I’m STILL Doing It Wrong: 5 MORE Mistakes I’ve Made in Social Media

Last year, I mentioned five “mistakes” I was making in my use of social media.  Astute readers noticed I was being somewhat sarcastic, since I normally adhere to the adage that there’s no such thing as “doing it wrong” (unless you’re doing this sort of thing).

But there is such a thing as “doing it well,” and if certain tools or tasks don’t immediately make my life easier or improve the quality of my workflow, I’m reluctant to adopt them.  This confuses the people who believe you need to be everywhere in order to be “taken seriously.”

As someone who’s only taken seriously by accident, I rarely have that problem.

But I do have other problems.  And sometimes, I really do make mistakes in social media.  So, with a bit less sarcasm than you might otherwise expect, here are…

5 Recent Mistakes I’ve Made in Social Media (and How I Fixed Them)

1.  Reach Out and Touch Me… Somewhere.

Despite operating this site regularly since July 2009, it wasn’t until last week when a confused Twitter acquaintance asked me how she could email me directly that I realized I had never included my contact info on my homepage. (Yes, sure, it was on my Contact page, where I presumed most people would look.  But as aggravated as I get when I can’t easily find someone’s email on their homepage, it never dawned on me that I’d committed the same sin.)

Whoops.

Now, if you’re reading this post on my homepage, you’ll notice a quartet of “Contact Me” icons atop the righthand sidebar.  Let’s not repeat that confusion again, shall we?…

2.  Confusing Conversation with Growth

I love to talk.  Those who’ve seen me (or who’ve witnessed the verbosity of my tweets) know I’m a hard man to quiet once my neurons start firing.

But conversing for the sake of conversing isn’t necessarily growing.  Expanding my awareness requires exposure to new stimuli.  Expanding other people’s awareness of my brand / abilities / reliably sardonic wit requires an increase in the quantity and quality of the places where I can be found.

By limiting my Twitter interactions to a smaller sampling group than many of my peers, I may have maintained a useful (to me) level of conversation, but I’m still missing out on a wide array of insights and opportunities.

To fix that, I’ve started…

3.  Making Use of Twitter Lists for Something More Than Blog Post Fodder

When I was “only” following 700-ish Twitter users, I was able to keep a handle on what I considered to be “important” or “relevant” information.  I knew I was still missing large chunks, but I doubted I could keep up with many more input streams, and I’ve never enjoyed the functionality of “better” Twitter management tools like TweetDeck.  (I still use Twitter’s web interface; how’s that for retro?)

But as I’ve begun to expand the number of people I’m following, I’m doing so with a safety valve in place: if I ever feel like I’m missing too many “important” updates again, I can just subdivide my sources into various lists.  That way, I can keep up with the people I want to stay in touch with, while giving the new (to me) conversants the benefit of the doubt.

And if the whole thing turns out to be a headache?  I’ll just shrink my following back to a more manageable number.  Like our own attention spans, Twitter is indiscriminately fluid.

4.  Who… Am I?

Have you ever signed up to test-drive a service using your personal email account as the login, only to realize you should have done so using your business email?  I have.  Repeatedly.  And while some services allow you to change the email account associated with that profile, others don’t — which means I’m locked into several instances of overlapping accounts and muddy workflows.

I have yet to find a simple solution for this, so if anyone has any suggestions, be my guest.

5.  Your Nubile Temptations No Longer Excite Me

I do a lot of the same tasks, in the same exact way, day after day after day.  If a system works, I stick with it because doing so saves me time and hassle.  Test-driving new tools and techniques is at the bottom of my to-do list, and if you’ve seen my to-do list, you know the bottom of it is subterranean.

It’s not that I don’t have options.  Mashable spotlights more seemingly-useful services in one day than I could reasonably evaluate in a month.  Instead of cherry-picking the ones I might actually benefit from employing, I tend to ignore them all until other, more eager dabblers have sussed out the winners from the also-rans.

And yet… how can I stay ahead of the curve if I don’t even keep the curve in sight?

So I’m tweaking my workflow.  Not in terms of adding new services to test, because I still don’t have time for that.  Rather, in terms of finding more time in my day.  And once I get that squared away, I’ll be happy to squeeze the occasional beta test into my otherwise breathless 24 hours.

But I still probably won’t use Facebook.

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Tags: audience, branding, Business, common sense, expert, honesty, networking, perception, personal, Social Media, Twitter