Just about everyone I know has written about the new “yuppie flu” we’re calling “social media fatigue.” There are valid perspectives on the position that we (consumers, corporations)
are inundated with and overwhelmed by the demand to be social. Communication overload is as old an affliction as, probably, speech itself. I’m pretty sure the third phrase that ever evolved was loosely translated to “would ya just shut up already?” (The first had to do with food, the second; sex. I’m sure of it.)
On the business side — I totally agree with my friend Rusty Speidel who wrote his opinion that not all businesses require a social solution. It may surprise you to know Idon’t think social platforms are the be-all, end-all to doing business and I certainly don’t think that social media represents a series of stand-alone tactics. I have a really hard time with a business that wants to plunge into social media engagement without even knowing where they’re going. The companies without consistent branding, messaging and media relations plans in place too often are getting ahead of themselves creating an online presence not remotely supported by content that is strategic or that has a recognizable purpose.
That’s the kind of stuff I, too, would like to see stop.
As a consumer, I don’t feel the need to engage socially 24/7. Even though I make part of my living providing social media counsel and education, I typically totally unplug on the weekends. I manage my engagement to a level of comfort, and freely unsubscribe, unfollow, remove and delete without compunction or guilt.
I will not (ever) “friend” a business and I have to really be interested in your content to actively follow you on Twitter, like your business page, or read your blog content. There is just FAR to much content, for even a hyper content consumer such as myself, to absorb. I value my time — all of it — and I’m not going to waste it on anyone offering me yet another solution I don’t need, a sale I’m not going to take advantage of or a loyalty program that has no pull on my purse strings.
Many people have reached a saturation point — so many that it’s been branded “social media fatigue.” I’m tired of hearing about it, frankly. (Sitting, drinking a beer between this guy and this guy as they argued about it pushed me to my breaking point.) Enough already.
Social strategy is part of communications strategy. Social media represents a fleet of tools we can use to help us communicate. For businesses, this must be applied carefully and not with the broad brush formerly used in media relations or direct marketing.
As consumers, it’s our individual personal responsibility to “clear the mechanism.” That quote comes from one of my favorite baseball movies, For Love of the Game, which I realize dates me and makes you realize that I’m older than you thought I was. In it, the pitcher played by Kevin Costner, uses the mantra “clear the mechanism” while on the pitcher’s mound to negate the sound of the crowd and to focus only on sending a perfect pitch over the plate. (*Editor’s note: I changed this post; originally I said the movie was Bull Durham, another baseball movie favorite but thanks to Jeff Uphoff, a baseball movie authority, realized my mistake. Thanks, Jeff!)
Consumers need to do this as well — clear the deck, shut down the programs, pare down the reading lists and above all, get rid of the crazy amounts of notifications you’re getting from all of these platforms. I’m stunned to learn how many of you get e-mail notifications daily from LinkedIn, from Facebook, from Twitter and/or Google+. For goodness’ sakes, no wonder you’re fatigued — get rid of that stuff. You don’t need it. Lord knows the last thing anyone needs is more e-mail.
If you’re a consumer feeling overwrought by communication, clear the mechanism.
If you’re a business feeling the pressure to use social media, question the process, the tools and the direction that strategy is headed. There may very well be steps you’re unwisely leapfrogging to get there.
You were stuck in the middle. That was pretty funny.
@steinarknutsen It was hilarious, actually. I’m glad to have friends who can discuss, argue and still enjoy a beer together. Even if rusty speidel gets cranky 🙂
@Marijean@steinarknutsenrusty speidel Whatever. 😉
I think the fatigue is a function of the fad aspect. There’s peer pressure to be engaged in social media and, as you pointed out with businesses, many people create accounts without knowing precisely why. I’m one of them. For me, it’s because I don’t understand things or learn about them easily by reading about them or hearing about them; I need to engage in the experience and see what happens.
Beyond just having accounts, however, there’s lots of conventional wisdom (though understanding how quickly things become conventional eludes me, a bit) about engagement. It’s no good to have a Twitter account if your Klout is 11! Posting to your blog less than once per week means you’ll never get readers! Don’t just post, engage! And so on.
The truth is, not everyone has that much to say. I know that I don’t. And I’m not always feeling clever. And some stuff simply isn’t your business. So, I may post in bursts, once in a while, or not at all for long stretches. In current parlance, this makes me a negligible presence on the web. OK.
In addition to the Fashion & Style (F&S) pressure, though, there’s another kind of pressure that comes with recent strides in portable technology. There’s an implied obligation to be available, to be current (e.g., having read all of your emails at least, if not responded to them), and to be visible, transparent, accessible. I’ve actually heard people say that they wouldn’t frequent a business or hire a person who didn’t show up on Google. Really.
