Thanks!

I’ve felt a bit overwhelmed by all my connecting methods lately. Ever since accepting the position of social media manager at SAS I’ve felt I needed to beef up my online presence. I started blogging in 2003 but I haven’t blogged about work until I started this blog, and that makes me feel at a disadvantage. At least once a day on the blogs or Twitter feeds of the social media gurus I follow I hear about something that I’m either not doing or not doing to its full potential. Steve Rubel is the worst (or best, I suppose). I’m convinced he makes his morning toast on his iPhone, via Gmail. I was awake at midnight Saturday, in bed with my laptop, with a vague feeling I needed to be doing something with my Facebook profile, or checking in on the groups I’m following but not, you know, following. And then there’s my LinkedIn profile, and should I be using TweetDeck, and do I have Twitter alerts set up and what was the tool that Jim Tobin mentioned last week that made his BlackBerry beep whenever someone mentioned him on Facebook? Or was it Twitter? And do I even need that?

So the idea of an Internet fast sounds appealing, and also terrifying. Does that mean I’ve let social media become the equivalent of a dozen new inboxes that need to be dealt with? And if I go cold turkey (heh) on the Web this Thanksgiving, where am I going to look for stuffing recipes? A cookbook? What is this, 1952?

Have you condsidered an Internet fast? What would you miss the most?

Good Afternoon

 

My name is Tammy, I live in Florida and I make handmade jewelry. I would like to know if you would have a possible interest in seeing my items on my website?

 

Thank you in advance.

 

Sincerely,

 

Tammy

And this one, which is at least concise:

open attachment file read and reply my letter business proposal from abdulla khouri

I’m getting a similar feeling from Twitter these days. I love the concept. I love the immediacy. I love being able to see what people are doing and reading and recommending in such a short format. As a writer I find it a fascinating exercise in brevity and craft. But come on, how do you keep up with it? I just added half a dozen people in the last couple of days, for a total of 60 people I’m following, and I already feel overwhelmed. Guy Kawasaki alone sent 54 tweets in the last 23 hours. With an inbox holding 2,000+ emails that need to be read, deleted or filed, I get enough of that feeling from my Web 1.0 channels.

I just downloaded TweetDeck in the vague hope it would provide some relief, but while a nice interface, it doesn’t really address the problem of having enough time to read it all. I’ve starred quite a few tweets that contain links to articles I want to read later, but now I have a backlog of tweets to follow up on. Did I mention I have 2,000 emails in my inbox? How about the number of unread items in my Google Reader? I don’t need another firehose.

Is Twitter really a positive development in communication? Or will we start seeing articles in the next couple of years by people describing how they’ve increased their productivity by, as impossible as it sounds, turning off Twitter. “At first it was hard, and my colleagues had difficulty adjusting, but now I realize I’m getting more done.”

Does that mean that even davebtommy.com is taken?

I’m pretty sure that when I bought my first domain, plooble.com, I paid $150 for it. I came home late one Saturday night and had an email from Mindspring offering to sell me my own domain. How could I pass that up? I don’t remember what I paid for domain #2, dbthomas.net. Dbthomas.com was taken at the time but a few years later a domain broker sent me an email telling me it had become available and offering to sell it to me for 30 bucks. I went to GoDaddy and got it for $8.95.

Amazing now that $150 ever seemed a reasonable price for a domain. I’m glad I got the ones I did when I did. Or else maybe www.davebtommylive.com would sound like a bargain.

Although I am going to start introducing myself as Dave B. Tommy, Live.

On reading the piece I realized it’s not taking that direction at all. Venture investment in Web 2.0 startups is down, whereas investment in sustainable energy startups is going up. Still, I’m sure the headline will stick in some people’s minds: Web 2.0 is out, green is in.

I’m glad I work at a company that’s pursuing them both. Not only is our solar farm scheduled to go live in December, but we’ve also broken ground on a new office building and customer visit center that will incorporate a wide variety of green features. And we have a new product, SAS for Sustainability Management, that helps companies measure and manage their environmental impact.

