Managing social media fatigue

Earlier in the week, a colleague emailed me a post on social media fatigue.

A brief perusal of it, gave me social media anxiety, instead. A minute into it, I fatigued and dropped the post from my mind.

That is, until I dropped by chance onto Andrew Shuttleworth’s blog, who blogs on social media in Japan, and who drew up the original aforementioned mindmap of what he calls “Social Media Information Flow.”

Well, this time, my attention was captured and I took a better look at his graph.

Andrew wanted to figure out how all the information he creates online, flows through. He discovered that there were 12+ different types of online info flows in his world. He then wanted to configure how to do organize and manage the information in the most efficient way possible. (This is where my anxiety begins: I get drowsy and give up, making up excuses.)

But I plugged away at it, because as Alex Iskold writes, in our “Attention Economy,” managing our limited attention or “scarcity of attention” is key to both individual and market success. (And to protecting my sanity.)

Josh Cantone points out the key point in Andrew’s work:

“One of the approaches that is currently gaining steam, especially in the area of social networking, is data portability.

Data portability will allow users to theoretically mashup and interact with all of their social media information from a single place. While that won’t cut down the number of sites and services tugging at our attention, it does promise to make managing that attention vastly easier. Shuttleworth points to services like Profilactic and Plaxo Pulse that are already attempting to bring our online social lives under a single umbrella.”

Last summer I was considering buying a UMPC to consolidate my data to a more portable-friendly hardware device.

Now, the question is different, but it concerns a similar issue of managing and organizing information: mine, yours and ours.