feeds in Google Reader.
What does that mean? It means I have a lot to learn about sifting through my digital information to find the best of the best that applies to what I want to read and see. And let's just say the prospect of figuring this out is daunting. VERY daunting. But that is part of this process, right?
So for now, I am a new convert to picking up my free issues of Marketing magazine from work and reading those on the bus, as well as sifting and sorting and working with tools. Eventually I will have some sorta system, and be better at this.
But a word of caution is that I am WELL aware that in this new mediascape, you will never get too comfortable, and that the tools will be ever-changing, and so really, what you need to define is the philosophy and the key objectives for filtering, and then apply the right, ever-changing tools. Otherwise, you will be lost.
And that's just the listening part of the puzzle that is social media engagement...
Good thing I love this.
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