Social Media and Social Networking are fun, rewarding and can be very time absorbing. Sooner or later though, you have to ask yourself a fundamental question: why am I doing it?

All you bloggers – why do you blog? All you Social and Business Networking site addicts, why are you members?

Bloggers

Why do you blog? Is it altruistic, happily sharing information with anyone who will read what you have written? Did you get seduced by one of the “You can make a fortune out of blogging” scams but are still waiting for the money? Is it to complement your business, keeping clients, colleagues, prospective clients up to date with your activities and offers? Unless it’s the first reason, how are you doing? Is your blogging helping your business to grow?

Analyse your time – how much time do you spend going from one site to another, seeking that “one missing, vital insight”? As Seth Godin wrote last week, reading is not doing! It’s easy to waste days reading expert after expert and what do you end up with? Paralysis by analysis together with a severe case of information overload! I’ve done it and, as my primary school teacher used to say “it’s not clever and it’s not grown up!”

It was a shock for me to realise that I’d owned some of the most important pdfs about setting up and running successful blogs and static sites for quite a while. But I’d got them when I was in a mad goldrush to get as much info as possible so they stayed on my hard drive, unread.

And I had wasted so much time since, trying to find information I already had! If I think of that wasted time, how much different things could be if I’d used it “doing”, rather than “researching”. You can add to the time wasting, the hours I spent tweaking my site’s design, rather than writing or doing things to draw traffic to the site. Part of a step forward in my personal development has been realising that pursuing Social Media for its own sake is a severe case of the emperor’s new clothes, unless you are a social media commentator or consultant.

How many of you (me included) have products and/or services that are not on your site and that could be earning you money? At the very least, they could be drawing people in.

Social and Business Networking

How many sites have you joined? I came across a software site the other day that sold an app that will register you automatically with the top 150 social networking sites… why? What’s the point? I’m in the process of quitting those few sites I have joined as I can’t keep up with the e-mails and messages. And that makes me look bad!  So, I’m going to cut right back for the time being to LinkedIn, ecademy, Twitter and Facebook (and the latter only because it’s the easiest way to keep in touch with my wife’s family and our friends in South Africa.)

Focus

For me, this year is about focus; Chris Brogan introduced me to the concept of having keywords for the year rather than New Year’s resolutions and focus is one of mine. Focus on clients, on quality networking and on using time profitably – that doesn’t mean that every moment has to be monetised, far from it.

But every working moment has to contribute to success as I have defined it for myself. Yes that includes time for networking, for building supportive relationships; it includes time for acts of altruism too as giving without expectation of a return is an important value. In on-line terms, it’s about identifying those people with whom I would like to connect, engage and share with at a deep level. It’s also about making sure that key off-line relationships are nurtured.

Time Management

It’s going to be tough! I’ve already started reducing the number of feeds from blog sites and making a plan for returning to my roots with my own blogging. I’m not an SM expert, yet I’ve spent far too much time recently writing about SM rather than personal and organisational development. Focus and minimalism is the way forward for me, at least in the number of sites of which I am a member.

I’m also going to cut back to three posts a week at each blog during the working week and the review of the SM week here at the weekend, as people seem to enjoy it and I’ve sorted out an efficient workflow.

Although many of the tools may be free, social networking isn’t. There’s always an opportunity cost, if only for the time spent and sooner or later there has to be a return on the time invested.

Anybody interested in joining me in this exercise?