invoke media

Saturday, July 26th, 2008

Posted by Jenn Lowther

* This blog post is part of Invoke’s participation in the 2008 Vancouver Blogathon for Charity

Social Media is everywhere these days. In the past 6 months, I must have signed up to dozens of social media sites, used them once or twice and then abondoned then to the box of neglected toys. The onslaught started slowly. We made friendster/MySpace/Facebook profiles, some of us started personal blogs, we got digg, del.icio.us, flickr accounts, we have dozens of blogs in our RSS readers, we all signed up for linkedin to cover the professional side, we gave twitter (and a dozen or so twitter clones) a go - we’ve hit a tipping point, we are nearing Social Media overload.

With all of these social media sites that we belong to and follow through out the day, the issue of signal to noise ratio has really reached a head. We can only take in so much information and we have far surpassed that information threshold - our brain bandwidth has hit the breaking point!

Twitter is the perfect example of the issue with signal to noise. When twitter first started catching on, it was purely novel - Twitters’ function had not yet been defined and as such, it had a terrible signal to noise ration. The classic example of this is the person who twittered their bathroom breaks to prove the uslessness of the medium. As the site has grown and matured - along with the sites users, we have learned how to parse out this noise. We have learned to pay attention to who we friend and the signals to lookout for to identify spammy/useless users before they ever make it onto our twitter role.

What I have noticed lately is a new type of noise, that of the self important user who continuously uses the medium to promote themselves without giving back to the community. The problem with these users is far more insidious than the previous types of noise. Given the field we work in, they are probably someone that you have met or are likely to meet in the future. This said, it is far more difficult to unfriend them, as it may lead to awkward situations when you run into them in the future. I have even seen it go so far as the self important user publicly calling out and harassing the person that has unfollowed them - very childish I know.

This brings me to the point of this post. We need these users to be self identifying and correct their behaviour or abstain from trying to draw upon the resources of the community. Think about how you use the various social media mediums and ask yourself this question “Am I contributing more to this community than I am asking for from the community?” If the answer is yes, you are good. If the answer is no, you really do need to think long and hard about your involvement. The insdustry is small and we are all very bright individuals, we will be able to identify such a one sided relationship. We are not petty and it is very unlikely that we will publicly call you out on your poor behaviour, but we will remember this for the future when you need something from us. We will be far more hesitant to help you than we would be to the other members of the community who give back.

I thought that this was the perfect quote to sum up the article:

We had a microwave oven that would beep every minute until I turned it off. I called it a self-important device. - Eric Shonfeld

Please don’t make me turn you off!

Tags: Blogathon, signal to noise, social media, twitter

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2008 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Blogathon, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.