Social Media and Simplicity, Part 1: Reduce
Muhammad Saleem is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.
This post is part 1 of 10 in our groundbreaking series on how freelancers can use social media and the principles of simplicity to build their business.
We as human beings are always striving for efficiency. However, the harder we try, we somehow manage to complicate things for ourselves.
Just as we’re getting a foothold in the offline world, we have to compete in the online world.
Just as we think we have a fair presence, we’re rudely awakened by newer technologies that help new entrants propel themselves forward faster than we imagine.
Making changes and embracing new ideas and technologies can be difficult. Especially considering the prevailing notion that once you get sucked into the world of new media (i.e. the social web or web 2.0) that it will consume you and all your time and that there will be no turning back.
The idea behind this 10-part series is very simple. First, we want to disprove the notion that it’s either your business or the new web by providing a set of “tricks” that help you separate the signal from the noise and integrate useful technologies in your daily workflow. The tools that various social media sites provide us are revolutionizing how we conduct our business and our relationships online, and there is no reason that anyone should be left out.
You can be a freelancer or any other kind of web worker and still enjoy web 2.0, or even freelance through social media or use it to supplement your existing business. Second, we want to instill in you certain principles that help you work most efficiently with the tools you have and within the time you have, without getting bogged down by constraints.
Day 1 – The First Law of Simplicity: Reduce
The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
People often have misconceptions about integrating new media into their business portfolio or day-to-day workflow. That’s because there are so many different mediums within social media, and within each one there’s an abundance of sites that do virtually similar things. It is incredibly easy to get lost, confused, or waste time with something that may end up being inapplicable. What we want to do is limit ourselves to only the most important and most relevant, without compromising on any functionality or losing a potentially viable outlet for exposure.
Reduce ‘Medium’ Participation
Social media is somewhat difficult to define. It can include anything from a forum or a message board, to a blog, and of course services that have come to embody web 2.0, such as Wikis, social news sites, social networking sites, and photo/video hosting and sharing sites. Right away, the plethora of options can be confusing and can sound unnecessarily complicated to the point where it actually creates a barrier to entry for newcomers.
The first thing to keep in mind is that while it may not be impossible for you to dabble in all these different mediums, it is important that you ignore most of them.
By having clear goals in mind with respect to your existing business (or your freelance career) you can determine which of these sites provides most synergy for you. In doing so, you can reduce the number of different mediums you participate in and leverage.
For example, as an online marketing consultant, while I find it important to understand and keep in touch with what’s going on in the social news and social networking spheres, for the most part there is little reason for me to spend time on virtual world systems or look into video life-casting tools like Justin.tv. Pick 2-3 mediums that are most relevant and ignore the rest. A little research can go a long way in determining these mediums.
Reduce ‘Site’ Participation:
A problem that plagues social media (or Web 2.0) is that since it is so easy to emulate an existing platform, too many people have created me-too sites that accomplish nothing more than dividing the community across multiple platforms. For example, within social networking there is MySpace, Facebook, Classmates, Yahoo! Groups, MSN Spaces, Xanga, Orkut, and the list keeps going on and on!
The best advice I can give you is to determine not just the site that most of your friends use, but also the site that provides the best unique value proposition for you as a professional, and stick to that site. As for friends or professionals who use different networks, you’re much better off trying to convince them to switch than having to maintain profiles on multiple sites. As the number of networks you participate in increases, the marginal value you get out of this participation diminishes significantly.
Another thing that works like a charm for some platforms — for example, micro-blogging sites — is using third-party services that consistently maintain your profiles across sites. One such site, hellotxt, which saves you the trouble of updating your status messages on Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, Plaxo, Tumblr, and several others. Just type what you’re doing into hellotxt and it will update your profiles with that message across the board. If you absolutely have to join all these virtually similar sites, don’t worry yourself with maintaining each of them individually. Just go third-party!
