Tasty Tweets, Status that Matters
Humans are essentially social creatures. The greater part of our conscious minds are devoted to communication with each other and we have developed numerous sophisticated mechanisms for doing so. It is in our nature to come together and exchange ideas and opinions. Social media is merely an extension of this natural inclination. But while the technology has advanced by leaps and bounds, we do well to understand that it is human nature driving the advance, and not the other way around. This leads us to a common problem – attention deficit.
The Problem with Social Media
Social media such as Facebook and Twitter can become very all-encompassing. We like to feel industrious, like we are keeping up to date and getting things done. Social media can provide that feeling for us, but can also provide an illusion of accomplishment. It is easy to get trapped into an endless loop of looking at tweets, status updates and such, and make a culture out of rehashing them or passing them forward.
It is easy to spend an entire day substituting progress toward our goals with filling in time on a myriad non-essential tasks. This is nothing new.
Before social media, email was the thing that grabbed our attention regularly. Many is the time I’ve sat with media people who could not resist stealing glances at their Blackberry during the conversation. Really? Is it that hard to set it aside? If we’re having trouble with it now, wait until the next iteration of online communication – real-time socket-driven media such as google wave. Wave is nothing that hasn’t been around for quite a while (Adobe has had better real-time tools for quite a while) but what makes it interesting is that Google will push the technology to the masses. When this happens, we’d best have the skills in place to regulate our social media time.
Hemmingway of Twitter?
It can be quite hard to make the best use of social media when we start to equate our chief value with what we are consuming online. It becomes tempting to consume more and more information, and to do this we reduce our consumption to highly condensed information bits. There are two ways of looking at an information “bit”. Consuming lots of them can become like making a meal out of candy – numerous delicious calorie-packed morsels that are easily consumed. On the other hand, brevity in writing can be the soul of wit. Hemmingway was widely praised for his ability to convey profound thoughts in simple, short statements. And the “haiku” form of poetry is widely accepted as a subtle and beautiful form of art. Short does not equal shallow, so respect the tweet.
But a diet of candy, like a routine of brief information hits, does little for our development. To be effective, our information “bits” should stand on much deeper information – the bit should be the delicious appetizer that hints at the meal which will follow. While the appetizer is easily consumed, we tend to take our time and savor it, pausing to view it, feel its texture, building anticipation for what will come next. Consider the first sip of a good wine – it is what we remember afterwards. Our info-bits should strive for the same introductory engagement.
Consumption vs. Creation
There is a second danger. We can start consuming more that we are producing. Re-tweeting an article we have read or a video that caught our eye, while worthy of doing, is not the same thing as actually creating fresh content. And the internet needs fresh content of both a local and global inclination. Consuming more than we produce creates a deficit in our personal communication bank accounts. When our social media gets in the way of capturing our deeper thoughts, it starts to hold us back.
Tips for Social Media
Proper use of social media comes down to establishing a few simple rules such as the following:
1. Spend more time producing than consuming
2. Limit social media time to defined blocks and stick to them
3. Set aside periods for producing content, uninterupted by social media tools.
4. Employ tools that slow you down. Pen and paper don’t get interrupted by Twitter and allow you to stay in the flow.
5. Strive to have a deeper piece of content behind each post.
6. Research a bit before posting, it is still necessary to build your argument even if people have access to the same information you do. Don’t assume they will “google” your information (even though they probably will, the point is that you are building credibility)
7. Think twice before tweeting, read aloud what you have just written and understand that it will be viewed by people who may be in a completely different cultural context. They might not grasp your references.
8. Use an aggregation tool such as HootSuite or TweetDeck. Otherwise you’ll waste hours of precious time.
9. Allow time to ruminate, when you are neither producing content nor consuming it, but digesting it. This time is precious, defend your right to it.
10. You can make powerful use of images and icons where words will not suffice, but search engines still rely on those words to index your content, so for now at least you’ll need both.