Twenty-some years ago I made a decision to never answer a phone unless I felt like talking. When caller ID became ubiquitous, I refined the commitment to “unless I felt like talking to the person calling.” To me, it seemed a simple point of courtesy: who want to talk with someone who doesn’t want to be talking with them?
I try to do similar things with social media. I don’t always check. I don’t read everyone’s pages. I don’t become a reliable presence. On purpose. I’m also aware that the more I do check social media and the more I do allow myself to receive information that way, the less inclined I am to write letters, visit, or phone people. I feel tapped out. Interactioned out.
My thresholds are particularly low for interaction, compared to most people. And yet, I have anecdotal evidence to suggest that this, too, is more common than we might think. I hear more and more people talking about feeling burnt from continual stimulation but choosing things like “reality” television for zoning out at the end of a day of quick hit communication with myriad friends and strangers. Physiologically, this means that their brains are getting no significant downtime. There are mood effects and metabolic effects that come from this.
Your clarity about putting boundaries around your engagement may be partly a function of it being your career. It’s important, though, to realize that such clarity is less common than it ought to be. Even I, who put tremendous stock in alone time and quiet, was surprised to discover how much I simply didn’t care when I took several unplugged days with my sweetie. This stuff is easy to leave behind. Because most of it hasn’t got the seeds of longevity. How many koan-worthy Tweets can any of us really write?
Input overload is real. We can see it in children as young as infancy. It brings with it a devaluing of silence, of true solitude. It goes hand in hand with the trends away from reflective contemplation and critical thought. Our academic testing and reports from hiring managers attest to the truth of the trending, yet we continue to cultivate new ways in which to engage one another.And yet…
Call me a radical, but I dream of the day when I’m able to return to a clinical practice lifestyle in which I use a computer less than once per day and am content to have a phone that isn’t smart. I’m no Luddite. I just know how I prefer to spend my time and what kind of stimulation makes my brain feel happy v. overloaded. In my heart’s eye, I think I’ll probably remember and reclaim a habit of fewer, deeper relationships when this happens.
I suspect I’ll always have email. Probably always have some other kinds of web presence, as well. And, I think I’m going to place a premium on maintaining a conscious sense of perspective such that verisimilitude and real life aren’t conflated or distorted into unsupportable shapes. Part of how I’ll do that is by cultivating deliberate ignorance. I will do my best to avoid learning all of the ins and outs of things. I don’t have a MySpace page and have no intention of joining FourSquare. I may end up ditching Facebook entirely, now that Google+ is ramping up. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, I will continue to learn from you and admire you, and to think about how to best incorporate social media in my work. Because you, my friend, are a very strong case for the best of what it has to offer.
I think the fatigue is a function of the fad aspect. There’s peer pressure to be engaged in social media and, as you pointed out with businesses, many people create accounts without knowing precisely why. I’m one of them. For me, it’s because I don’t understand things or learn about them easily by reading about them or hearing about them; I need to engage in the experience and see what happens.
Beyond just having accounts, however, there’s lots of conventional wisdom (though understanding how quickly things become conventional eludes me, a bit) about engagement. It’s no good to have a Twitter account if your Klout is 11! Posting to your blog less than once per week means you’ll never get readers! Don’t just post, engage! And so on.
The truth is, not everyone has that much to say. I know that I don’t. And I’m not always feeling clever. And some stuff simply isn’t your business. So, I may post in bursts, once in a while, or not at all for long stretches. In current parlance, this makes me a negligible presence on the web. OK.
In addition to the Fashion & Style (F&S) pressure, though, there’s another kind of pressure that comes with recent strides in portable technology. There’s an implied obligation to be available, to be current (e.g., having read all of your emails at least, if not responded to them), and to be visible, transparent, accessible. I’ve actually heard people say that they wouldn’t frequent a business or hire a person who didn’t show up on Google. Really.
Twenty-some years ago I made a decision to never answer a phone unless I felt like talking. When caller ID became ubiquitous, I refined the commitment to “unless I felt like talking to the person calling.” To me, it seemed a simple point of courtesy: who want to talk with someone who doesn’t want to be talking with them?
I try to do similar things with social media. I don’t always check. I don’t read everyone’s pages. I don’t become a reliable presence. On purpose. I’m also aware that the more I do check social media and the more I do allow myself to receive information that way, the less inclined I am to write letters, visit, or phone people. I feel tapped out. Interactioned out.
My thresholds are particularly low for interaction, compared to most people. And yet, I have anecdotal evidence to suggest that this, too, is more common than we might think. I hear more and more people talking about feeling burnt from continual stimulation but choosing things like “reality” television for zoning out at the end of a day of quick hit communication with myriad friends and strangers. Physiologically, this means that their brains are getting no significant downtime. There are mood effects and metabolic effects that come from this.
