What Color Is Your Social Media Mood Ring

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What color is your social media mood ring?

Mine is ocher, going on brown. Let me explain.

Social media is starting to get a bit on my nerves. Of course, its perfectly normal that every now and then we get a bit exhausted with our habits. And as I come upon nearly a year of being fully engaged with social media in an analytic way, I’ve got to confess to a bit of exhaustion with it all. And by “analytic” I simply mean that the way I engage and think about social media is different than most people because it is also my business. I make my living with social media. Of course, it could be my mood and sure enough, tomorrow morning I’ll wake up, check the 100 or so emails in my inbox, begin heavily caffeinating and doing it all over again. I’ve got work to do and clients to service. I take that very seriously and that isn’t going anywhere.

But as a user of social media, I am just a bit tired of it all. So I made a list:

• I am tired of checking in on Foursquare.
• I am tired of downloading Google Analytic spreadsheets.
• I am tired of checking follower counts on Twitter.
• I am tired of scanning Tweetdeck looking for the good conversations.
• I am tired of ignoring friend requests from Facebook friends I don’t know.
• I am tired of staring at my RSS feeds and wondering where all the good content is.
• I am done with stumbling, digging, bookmarking, scheduling and monitoring.
• I barely interact with Facebook at all.

What does all this mean?

Not sure yet, and actually the interesting thing for me is deciding if whether what I am feeling is something that the broader culture will begin to feel sometime soon. I am not saying social media is going away, or that its not useful or powerful, or that businesses and brands shouldn’t be engaging and experimenting with it. I believe they should and furthermore I plan for a time when we don’t even use the term social media anymore.

But what I do have to plan for is how my current and future clients need to roll my internal barometer about social media into their own plans. What does this mean for them? Not sure yet, but perhaps it will result in urging clients to move a bit more slowly or to pare down the number of networks and communities they join and engage. Maybe this is all about finding quality. We had to see it all before we could know, once again, what we had no interest in seeing ever again.

So a simple question to my readers. What color is your social media mood ring?

Image Courtest of Team Dalog on Flickr

Tagged as: Exhaustion and Social Media, Mood Swings, Social Media Criticism