Social Media is a distraction…
Unless it’s your job. I hear and read that ‘social media’ isn’t working, that it offers no results, that it’s a distraction, that it prevents you from doing the job that matters, that it’s a waste of time, taking up most of your time and leading nowhere. I believe it depends on how you use it, who uses it and the purpose behind it. Like everything else, there are different sides to it. Perhaps, interacting with people, building relationships with them, creating emotional bonds, offering and getting feedback, answering private messages on Facebook requesting information, building brand perception, starting conversations, reading blogs, sharing useful information, creating leads, calls to action that work, reading many RSS feeds, adding value to your community and much more is actually your job.
A Challenge For You
Many people will tell you they can’t find the time to do all that. Let me challenge you here by asking the following: Would your business improve by doing all of the above? We often do all this on automatic, without paying attention to the most important side of it: the human side, the side that makes you care about the people you connect with. Even if it isn’t part of your job, we all connect and interact with people online. Could it be part of your job?
The Other Side
All that work we believe has nothing to offer, which we occasionally believe has nothing to do with us, is really part of what the new Internet has to offer us with regard to unlimited interaction, relations and information. We could find something to do and do it endlessly until we hit a wall. You’ll probably find it isn’t your job to do it or that you didn’t find the results you were expecting with it or that the processes aren’t fast enough. OK then, we can try hundreds of platforms, tools and practices to experiment with: something is bound to happen. All this in addition to what the community has to offer us, what goes on in Twitter, on your friends’ walls, on your Facebook home page, on your Pinterest board, in your blog, the constantly updated information in your RSS feed.
However, many of us remain unperturbed, doing what we’ve always done, thinking that the Internet isn’t our job: it’s just a way of getting away from the noise, it doesn’t mean that it has a positive impact on our decisions or plans…
How addicted are you to the social media? What would happen if everything that could be your job was something that mattered to you? Could you create online work processes to work on for two hours on Monday and Wednesdays?
Photo credit: careers guardian.