Your clarity about putting boundaries around your engagement may be partly a function of it being your career. It’s important, though, to realize that such clarity is less common than it ought to be. Even I, who put tremendous stock in alone time and quiet, was surprised to discover how much I simply didn’t care when I took several unplugged days with my sweetie. This stuff is easy to leave behind. Because most of it hasn’t got the seeds of longevity. How many koan-worthy Tweets can any of us really write?
Input overload is real. We can see it in children as young as infancy. It brings with it a devaluing of silence, of true solitude. It goes hand in hand with the trends away from reflective contemplation and critical thought. Our academic testing and reports from hiring managers attest to the truth of the trending, yet we continue to cultivate new ways in which to engage one another.And yet…
Call me a radical, but I dream of the day when I’m able to return to a clinical practice lifestyle in which I use a computer less than once per day and am content to have a phone that isn’t smart. I’m no Luddite. I just know how I prefer to spend my time and what kind of stimulation makes my brain feel happy v. overloaded. In my heart’s eye, I think I’ll probably remember and reclaim a habit of fewer, deeper relationships when this happens.
I suspect I’ll always have email. Probably always have some other kinds of web presence, as well. And, I think I’m going to place a premium on maintaining a conscious sense of perspective such that verisimilitude and real life aren’t conflated or distorted into unsupportable shapes. Part of how I’ll do that is by cultivating deliberate ignorance. I will do my best to avoid learning all of the ins and outs of things. I don’t have a MySpace page and have no intention of joining FourSquare. I may end up ditching Facebook entirely, now that Google+ is ramping up. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, I will continue to learn from you and admire you, and to think about how to best incorporate social media in my work. Because you, my friend, are a very strong case for the best of what it has to offer.
Marijean, this post is insightful on a number of levels. I agree with you 100% that social strategies need to be part of a larger communications and branding strategy. If you can’t keep your website current, you probably don’t need a blog or a twitter feed. Social strategies, in my opinion, are often the icing on the cake of an otherwise solid marketing and communications plan.
Social Media Fatigue reminds me of colleagues who complain about working their long hours, but who have incredibly inefficient time management skills in the office. If you choose to take on more social media than feels healthy for you, don’t get online to complain about it – get offline to take a break. Just like how, at the office, if you’re working long hours, don’t waste precious time in the office explaining to me how tired you are of being in the office. Stop being a martyr, get your work done, and go home to take care of yourself emotionally, physically, spiritually…It’s our individual responsibility to have enough self awareness (as you’ve articulated here that you possess) to know how much is too much, and to keep a healthy balance of online and offline time.
Thanks for another great post!
@MilliGFunk “Stop being a martyr,” oh AMEN. And there’s this ongoing one upmanship of who can be the bigger martyr at work as well. Yeesh. Thanks for the compliments!
Mari, I’m really laughing out loud after reading this line..”would ya just shut up already?” and it’s so true. If you feel tired, unplug from it all – simple. I applaud your taste on following people who matters most to you, as there have been plenty of folks who are gaming the system. These days, numbers don’t matter much if you can’t even get it to convert -to your sales funnel. On the subject of social media fatigue, I even read people tagging #sharepocalypse on Twitter as they continue to rant about it. In my experience, I had my share last year of that yuppie flu where it’s just too overwhelming ( and boring ) to post updates and schedule stuff on my social networking accounts, until I took matters into my own hands and created myself a nice fix. You see, what’s tiring is that you have to post stuff like a bot, when what you should be engaging with your peers instead. I’m glad that now, I am engaging 80% of the time and I find it more enjoyable to converse with people on the Social Web. What do you think? Love your post, by the way.
I just learned firsthand about “Clearing the Mechanism.” We just returned from our honeymoon, the first time ever we’ve taken 2 full weeks off in a row. We made a concerted effort to unplug. Once we crossed the US border, we turned off our phones and then locked them in the hotel safe, along with my iPad. The iPad only came out when we needed to look up a tour or a restaurant menu. Then it went back in the safe. The phones stayed off until we were back in the States.
This was probably the first time we have truly relaxed in about three years. DH is frequently on call. If a call comes in at 3am, he has to answer. My job is not as much 24 hour, but it is not uncommon for me to answer emails at 10pm or to trade texts with my boss on weekends. Even when we are “off” for a weekend and there are no special projects, we still feel tied to our phones. If someone calls, we answer. We check emails while watching TV.
For the past two weeks, I did not tweet. I did not post on Facebook. I didn’t talk to anyone familiar except my husband. And it was fabulous! In fact, I have yet to post pictures of either our wedding or honeymoon on Facebook. I’ll get to it, probably this week. But I no longer feel that urge to constantly update. We have decided that we need to unplug like this twice a year. Our brains will be happier for it. Our relationship will be better. And I believe that my followers and my job will benefit as well.