If I didn't know better Charlie O'Donnell and many others are reading my mind. Lately I have been seeing a lot of discussion around social media noise and our inability to filter it out or manage it in such a way as to continue to make it a productive part of our days.
Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm for Friendfeed has to do with my goal to reduce the amount of digital noise - an approach that regularly sees me turn Twitter off until at least noon to reduce the number of distractions.
It is not just Friendfeed though. It is the desire for budding entrepreneurs to create new social media services, tools, and resources that add too, aggregate and multiply the noise exponentially and create an endless number of entertaining distractions.
It seems we're at a crossroads - there's so much information, but not enough filters. We can either drown in the lost productivity time sink that is the internet or we can swim...swim for our lives.
I have been maneuvering in the digital space for quite a number of years now and the recent explosion of social media options has forced me to do something I have never had to do before, pick and chose not only what applications are best for my own purposes but also what applications I may have to ignore regardless of their value or their deserving of my attention.
I use instant messenger and e-mail a lot, I use Twitter and Linkedin some, and occasionally I blog and or contribute to the noise in my own way. Other than that I have been forced to cut out the use of many social media applications because they were just making me so highly inefficient that it was becoming ridiculous.
At a certain point though, socializing in social media follows one of the basic economic laws: the law of diminishing returns.
I believe some time ago I reached the point where social media had hit its point of diminishing returns so now I have even had to go so far as to give up using my RSS reader. I don't read feeds anymore, as inefficient as it sounds I have twenty websites that I visit once a day and then I just don't go back for the rest of the day.
No matter what happens I know the new news will still be there waiting for me the next day. These have been hard choices to make but at the end of the day they are choices that I and many other marketers have had to make in the face of so much information.
I know other online marketers are also feeling the buzz of information overload, what are you doing to filter your worlds of information while being surrounded in the tempest of noise?
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