Social Media Tune Up

After several years of active involvement with blogging, social networking and what we now call social media, I am very conscious of the need, in the business context, to have some strategies and systems in place, firstly to retain our sanity and then to achieve our business objectives.

We also need, from time to time and preferably on a scheduled basis, a tune up.

We need to get under the hood, do some cleaning up, tightening, cleaning, polishing and general tuning for better performance.

“We” includes, of course, me. Although I can’t for a moment pretend I’ve been as systematic, frequent or generally efficient in the matter as I need to be.

This has been brought home to me by my experience over the past couple of days with my Twitter acount.

I started to take a look at the Twitter account with the idea of having a quick tidy up – sorting out who I was actually following and why, who was following me, organizing lists, and so on. It turned into a bigger, more time-consuming job than I had anticipated, but now I feel much more in control of what’s going on.

There is a lot more to be done. The process of reviewing and taking action on Twitter has made me rather conscious of a more general need to take concerted action to get my own social media wagon tidied up, tuned up and ticking over nicely.

So here is the challenge I have set myself. Over the next few weeks I will be going over some key areas of my social media activity, do a tune up for each and report the process here with a series of blog posts. In the process I’ll share information about any tools I’ve been able to use to facilitate the exercise.

My hope is that, as well as getting me up to speed, one or more of those posts may help or encourage someone else who, like me at present, is in a “not perfectly organised” mode.

The list of key platforms or areas of activities is:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Delicious
• This Blog
• Flickr
• RSS Feeds – mainly my BlogBridge account

As I have done most of the work now on Twitter, that will be the subject of the first of the promised reports.

Image: Hot rod, Wintersun Festival, Coolangatta, 2009, by Des Walsh – some rights reserved