Social Media Overload

So in an effort to make sure I'm keeping my talks relevant, current and otherwise engaging, I attended a panel at Clark University's Graduate Center right off route 9 in Framingham this morning. Oddly enough I knew two of the four speakers on the panel from other lives: Eric Guerin's sister and I were grade school buddies and Jeff Cutler and I worked together at TimeTo.com a short lived, money incinerating dotcom. Mike Langford and Cappy Popp were two strangers to me - but I knew of them in the Twitterverse.

The panel was great and highly consistent with the information I share when I give my social media talks. They had a business audience and thought they were great about giving the small business owners candid, actionable information. Cappy talked extensively about LinkedIn tools for the audience and he cleared up a few details that were foggy for me. Cappy won some major points with me when he warned the audience about LinkedIn LIONs (Linked In Open Networkers) who were essentially contact collectors. Nothing frustrates me more than the feigned relevance of people who are LIONs on LinkedIn. Their predatory use of their personal collections names as equity is just a clear abuse of LinkedIn as a social media tool. In the email world, these people are called Spammers.

I felt the panel lead the room and gave some great intelligence on the pros and cons of rolling social media into their small business marketing activities. The one thing that frustrates me to no end with these panels is that they are lumping social media into one blob of a topic and are not considering that to really educate people, lumping the "Big 3" (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) into one talk are in essence, useless! (Please note, I'm NOT blaming the panel, I'm blaming the people organizing the panels!) You are not giving your audiences enough time to absorb enough information about one of these tools so that they can go back to work and take meaningful actions towards getting their businesses effectively active in any of the tools. People that are booking these panels and talks are missing out on the big help they are trying to deliver...which is getting social media knowledge into the hands of the people who can bring these tools to their companies and help them build effective communities!

That being said, the panel did a great job helping the people in the room understand the effectiveness of social media is realized through the PEOPLE running the programs. They, in other terms, explained that push marketing would damage their social marketing efforts and the way to have a great community was to go where their audiences "lived" on social media and pull them in with offering meaningful content. I got it, but I'm worried that the room did not. I heard someone talking to Eric and Jeff after the talk and they still were stuck on building a mass community on LinkedIn. I can say it was a primary focus for this guy - the panel specifically answered his questions, but he didn't really have the time to absorb what they were saying.