MediaJoltz

First I want to apologize for my lack of posting. I am in the middle of moving my mother from Pennsylvania to Utah. And then this past week I got hit with the flu, not fun at all.

Today though, I want to discuss a topic that has been showing up like on Chris Brogan’s blog post: Why join another social network?

With all the places you can go and join, Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Myspace, Linkedin, and then all the blogs and podcasts you can listen to, it is very easy to become overwhelmed with trying to keep up with it all. I agree with Chris when he says you don’t need to try and be in it all. The point where your balance in life as well as your work starts to suffer, is when you need to cut back.

Today I cleared out 20 blogs from my aggregator- it was at a point where I had not been able to read all the posts and started to feel overwhelmed. I kept trying to get up earlier and earlier in order to have time to read them all-but it still wasn’t working. I found myself deleting a lot of unread posts thinking “I’ll go back to the site later.” When I realized that I wasn’t, it was time to ditch.

So here is how involved I am in social networking and what I use each application for:

Myspace: I have a page, but that’s all, I created one and left it. I check it once a month to see if there are any messages.

Twitter: I am on every day. This is where I keep in touch with friends and get up-to-date information on what is going on. While there are a ton of prominent people in a new media work sense I try and keep in touch with through Twitter, it still has more of a social community atmosphere rather than a doing business making money right now feel.

Linkedin: I get on every day. I spend about an hour answering the messages in my inbox and searching through the Q/A part of Linkedin. I use Linkedin for business connections as well as getting sound advice from peers. I once asked a question and one hour later, I had 30 different people send me their answer. How cool is that?

Jaiku: I am on Jaiku and check it once in a while, but don’t use it like Twitter-more people are on twitter.

Pownce: You need an invitation to be on Pownce and I would love one-hint hint…so I can check it out and find out how much I am going to integrate it into my everyday activities.

Facebook: this is a mixture of business and family. I have a lot of friends and family on facebook and keep in touch with them with pictures, video and the like through this application. I also have some associates I keep in touch with through facebook too.

I do listen to various podcasts and read blogs and I’ll leave the blogroll call for another post.

Don’t get so involved that you lose site of the vision of social media. It isn’t a race to see who can have the most Twitter friends, or ask the most questions on Linkedin. It isn’t about being the most popular either.

I use these tools to associate myself with those I see as strategic partners and friends in life. An example of that is I wanted to meet and become friends with some people here in Utah and was never able to get a hold of any of them through email or cell phone, so I went where they were-on Twitter, and have now found some great friendships with them-you know who you are and I want to say you guys rock!

To sum it up here is a question a friend posted on Linkedin:

From my answer you can tell that I am very passionate about this and hope that you will be too!

“I like the social networking sites because I am able to:

A. keep up with friends and family not close. I can’t be on the phone talking to them all, all the time, but through things like facebook and twitter I can get up to the minute information on the people I care a lot about. I like Youtube because it provides an easy way for my mother who lives across the other side of the nation to see what is going on in our lives, when we open her christmas gifts, paint the house or even just visit fun places.
B. I have a chance to meet and make friends with people I otherwise wouldn’t be able to. I have tons of friends I hang out with, I also have people I consider friends whom I’ve never met-and never would considering they are in other parts of the world.
It is definitely still a balancing act between the online world and the real world. Some people take either one way too far, either they hide away in their houses, or are repulsed and never meet cool people online…You also have to be careful of social burnout and not doing too much and becoming overwhelmed.
Social networking and new media as a whole allows us to meet people and join conversations you never would have been able too before.”