Please Make It Stop

February 27th, 2009 → 11:44 am @ Bob

8


10 Ways to Deal With Social Media Gone Awry

Twitter is Overrated

I had the bright idea this week to create a second Twitter account for myself, one to separate my ‘personal’ account from one that represents my ‘professional’ persona (don’t laugh please … it’s a work in progress). Dovetailing on this thought was another idea to see if and how I could measure follower trends — and perhaps more importantly, the relative meaning of having Twitter followers in the first place.

For @nvbob, my personal account, I’ve wielded a mighty ban stick recently, whereby I have closed the account to the public stream, I’ve limited my followers and reduced the numbers of those who I follow. With @bobconrad, which I set up on Sunday, I followed hundreds of people right out of the gate.

The results: Within days I had more than 30 auto-replies in my @bobconrad Direct Message inbox and more than 250 followers, which is far more than I ever had under my @nvbob account. Altogether, the aggressive trend to follow others had the effect bringing on 265 new followers, despite having, as of this writing, only posting a mere 21 updates.

Based on this trend, I decided to create a very simple research project. I posted a link to this article about social media run amok: http://www.searchandsocial.com/seo-blog/stop-high-level-social-media-speak/. I posted it from both my @nvbob and @bobconrad accounts at the same time but with different short links that linked to the article.

What I wanted to know was if my new followers, despite the dozens of friendly — and frankly, very annoying — replies welcoming me to the Twitter fray, would yield more, the same or less clicks through to the article.

The text on both tweets was the same: “Excellent article on social media gone awry: (link).”

I then waited overnight to review the results. Using Tr.im to create the short links, I was able to measure the clicks from the same tweet from two different Tr.im accounts. The ratio of clicks versus followers is:

@bobconrad (the new account)trim-bobc
256 followers 
9 clicks to the article 
28.44 to 1 ratio 

 

 


@nvbob (my old account)trim-nvbob
83 followers
10 clicks to the article 
8.30 to 1 ratio 

 

As you can see, the volume of followers is negligible when you have spent time weeding out your less-important contacts versus playing the “I’ll follow you if you follow me” game. Cautiously, I think these results demonstrate the idea of appropriate targeting rather than jumping onto the social media bandwagon with guns blazing.

With that in mind, here are 10 tips on how deal with the bombardment of frivolity social media brings forth, as well as general recommendations on how to best manage the onslaught of what is becoming mind-numbing banter and information overload.

  1. Stop responding to email. Pick up the phone and call back instead.
  2. If you really want to have a discussion, invite the person out for lunch – better yet, beers after work.
  3. Consume passively. Read sites, view images, watch videos and so on – but don’t respond to what you are reading or viewing.
  4. Again, don’t respond. Responding to others encourages dialogue. The Internet, using social media, is often the wrong place for that as the discussions are increasingly vitriolic and/or shallow.
  5. Follow people on Twitter using their RSS feeds rather than through Twitter’s follow feature. Doing so will allow you to read their updates on your time and through your own system versus Twitter’s never-ending stream of digital diarrhea.
  6. Setup different email accounts (using Gmail) for different purposes. Filter email that you know for sure will be sent to you, such as newsletters, Google Alerts and so on. For example, I set up a work Gmail account so that all Google Alerts, Help A Reporter Out emails and other emails are auto-filtered there to be consumed at my convenience. Also, those emails filtered to never show up in my Gmail inbox.
  7. Consume as much as you can — news, blog posts, etc. — through RSS feeds. I use Google Reader. Click the “Mark as Read” button often and liberally.
  8. Delegate your information consumption to someone else who can filter it for you.
  9. Put your information dissemination and consumption tools in one place. I use iGoogle for managing input (RSS, Twitter, Gmail, etc.) and I have a Ping.fm account to transmit output to the various other sites where I have accounts. More than 90% of what I need can be managed within two clicks.
  10. Finally, measure your efforts. Online media offers the benefit of seeing instantaneous results, as the above example using Tr.im shows. Is your output maximized to increase the ratio of success? If not, consider changes to your system(s) until your output is achieving a better return on your investment.
Tags:  gmail, igoogle, information management, rss feeds, social media, social media backlashsocial media, twitter, web 2.0