Horses for courses – which social media tools?

Given I rate a mention in Tom Reynolds’ latest post, I figure I should contribute back. Tom opens with this:

“Of late I’ve noticed a strangely snobbish and superior attitude emerging amongst so called social media experts (I hasten to add most are in fact genuine social media experts!) towards Facebook.

Sure, they love their twitter and spend hours tweeting, replying and retweeting and explaining to “idiots” why Twitter is such a great resource, yet they regard Facebook as being some sort of opiate for the masses, a place where the great unwashed gather.

We’ve seen Scoble fall in and out of love with Facebook , and go bananas over Friend Feed (which I am slowly coming round to), but I am curious about a few Australian folk and how they approach Facebook.”

As with all my clients, and anyone who even just asks, social media tools have to be horses for courses. Some will want to blog, for others it will be Twitter, for still others, Facebook. And so on. There will only ever be a few – those of us who can dedicate the time – whose social media use is truly cross- or inter-channel.

Tom calls out Robert Scoble for special mention. Scoble is a special case, and just using the tools in the most effective way is a big part of his job. But for most of us, use of many tools is a burden (even for me). Without the ability to compartmentalise or conversely, integrate, our use of social tools, there’s massive potential for some unpleasant cognitive overload and the concomitant abandonment of the tools.

Accompanying the ability to use the tools at all is the need for a reason. Unless a particular tool solves a problem, why use it at all? While I use many social media tools, here’s just a couple of examples of why I use some of them:

• my blog – mostly longer form writings to express opinion, to influence others, to establish subject matter authority and to entertain
• Twitter – status messages in the form of “I am”, “I need” and “I have found”
• LinkedIn – professional history, feedback from others and occasional Group and Answer contribution (adding value)
• Facebook – largely to see where my connections are and what they are up to but now also a growing amount of event management and organisation

So, you can see that each tool has a somewhat different focus, a different potential audience and solves a different problem.

It’s for this reason, that Facebook has only just seen me add a page specifically for acidlabs and take on the management of the Social Media Club Canberra group and the happenings there. Until now, Facebook has been something I use, but not as much as others, like Twitter and my blog. My Facebook profile contains stuff that is both personal and professional (but nothing I wouldn’t show my Mum, for example). It’s very deliberately that way – no Zombies, no gifting, etc.

My use of many tools, including Faccebook, is growing as I see a need or gap or have an idea that needs testing. If you look back on this blog, I have more than one post asking questions about the value of Twitter (I almost wish I could delete them, but that would be cheating).

I do use Friendfeed and a few other tools (Twitter, Dopplr, Flickr) to push updates from other social networks into my Facebook lifestream. While it’s an imperfect solution, it does pretty much aggregate what I’m up to in one place for those who absolutely need to know what I’m doing – for God’s sake, don’t tell me who you are, I don’t want to know

I disagree with Tom’s assertion that Facebook is “opiate of the masses” stuff – it’s completely about problems solved and benefits gained. Certainly, for the people I actually know in real life that I consider to be knowledgeable about social media – Scoble notwithstanding, as I have met him, but I doubt he remembers – Facebook is one of many tools that may or may not fulfill a given need.

I’ve been a part of more than one conversation with experts such as Laurel Papworth on “which is the best social network”. The answer is none of them. They each have different models and meet different needs.

My personal and professional view is that all these tools have value – each one has merits and hassles. Any person or organisation testing the waters with any of them needs to give them time andfind which one or ones is the best fit.

So, I don’t necessarily agree with Tom that the social media “experts” (are any of us) are hating on Twitter. I certainly don’t. YMMV.

Related posts

• Hasbro missed the boat on Scrabulous (2)
• Work (0)
• Why are we even arguing about this? (8)
• Where is my continuous partial attention? (1)
• What does a social media consultant do? (7)

Tagged as: community, facebook, social media