Taming the Beast: Managing your Social Map Part I
Naturally, as a digital agency, we at Real Branding spend a fair amount of time educating clients and partners on social media. And of course many of us also take that into the realm of friends and family. More recently I’ve noticed that the questions are trending away from the “what is it?” category and more toward the “how do I utilize it?” category. Common comment are “yes, I know what it is, but other than keeping up with friends on Facebook, where’s the value?” and “I love it, but social media is a time suck.”
Now that we are all publishers and are all hyper-connected, the nature of managing information flow, social interactions, as well as our own time and productivity is changing as well. With that in mind, I put together a presentation for our recent company off-site that addressed the way I’ve set up my social map to handle information flow. This post is the first in a series expanding and explaining that flow. I hope its helpful and more importantly, I hope many of you will contribute your methods, tactics, and approaches to managing the ever expanding social map. Perhaps together we can continue to devise strategies and tactics that will allow us to “tame the beast.”
However, before we get to the not-so pretty graphs and visuals (I am clearly not a designer), I’ve found that there are two things that help me manage my time and productivity when interacting with social media.
1. Knowing my objective
2. Committing to a schedule
Knowing Your Objective
To get the most out of any endeavor I believe that it is critical to understand what you want out of it. Although I may have more specific objectives for each of the individual services to which I subscribe, overall my objective for participating in the social media space at almost every level of the Social Technographics ladder (Spectator, Joiner, Collector, Critic, & Creator) is threefold:
1. To Learn
2. To Contribute
3. To increase Real Branding’s visibility and reputation as well as my own.
To make the most of your investment, know why you are investing in the first place.
Committing to a Schedule
If you don’t have a commitment to a schedule, you will frequently find yourself spending far more time with Social Media than you had ever intended. Face it; there is a lot of great information out there; from the technical to the political to the breaking news to lolcatz. Think about how much time you are willing to commit and then commit to it. And commit to making the time correspond to your objectives.
The Map
With that in mind, the snapshot below of my primary social map without the information flows. If you want a sneak peak of what’s next, download the PowerPoint from slideshare and walk through the animated slide.
Managing Your Social Map
Next we’ll tackle the categorization (depicted by color) and review the where and why of the flow diagrams.
In the meantime, if you haven’t drawn out your social map, identified your objectives for being active, and set a schedule, take some time to do so. And remember, it doesn’t have to be pretty to be effective…
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