So why the absence?

Well I had to make a conscious decision over the Christmas holiday to take enforced leave from social media engagement (especially about getting my pants in too tight a virtual bunch about the state of a restaurant’s loo).  It was all getting a bit too all-consuming (I was spending up to four hours a day on it) and what with home and work it all got overwhelming.  So I decided to take a break.

As I forced my brain to avoid laptop-based words I rediscovered reading fiction – you know, the old type, in books (including the Stieg Larsson ‘Millennium Trilogy’ which is very addictive).  So by fitting in book reading my lack of free time was even further exacerbated by access to less waking hours in my day…

Since the start of the year I’ve become sleepier than I have ever been before.  I just cannot wake up in the morning and this isn’t vintage Crump behaviour… for at least the last decade I have been someone who wakes up before the alarm clock, between 5 and 6 am, seven days a week.  Now I can sleep until midday and am really struggling to get out of bed every morning. So why the change?

My friends it’s all down to (lack of) nicotine.  Yes, I am delighted to report is that I have managed to stop smoking (since the second week in January). After 18 years of smoking I’ve stopped and it really is brilliant.  I feel so much better (despite having gained 5 kgs – the appetite is back!).  I used to (embarrassingly) smoke between three to five fags (plus a couple of glasses of diet coke) for breakfast. So the fact is that my body isn’t craving nicotine (oh and awaiting a jolt of caffeine) and forcing it to wake up to get its fix.

So lack of nicotine stimulation means that I get up to three more hours sleep a night (a morning!) creating a big squeeze on my time to surf, blog, keep on top of my google reader and generally engage.

But guess what, I’ve missed my tapping away on my laptop, my google reader, and my tweetdeck.  I need to formalise a plan for managing it all but its back on my ‘to do’ list.

So the things I’ve learnt in the last three months:

• Being smoke free is genuinely liberating
• A few extra kgs (with a plan for removal with a bout of cycling) is not all that bad
• Getting more sleep is ace (and I hate the alarm clock with a passion)
• Reading words which aren’t backlit (on paper) is fab
• You need to plan to do stuff that you enjoy (i.e. wittering away right here)

:+) x

My gmail is neilphilipcrump@gmail.com – so add me to your contacts and invite me to a wave – desperate to try it out with lots of people on it at the same time – the video demos make it look brilliant.

• LinkedIn profile and some were actively engaging in group discussion
• Facebook profile (no one admitted to playing one of those annoying farming games!)
• Twitter account and were actively tweeting and retweeting
• Google reader and actively followed blogs

Nearly all of them had an element of social media strategy in their communication programmes.  Most had an avatar and a couple had a personal blog.

The interesting thing is that if I had asked this question two or more years ago virtually none of the above would be the case.  The popularity of social media and therefore its influence is growing massively.  Check out this amazing video from Socialnomics - have your sound on for a bit of uplifting Fatboy Slim…

Crazy stats or what!

So a quick question for you to answer by leaving a comment…

How many hours so you think that you spend engaging in social media in a typical week?

I won’t go through all the details but Phil Baumann has written an excellent article on it here.  In the post he covers some very interesting points.  I just left a comment on his blog that makes me sound a bit like I have social media phobia (which I do not :+)).  It read…

This is a really excellent article on sidewikis – I’ve been googling away trying to get a good understanding for the last few days and there was this post just sitting there in my reader! You have summed everything up brilliantly. My concern is that there is no notification function to inform you that a sidewiki has been left on a page. If you are running a huge website then how can you keep track of this? Especially since if this is meant to encourage engagement then you wouldn’t know if the comment is there whether or not it is a bitch-slap or a compliment. I love to engage – it is just that now we have to check every page of our blogs / websites that we run in order to do it!!!

Do you get my point – you are literally going to have to hunt down people’s sidewiki comments (oh boy).

This aside it really is an interesting development.  If someone is dissatisfied with a person, an association or a company they can literally put a comment (as long as it follows Google’s policy) that can be seen by anyone on that page.  Crazy world hey!

The challenging thing though is that people could easily publish inaccurate information – this is a bit worrying in settings where what people write could have a serious impact, say for example in the area of healthcare (in which I work)…  Someone could post an ill informed or inaccurate entry with medical advice that another person might act upon.  This could have potentially fatal outcomes.  Eekk.

…I am not a big techie nerd so I’m not sure how this will evolve – maybe it will remain in the world of the geeks and will pass us by (although my gut says this won’t happen – remember when you didn’t use RSS functionality?  OK YOU still might not but millions of other people out there do and it has changed the way they sift through information on the web.

Anywho folk in the meantime if you have a blog or website I reckon you should have a little read up, download the toolbar, keep an eye out and prepare to engage…

Enjoy…