Wow! Take a step back and think about all of the channels of input screaming out for your attention. You have the constant deluge of Twitter, the pounding of your RSS reader from bloggers pushing out their content, you have publishing sites with articles, videos and podcasts, not to mention Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn social networks to monitor and manage.
I will be the first to say that without social media our personal business would not be where it is today. This has been a HUGE godsend and literally has help put us on the map. However, if you’re not careful, you may find yourself losing hours & hours of time better well-spent in more productive money making decisions.
Are you feverishly tweeting at all hours of the day? Check your Facebook page before you go to bed and first thing when you wake up? Addicted to social media? You’re not alone.
First, from a psychological perspective, there is the family dynamic of social media.
As more and more adults flock to social networking sites familial relationships are affected. Husbands are mad at wives, children are upset with parents, parents are upset with children, boyfriends are mad at girlfriends, and wives are mad at husbands for a myriad of reasons: spending too much time on Farmville, embarrassing messages on walls, inappropriate behavior discovered and monitored, or temptations from the opposite sex. Don’t get me wrong, some families may find a common ground on social networking sites but it seems that many are affected negatively when it becomes an addiction.
When it comes to home business owners and internet marketing, I find it particularly problematic with too much social media and an extreme lack of priorities. It reminds me of the one major lesson I learned while my husband & I were first starting and managing our own company, the importance of focus. If we define our objectives and focus on achieving them then it is easier to set our attention on specific social media channels and the insights, ideas and knowledge they expose. Varying levels of priorities (work objectives, personal development objectives, family objectives, etc.) further help us define how to use our attention span to absorb the most relevant inputs.
For nurturing creativity, an outside, broad focus can help empower our focus on achieving specific goals which puts the whole issue of attention deficit disorder central to the management of social media. We want to take in as much input as possible for generating ideas while remaining focused on achieving our key priorities. It’s a process of absorbing in the data, filtering and storing the stuff not immediately relevant and enacting what is relevant to towards accomplishing our immediate goals. If you fail to filter the data whether mechanically by using an application to organize and store it, or mentally by defining your objectives and priorities, then anxiety can set in creating attention deficit and information overload. This will negatively affect your business and you can sabotage your business before you are even consciously aware of what hit you.
Increasing your productivity is one of the biggest dangers of social media is that it can quickly transform from a powerful marketing tool into a huge time waster. You need to make sure you outline social media goals and a plan for how you’re going to reach them. Once you have a plan in place, make sure all of your social media activities are in line with this plan so you don’t end up wasting hours doing nothing.
Schedule blocks of time for projects as appointments on your calendar. When information comes in or distractions knock at the door, remember you’re in a “project appointment.” Process it when the appointment is over. If you have turned off your popups, you won’t even know it’s there!
On average, it takes at least 15 minutes every time you check and answer email. A water cooler break on Twitter or Facebook may be another 15 minutes.
How much is 15 minutes worth to you?
Can you afford to check your email and social networks three times every hour? If your billing rate is $1,000/hour like some of the top CEOs, then maybe. However, if you watch the habits of these same CEOs, you won’t see them socializing 45 minutes out of every hour.
Water-cooler breaks on Twitter and/or Facebook are important and a stress relief to many. Just make sure you control the social networks rather than allowing them to control you! Schedule social time throughout the day.
Burning yourself out too early! Believe me; this has happened thousands of times. A key decision maker at a company hears about this “hot social media thing”, and decides his company needs to start blogging and Tweeting. They blindly jump in with no plan, and blog and Tweet furiously for a few weeks. Of course, they don’t get any results because: 1) They don’t have a plan, 2) they don’t really know much about social media marketing. As a result, they get burnt out, proclaiming social media to be an overhyped waste of time. The reality is they never gave themselves a chance for it to work. Remember, social media has great benefits when it comes to your business. The goal is to learn how to control social media, before it controls you.
The new age of social media has the potential to pull down more and more workers if they don’t gain focus around their defined objectives and filter the need to know versus the nice to know on continual basis. Whether you’re learning how to better optimize your paid search campaigns, staying on top of the latest search engine optimization tactics or figuring out how to use social media to generate buzz for your company, keep in mind attention management and execute it wisely.
To Your Unlimited Success!
Michelle Chasen-Hooks