Reduce Your Scope
For most of us, there are three major social media platforms that we can make work for us. The first is social news sites, the second is social networking sites, and the third, and my personal favorite (and the one I consider most important) is blogging. The bloggers among us already know this very well: a blog’s identity is tightly connected to your identity. If you don’t have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish, your blog can very easily lose its identity. A blog about everything is just as easily a blog about nothing (in particular). Know what you have and want to share with the world — your specialized knowledge gained from your experiences — choose a topic, and brand yourself accordingly.
As a great example, rather than focusing on online marketing in general, choose a specific focus like search engine marketing, affiliate marketing, blog marketing, viral marketing, or any of the other subcategories within online marketing. The same principle can be applied to the rest of your social web participation. Why participate on Reddit when you have Sphinn (“Sphinn is a social site for search and interactive marketers. It’s designed to allow you to share and discover news stories, read and take part in discussions, discover events of interest and network with others.”) By reducing your scope, you instantly increase your focus and rid yourself of unnecessary complexity.
Remember, there are no secrets. Less is often more, and the key is in creating and sharing value. As we said in the beginning, step 1 in achieving simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. If you don’t feel it’s right for you, get rid of it, and focus on an alternative that works for you.
For simplifying the rest of your life, check out John Maeda’s Blog.
3,200 freelancers surveyed globally. In-depth interviews with 10 notable freelancers.
Insights and information you can't afford to ignore!
Find Out More
With over 100 weekly comic strips and counting, Freelance Freedom is an institution around here. Check out of all NC's brilliant work in the archives.
Freelance Freedom Archives
Interested in contributing to FreelanceSwitch? Write for the foremost freelance community and help share knowledge for the benefit of all!
Become a Guest Writer
Very interesting topic, I look forward to reading the rest of the posts in this series. Social media has been a great resource for both ideas and traffic for my blog. If you work get noticed in social media and passed around it’s a great way to promote your work.
hellotxt sounds like a great service. I’ve been getting into twitter lately but it would be cool to have reach into those other similar sites as well. do you know how compatible it is with the other sites? for example, twitter has pretty small max length and converts urls to tinyurl – are all those kinds of things uniform with the other sites?
The web has a lot to offer, from entertainment, to education. It is easy to get lost into the web with its content, and images. Thanks for the advice.
Great article, this should be a good series.
Hi Freelancers and Switcher Staff,
This is off subject of the article, but perhaps I can get some info.
I tried to post a job on the job board, and my post never showed up. For about a day, it was showing in my account, I assume waiting for approval; then it just disappeared. I was curious what happened. I’m new to the community and would like to know what changes need to be made, if necessary. Was it moderated? Was there a technical issue?
I checked out the support link (http://eden.helpserve.com/), and it’s like a ghost town there. In addition, it looks like your vanilla forum crashed too. Is everything OK?
Hoping the best…
Can’t wait to see the other installments, good suggestions here, I think they can be a time stealer if you don’t watch each one carefully. Many of the social sites can be very good for business and each one has its own way to reach different people. Thanks, Scott
Awesome! I’ve been waiting for an article like this for AGES.
Thanks Muhammad!
Nice article. I’m definitely looking forward to the series. Especially if there will be specific tips on how to turn Social Media into actual leads or ‘real’ work.
Eh, I’ve been getting leads through forums and other ‘social media’ for ages. It’s interesting how relationship marketing has changed in such a short time. I’m still under the impression people overdo it. All you need to do is be helpful and present yourself to any given community as a professional who can solve problems. I try to be helpful on the FSw Forums, and it’s ended up bringing me leads from several other FSw regulars who give me work because they know me through either IRC or the forum.
On a closing note, I still think ‘social media’ is a pretty ambiguous buzz word.
Off topic – your forums are not working…
Any thoughts on what the ratio of your time should be spent on between building your online presence and building your portfolio? Do our words or work speak louder? Great stuff to think about in this article… I want make some reductions for sure.
