Monday, August 9, 2010

Managing the 3Cs of Social Participation

In a professional environment, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the three "Cs" of social media engagement -- contacts, content and connections.

There are blogs to read. Tweets to follow. LinkedIn updates to evaluate. Trends, chats and discussions to monitor. And, of course, you still have to find time to perform the responsibilities of your job.

Dawn Foster recently penned an excellent post for WebWorkerDaily that presents a series of best practices she employs to manage this information overload.

Personally, I rely on a number of Web 2.0 tools to help bring structure to the social chaos. For instance, I've been a long time user of Google Reader and Social Mention.

This weekend I spent a few hours exploring a couple of other applications that I'm now trying out:

1. NutShellMail from Constant Contact consolidates the updates from your social networks and delivers them to your Email inbox in a single message.

2. Lazyfeed helps you monitor channels of content on the Web by topic to identify content to blog about, tweet, share with others, etc.

3. Sprouter is an online community of entrepreneurs organized by topic, event and activity.

2 comments:

laurent said...

Marc,

May I suggest just one more C?

C as in Community. Because social media is really a network of peer networks (aka community). Relevant communities for a brand or a marketer in a brand is likely to be where the right contacts are, connections develop and relevant conversations (i.e content + publishing/sharing/creation of it) take place.

Marc Hausman said...

@laurent - thanks for the comment and "yes" very good point about the fourth "c" -- community.

Contacts/connections organized along a common theme or interest is certainly a community.