Not Another Social Media is Awesome Article

Why don't you make it remarkable?  Why don't you make it meaningful?  Whether your vision is for marketing or for actually building relationships, those questions lead to characteristics that will help your social media efforts be more visible and appreciated.  Just a hunch here, but I bet those questions could help in the real world too.  I'm not an early adopter by computer geek standards, but I do qualify when compared to the general population.  However,  I was not an early adopter to social media - Facebook, Twitter, etc.  Nevertheless, we started dipping our toe into the social media pool last year.  Wow, just like many other environments in life, there is noise, spam, and junk mail that have taken on new faces.  I understand why.  Social media is a low cost way of advertising.  Now, I love innovation - especially disruptive innovation!  Can you guess my favorite innovative tool of late?  The Facebook Filtering tools!  I am very grateful for all the relationships I have in life (and in my virtual social media life).   However, I never put all my friends on one giant conference call, and expect them to all talk at the same time.  Think about that phone call in reverse.  I am speaking to all my friends from all areas of life at once.  What subject matter interests them all simultaneously?  I could not provide value to all of them for very long.    I am thankful for filtering tools in email, in spam, in the form of Caller ID, but I digress.   My brief and humble words for you today, have a plan for your social media efforts.  The plan should be to provide value to your potential followers, friends, and customers.  Remember, the filter exists, and your audience will tune you out if your message is too loud, too often, or meaningless.  Before you post, run your own mental filter first and decide if the post is meaningful.  Value is ESPECIALLY important if you choose to interconnect and redistribute your content and comments across several mediums.  Proceed with caution when using Feedburner, Twitterfeed, and other tools that redistribute your posts everywhere instantly.  Think about the users that are following you or that you want following you.  If they are devoted long time followers, most likely they subscribe to all your feeds.  If you choose to interconnect all feeds and post the same material across all platforms - they will stop listening.  Too loud or too often is not an initial problem on startup efforts, however it is a rule of thumb that you shouldn't forget as time passes by.    Social media is awesome, but only if you choose to make it awesome.   Once a follower filters you out for being too loud or boring, odds are you will never get them back.