You know the famous I love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel are working in the chocolate factory and the conveyor belt keeps going faster and faster? Eventually they start shoving the chocolates in their mouth and hat because they just can’t keep up.
As you ramp up your social media life, you start to spread out. This is good, because you can meet and connect with more people as your network expands, but what about home base?
Many people can feel like Lucy trying to keep up with the increasing flow of data, but there are a lot of us that also feel the pressure to keep pumping out more chocolate.
I was reading Adam Covati’s post about this very subject this morning. Adam was wondering where the different sections of his online life fall. It got me thing more about where I’m spending my time. Like Adam Twitter takes up a decent amount of focus if not time.
The power of Twitter lies in how many other apps are now connected to it. I don’t think I use a single tool that doesn’t have the ability to ping Twitter. I use Brightkite as a way to geo-locate myself to friends, which pings Twitter, well, I did until I found Foursquare, which basically does the same thing, except it gives me pretend prizes.
I started using Posterous a little while ago, I love how drop-dead easy it is to upload almost anything. I use that to upload mostly photos that I want to connect to both my Facebook account and my Twitter account. This weekend I started using my Tumblr account that I signed up for a year ago.
I also make a concerted effort to get into Google Webmaster’s Forum and help out in there a couple of hours each week. Family photos sent up to Picasa, Non-family photos sent up to Flickr. Cute videos of my son sent to YouTube.
I also need to add content to this blog as often as possible. Oh yeah, email,
I’m not alone, you’re probably in the same position. Maybe you have different channels, but your conveyor belt is turning just as fast. Don’t forget to add in your email, your daily workload, your family and that whole sleep thing.
How are you handling your online conveyor belt?
I’ve said in the past that Twitter is a gateway drug to other social media networks. I’ll dabble and experiment here and there, but none of them give me the same feeling I get with Twitter (my first true love). When I’m away from work I can only break out the iPhone so many times before my wife gives me the “If I see you on that one more time tonight I’m throwing it out the window” look. I try my best to read every tweet but it’s become very difficult to do that lately.
I’m finding myself letting a lot of chocolate go by.
I’m not sure that Twitter is any more of a gateway network than any other, but once you start to engage, it’s hard to pull back, and stopping all together seems out of the question.
Being in the stream is warm and familair, being out of the stream seems isolated and strange.
I’m losing. I’m eating none of the chocolate. It’s all going by. And I can’t keep up. 7 days behind on RSS. Haven’t looked at Twitter in 4 days. Last Posterous post was 7 days ago. Last Facebook visit was many days ago.
Thanks Phil. Now I have to go check in on all of those now that I’ve read your post from 5 days ago.
That’s the hard part Robbie, finding out which ones work for us. I know I can’t keep up with all of them, so I try them and if they fit into my workflow I’ll adopt, if not, I’ll drop it.
The hard part is to keep trying the new stuff, because the old stuff is already broken in and comfy. But like my brother the contractor says, “your old hammer feels good in your hand, but at 5pm, your glad you had a pneumatic nailer hooked on your belt”