As a freelancer myself I have read Freelance Switch pretty much consistantly since I started. It is an excellent resource and with no exception I have found every single article posted both well written and thought provoking in some way or other. Even the ones I disagree with I still think are excellent. This article has just put a stop to that. It is an article about nothing. I am annoyed I wasted my time reading it. I don’t usually comment on sites as a whole, purely for the fact that usually someone has said what I think about the article in a far more coherent way than I could have possibly done. Anyway, I really hope parts 2-10 will actually be “Ground Breaking” and have more substance.
Great start to this article series! I’m glad to see New Media getting attention. As a business owner who specializes in new media, I’m happy to see other freelancers starting to use web 2.0 apps as a viable business resource. Not many of my clients have heard of these apps but the more we, as creative people and new media moguls, become cheerleaders for them the better off we’ll all be.
Thanks for this!
Looks like an excellent series in the making. I can really agree with trying to spread oneself too thin across too many (perhaps not that useful) social networking sites.
@James: I reckon it’d be self managing – if you spent too much time on building your online presence you wouldn’t have (time for) a portfolio
This is great, I can’t wait.
off topic maybe: why are some sites like reddit etc, are so badly designed (aestheticaly)?
Maybe the simplicity is good, but a nice clean up would be welcomed right?
@ Centrifugal.me: It would have been either a technical issue or that we decided not to publish your job due to quality concerns. If you re-submit, email a copy to freelanceswitch@gmail.com and I can tell you why your ad was moderated out (if that was the case). It’s usually due to either a) no contact details supplied or b) implied or explicitly stated rates that are too far below average. As a freelance community it’s our responsibility to bat for freelancers, so we’re a little tougher on job ads than most freelance sites.
Thanks very much, Muhammad! I believe everyone reading FSw is gonna pay much more attention to the ways we go to show ourselves. Me, I have an Orkut account, just for personal relations, and another accounts in Facebook and DesignRelated to share professional work.
But there’s another thing I have in mind:
I believe commenting on blogs, like FSw and others, doesn’t match this “Reduce” campaign, does it? I mean, expanding your name, distributting your name all through the web with yer URL on it is “allowed”? :]
Hi Skellie,
Thank you for the reply. I made a note of the email.
A word of warning about HelloTxt: When you use it, you’re HelloTxt your password to all those other services. If you trust that HelloTxt isn’t in fact hording your passwords, then by all means use the service. Personally, I think it’s a terrible idea, and many people agree:
http://adactio.com/journal/1357
This is awesome, Mu! Can’t wait for the other sites. I wonder if you have any advice on figuring out *where* to focus your efforts in the social media space. I mean, a lot of sites don’t start out with any particular focus, but there’s a “founder effect” where the early membership of the site shapes the character of the site over time. For people who come a little later, it can be hard to work out what the emergent biases are, especially with newer sites that might only have 5 or 6 votes on a “popular” post.
Great article, thank you!
I think it’s importnat to define upfront what you want to gain from participating or using a site. If it’s “just” to stay in contact with friends, it’s a good idea to limit your particfipation in the off-business hours as otherwise, it tends to burn your time…
Hi Muhammad,
Thanks for the tips in the article. I certainly find the whole social media stuff a bit bewildering at times. I like the idea of a service like hello.txt, but as Luigi pointed out, you need to be careful with this service. I definitely agree with you, that picking 2 or 3 mediums to work on is a good policy. Otherwise you might end up spending so much time being “social” – that the actual work you’re trying to sell gets pushed to the side.
Great post.
In addition to Justin TV, I think Gary V of Wine. TV is another great example of focus. Video, photography, and design create an added visual element that allow you to focus and if you’re decent bring a great audience.
Enthusiasm, personality, and focus on an open niche can also help greatly. I think Freelance Switch also is a great example of these last three characteristics.
I suggest can publish in e-book and sell it,the contents are good.Moreover you have 22,800 subscribers,i am sure they will support you.
I’m looking forward to seing more in the series.
Thank you! I have been consistantly overwhelmed by online marketing and SEO and trying to get traffic and trying to maintain a life and I am so glad to see that I can actually improve all of these things by reducing. I can’t wait to see the rest of the series.