How to manage a social media overload

[This is an extract from a recent article published in Media on 26th March 2010. Read the full article here].

Social network overload? Napoleon Biggs, vice-president and head of digital integration for Asia-Pacific at Fleishman-Hillard, shares his secret on how to deal with more than one online presence at a time.

I'm suffering from social media overload! Maintaining my social media presence has become a burden. Being a person that thrives on social interaction, I never thought that I'd reach this stage in my life.

Let’s start with some history.

In the beginning, there was Facebook. The world of status updates was simple. Facebook even told us how to start the sentence: “Napoleon is …”

Then along came a punky upstart by the odd name of “Twitter”. Its open platform rapidly encouraged people to share links (with URL shorteners, like Bit.ly), upload and comment on photos (with Twitpic), retweet other people's thoughts and star your favourites. All this within the space of 140 characters.

The world of status updates changed overnight. Now everyone and his mother is offering status updates, be it Sina Weibo, Google Buzz, Plaxo Pulse (recently renamed "Stream") or Me2day memos.

Thanks to the creativity of the open source world(s) we currently inhabit, there are quite a few tools out there to manage all these conversations and they are all heading in the same direction.

Many started as tools for managing Twitter conversations, like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and Seesmic but have now integrated Facebook as well. Ping.fm allows you to manage your status updates across multiple platforms at once. But, I’m going to run through a tool that I find works very well in an office environment, for managing your work and personal messaging platforms.

It’s called “Digsby”. No it’s not related to the large fluffy dog ‘Digby’, but is almost as faithful to its master’s demands. The software comes in Windows, Mac and Linux versions, and can be downloaded at www.digsby.com.

[Read more on Media.asia]