Concerned Citizens

I’ve been adding more and more to my social media toolkits lately. I’m now on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and I’m blogging on three different blogs. I’ve also made Facebook my home page on both my laptop and my cell phone. I text and I e-mail. I’d say I’m pretty connected. These days I may be too connected as I’ve found that as others join these channels I’m starting to drop into information overload of a trivial nature. Now I have friends on Twitter and Facebook telling me if they are feeling good, bad, or just feeling. Note to them: Too much information!

Okay, that was kind of strong but it probably got your attention right? If any of you have joined these networks you find them useful at times but sometimes the usefulness is drowned out by useless status comments. Here are some examples (I’ve dropped the names to protect the innocent): “xxx is back to Day 1″, “xxx is wanting someone to tell me something good”, “xxx is at work and try to get his hands warm”, or “xxx is looking forward to a great weekend ahead!”

Sorry if I found some of you in these statuses but I hope you’ll understand more the reason for noting them after reading this posting. You see, I’ve found that I’m enjoying Facebook because aside from the stuff you saw above it also gives me great information. I find out if someone will be in town, I discover new events that are happening around town, or I get details about particular events as they happening. I also find people with similar interests like me. Mine recently was “Randy is recovering from a day of upsets. So many of the titans fell yesterday in incredible games. Isn’t March Madness great?”

In that one status I found other friends who are March Madness fanatics like me and had opinions on the games yesterday. I connected through the social media. But I did it because I put relevant context in the status. Hopefully you’re starting to see where I’m going. There’s an art to statusing that a lot of people need to learn and understand.

I don’t want to turn the statuses off. In fact I can’t on Twitter. However I did find a little trick on Facebook. You can go to the bottom and select “Options for news feeds.” There you can set friends you don’t want to get status updates from a the bottom of the page on the right. You can also adjust the level of updates you get with the cool slider bars. Needless to say I have put a few friends in “status jail” for now.

So in the future if you status, let me know what you’re doing that has some context. Tell me what’s cool about it or what you don’t like. But please, don’t tell me you’re breathing or resting or sitting or standing or … I really could care less. Well, not totally true but I want to know more about you than basic body functions.

Oh, and to finish this out, I happened to get an IM from a friend on Facebook while writing this blog entry. While he didn’t have any context with the status it made sense – “xxx is status-less for the time being… Please stay tuned.” I like it.