I’m sorry it’s been a while. Not sure you missed me like I missed you, but being ill, travelling loads and doing my first speaking engagement in years (at Ecole Hotelier Lausanne, which went really well), not to mention continuing to try and be a better dad and husband have meant that you’ve had to take a back seat.
Leave it to those crazy French Canadians to try an experiment like getting all your news from social media for five days (coverage from the Guardian and The Toronto Star). The problem with this experiment is that Social media as a tool depends on your connections. More so today than ever before, who you friend and follow is really important to how successful you’ll be using social media for anything.
Recently, Facebook launched customised news channels, where you can friend and follow CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times and other outlets, as well as individual contributors like Katie Couric and CNBC’s Nicole Lapin.
If you’re following CNN, the Guardian, BBC news and other news outlets on Twitter I think you’re likely to be pretty informed. But it all depends on who you follow! If you’re not connected, not following, not friending then don’t rely on the medium for your news.
The same goes with any task oriented participation through social media. If you want to get a job through twitter, follow people in HR, conduct searches for words like “job” “hiring” etc. Use Linkedin for the job hunt and you should be okay using just social media for leads (I’d never just use any one medium for a task like this, but that doesn’t change the fact that you could do it pretty successfully).
The lesson is social media can be good for almost anything, but if you don’t participate and commit, it’s likely to be good for nothing. It’s a tool, and like any tool it’s only as good as the person wielding it.
