Back in April, inspired by a post from Louis Gray, My Social Media Consumption Workflow, I wrote a piece, entitled Evolution of My Social Media Interactions, which sought to capture a snapshot of the set of services I was using then for interacting with social media. It was already clear then that I would need to revisit this subject from time-to-time:
Okay, enough for now. Who knows how I’ll be using all this stuff next month, or which new tool will get added to my kit?
Back in April, I focused on “how I start my day” and talked about:
I fire up the browser, and open up a series of tabs: my blog, Techmeme, Twitter search engine Summize, Plaxo Pulse, Twitter.
What’s changed since then? A few things. First of all, I have far less of a notion of “starting my day” with social media. Back then, I think I was viewing this a bit like a substitute for the morning paper. Sure, I checked on things throughout the day, but not obsessively. Now, I’ve gone from a morning dip into the social media pool to swimming in it morning, noon, and night.
That said, what sites get tab real estate in my browser is still an important indicator of where my social media consumption is heading. My current lineup is Plaxo Pulse (reminder/disclosure: I work for Plaxo), FriendFeed, Summize (which is now Twitter search; set to the query “plaxo”), Twitter, and Techmeme.
Truth be told, I’m using Twitter less and FriendFeed more. (FriendFeed got a mention in my post in April, but had not yet risen to “tab status.”) FriendFeed and Twitter Search help me as a marketer know what is on the minds of an influential demographic of early adopters. There are many folks I follow directly there — and many, many more I encounter based on searches. And, of course, this sort of social discovery provides opportunities for me to jump in to either start a conversation or contribute to one already going.
One question that I am often asked is, “How do you use FriendFeed and Plaxo? Why both?” That’s actually really easy. I use FriendFeed to track and engage in public discourse, and I use Plaxo Pulse to share content and conversations privately with my family, my friends, and my coworkers, and to stay better connected with my extended business network.
On the production side, I am mindful that many bloggers are struggling to find the time to keep producing good long-form content in a 140-character attention span world. I, too, am not immune, and I find that my posting frequency here has dropped since April considerably. That said, I find that Plaxo and FriendFeed are *both* becoming good drivers of readership.
Perhaps the biggest change in my engagement with social media is my jump into video. Together with Joseph Smarr and David Recordon, I’ve launched an Internet TV show called The Social Web TV. We’ve launched using Viddler for hosting and streaming the video, and the blog is on TypePad from SixApart. It is really invigorating to tackle the challenge of producing a great show every week. (Shout out to Gary Vaynerchuk and Robert Scoble who inspired me to take the leap.)
The Real McCrea 