Choosing The Right Social Media

There was one thing that surprised me at PodCamp3 Boston, and that was how overwhelmed by choices even the best and brightest in the new media, old media and social fields are right now. With a new social media platform, application or site popping up near daily, the constant question was how to choose what to use.

The answer is to use what works for you, and nothing more. Unless you are someone like myself, whose bread and butter depends on having a presence on nearly every social media possibility, reduce your own noise level by making choices.

The option for social media are extensive, and the early adopter crowd is often loud. Just because so-called "A-Listers" like Robert Scoble or social media junkies mavens like myself love something like Twitter or FriendFeed doesn't mean you have to. Apply PodCamp's Law of Two Feet to your social media use and leave what isn't working for you to find something that does.

How do you find out what might work for you? The short answer is to try out many things and narrow it down to a few by trial and error. The other side of that is not to let anyone else dictate what you should be using. Just because I despise Plurk and think it is the "ugly MySpace page" of the microblogging universe doesn't mean that you will - you may love it. If you don't try it, you'll never know.

Maybe your temperament is more businesslike, and you find the whole idea of social media a waste of time. You may be better suited to dip your toes into LinkedIn as your first social media site. It is a very businesslike social business networking site with a very corporate look and feel that appeals to many.

Maybe you are someone who values a universal conversation and a fast way to connect with many new friends. Twitter might be for you. If you can manage the noise of having "all @s" turned on it will be even more productive for you. You may find one of the many desktop and mobile clients for it helpful in managing the stream of constant information.

If you are an artist there are sites like Flickr for you. A musician or band? Try Trig. A reader? GoodReads is full of book worms just like you. The fact is that there is a social media solution for any possible interest, type of person or type of business out there. if you can't find it, you can make it using a social community creation tool like Ning.

Maybe you are like me and need to use them all for whatever reason. Then you will need the tools to make them more efficient. Never fear, there are plenty of applications springing up to handle that as well, like Ping.fm, the new FaceBook interface and FriendFeed. I use Ping to send a message out to all of the services I use the least often, like Pownce or Plurk, reserving my more individual interaction for the services I use the most, like Twitter.

Social media types love to lament the "firehose" and talk about how "noisy" social media is, but I think some of that is ego-feeding. Social media is only as noisy as you make it. For me, it is quite noisy - it's my job. I love the noise. If you need a quieter way to connect, you can use fewer services or an aggregator like FriendFeed or FaceBook and control how much information you get bombarded with. It really is just as simple as being selective, not following the early adopters to every new and shiny object, and only using what works for you.