As everyone starts to move to the social web, its getting a little overwhelming to follow colleagues, friends, family, influencers and news outlets. Every media source and email seems to be tagged with a "follow me at..." tag. What we originally thought was going to be an instant way to stay in touch with the world and access news and information easily is getting a little much. It's time to sort out your social streams before you start drowning in them.
If you think keeping track of a few dozen or few hundred followers is getting difficult, imagine monitoring thousands or tens of thousands of followers. John Chow, Chris Brogan and Robert Scoble are leaders when it comes to processing information, each of them a leader in the social web. How they consume their huge volumes of information offers great insight to help chew on your bits and bytes easier:
The key to managing the stream is filtering. You need to sort the people into relevant groups. Put friends together, colleagues together, keywords in another group, news and interests in another and so on.
John Chow has more than 58 000 followers on Twitter and reciprocates more than 55 000 of them. Obviously that's too large of a chunk to manage efficiently, so he uses HootSuite as a browser based Twitter client. "With HootSuite, you can manage all your Twitter followers and accounts in a single application. You can create as many columns as you want in order to separate your followers into groups. You can add new tabs to track keywords or other Twitter accounts," says John.
Chris Brogan, a community leader in social networking and co-author of the new book Trust Agents, recently broke down how he manages Facebook. "I have three main areas I sit on, and I keep them open in 3 browser tabs,” he explains and then goes in to detail how to set up your own filters. Brogan uses Facebook differently than any of the other networks. "In sales, it’s a relationship tool, not a marketing funnel driver. You use it to get to know more about your prospects, and to keep your
customers warm," he says.
But perhaps the leader in all social networking, when it comes to producing and consuming the largest volume of content, is Robert Scoble. The uber blogger gave a talk in 2008 about what he calls The World Wide Talk Show. Robert lives on each and every social network, mostly FriendFeed, and here describes how he consumes it all.
If you want more ways to manage multiple profiles across different social networks, and even aggregating them all into one place, check out
this article from Mashable.
The social web is gaining a lot of fanfare as being the future of the internet. It's all about relationships and sharing and following and networking. However if you don't start effectively managing that stream you will easily drown in the flood of information.
catch the buzz ... pass it on.
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