As for 2.0, we have an active Marketing 2.0 Council engaged in understanding 2.0/social media initiatives and strategizing how we can use them effectively. And we’ve just hired our first Social Media Manager (me). No one is talking about how one focus is better than the other. No one is saying, “Let’s stop all this social media nonsense and spend more time on green.” In fact, we’re talking about how social media can help us tell our corporate social responsibility story. It’s a natural fit, when you think of it, and I’ll write more about that as we go along.

One of the many things I’m learning from social media is that we have the capacity to hold many ideas, concepts and pieces of information in our brains at the same time. The multitasking we thought we mastered in the ’90s is but a pale imitation of what we’re capable of now. So we can make room for green and 2.0 at the same time, can’t we?

Online I was usually dbt001, because with a name like mine, it’s hard to get an email address or username other than something like DavidBThomas3369.

When I started working at SAS in May of 2007, I arrived to find a nameplate on my door reading “Dave Thomas” and an email address to match. What the heck, I thought. I’ll just go with that.

Then I heard John T. Mims speak at the Ragan Communications Web 2.0 conference held on campus at SAS. One of John’s tips for participating in social media was to build your name as your brand. People with a common name need to do something to stand out in Web searches, John suggested. That’s why he started using his middle initial.

That got me thinking. If you search for “Dave Thomas,” you’re going to get an awful lot of search results, almost all of them not me, and many about the late hamburger pitchman. (People still insist on reminding me we share a name – I know, thanks). If you Google “David B. Thomas,” you’ll still find a lot of people, but you’ll also find me – three times on the first page of results. So now I’ve started using my B again. Where possible, on Twitter for instance, I’ve changed my username from dbt001 to DavidBThomas. It was either that, or change my name to Marmalade P. Vestibule.

When I first started blogging in 2003, along with a small cadre of friends, we all sought to be anonymous on the Web. It just seemed like the thing to do. My blogroll included Adda, Rebecky, Mykull and Pinky. You would need to scour their sites with the acuity of a Federal corruption investigator to figure out what town we even lived in. What were we worried about, exactly?

Five years later, not only am I writing a post about my name, but I’m on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Orkut (I think), Flickr and Friendfeed. If you want, you can find out what’s in my Netflix queue. I take care not to post anything potentially controversial or damaging to any of those outlets, but I don’t really do anything potentially controversial or damaging these days, publicly or privately.

Things have gone so far in the opposite direction that we’re now seeing public service announcements aimed at teenagers reminding them that anything they post online lives forever. As for my generation (X) social media seems to be teaching us it’s okay to be online and open and honest about your life and who you are. That knowledge is seeping through to the companies we work for. I’m still holding my breath for the first big “social media crisis” I may have to face. But maybe by the time it happens, I’ll be able to spend my time addressing it rather than defending our participation in those channels.

What’s the opposite of anonymity? Nymity?

It’s definitely a step in the right direction over the paper phone book-style directories they used to print and distribute the same way. But I couldn’t help wondering why they don’t just eliminate the distribution step and rely on their web directory? If they’ve already decided to forsake non-computer users, how much more of an incremental step is it to assume that people with computers – especially in this town – have Internet access?

I’ve struggled with a similar question at various previous companies; When do you stop printing your collateral and just rely on your Web site and other electronic resources? The answer, so far, has always come down to the same thing: The sales folks like to be able to put something tangible in customers’ hands.

Besides, if you don’t have a company magazine, what will you leave lying on tables in your waiting areas? Laptops?

Actually, why not?

Still, it all starts to sound a bit odd. For one thing, the paper was written by the 304 Military Intelligence Battalion Open Source Intelligence Team. That’s quite a name. Do you think they get special berets? What would their badge look like? An eagle with a keyboard in one talon and a mouse in the other?

Maybe soon we’ll be deploying social media denial teams into Iraq and Afghanistan.