Social Media – Can you see the trees through the noise?

Since I have started to run my own company “wwwTheGrowthAcademy.com” I have had to embrace new ways of generating business and I am loving the whole social media explosion. I enjoy writing this blog and I am a big supporter of Twitter and Linked-In.

I was a little bit late to the party in some respects but I am learning as much as I can as fast as I can and feel that I am starting to get a very basic working knowledge of what needs to be done to gain something from my activity. Maybe.

There is a lot of information around from a lot of “experts” on how, why, when and what you should do in order to have a good social media strategy.

A lot is actually an understatement!

There is a massive amount of information around. Blogs, Pod-casts, Twitter posts, data-sheets, seminars, network meetings and courses are all plentiful and the vast majority are very good. But did I mention that there is a lot?

I have had four conversations this week already with people who are just swamped with info on social media, and they are now finding some of the info actually contradicts what they read last week or even yesterday…

How do I manage to avoid this? I didn’t avoid it, I just tried to make time. Badly. I subscribed to a number of pod-casts and blogs and soaked up as much as I could. But in reality I wasn’t taking enough in and information overload became apparent. I had to be brutal. I had to be harsh. And I had to cull. This was the hard part, which blogs should you read? what if you miss that vital piece of information that will change your world by not reading a blog? Surely you can listen to pod-casts whilst in the bath, whilst on the bus and whilst sleeping? (some info must stick surely?). I decided I had to make decisions, and select a smaller number of people to appoint as my “virtual educators” and trust that any gaps they left (after all they aren’t designing their content just for me!) could be plugged by dipping in and out of articles identified by my friends on Twitter.

I follow Colin Gilchrist, Barry Dewar and Gordon McIntyre-Kemp for blogs and twitter posts on related topics and keep my eye on content posted on www.businessblogshub.com. These guys are pretty comprehensive and although have similar outlooks they rarely overlap. On the pod-cast side of things I subscribe to “Internet Business Mastery”, their style won’t be for everyone but they talk sense. I would recommend anyone who is looking to learn more at the very least takes a look at these guys.

I would draw a parallel between reading up on social media information and reading up on something like dieting information. There is a lot of great stuff about, but you can’t possibly do it all and if you do it is unlikely to be of any benefit.

Pick what is right for you and embrace it.