Social Media – Problem Solver or Productivity Killer?

Things are starting to get interesting here at the Brazen Careerist office (my living room). We're pitching the company to investors nearly every other day; we're days away from launching the site, and we're doing consulting to help with cash flow.

I've never been this busy in my life, and I'm having a blast. The first few months of the start-up were tough. We didn't really know what we were doing. I mean, we had a basic idea and we had a lot of good discussions, but if we had gone out searching for money back then, we would have been stumped by questions that now seem simple to answer. I'm glad we went slow and learned how to work as a team.

On top of that, I wasn't totally sure of my role in the company. I have a degree in accounting and I used to work as a Financial Consultant at IBM, but I'm certainly not a CPA or hard core accountant. But now I remember what drew me to accounting in the first place – top level financial analysis.

I've realized that my value lies there (at least for now)–I'm the financial guy. I'll go to a pitch with Penelope and rely on my trusty three-year financial plan to help me explain how we derived each number and what those numbers mean to the long term business plan of Brazen Careerist, Inc.

Long story short we're smack dab in the middle of turning the imaginary corner where you go from seed funded early stage start-up to angel backed (fingers-crossed) full-fledged company with employees, structure, and maybe even an office!

But as this happens, as we become busier and busier, I've noticed that a lot of the social media and web 2.0 tools I use are becoming more of a chore then a help. In fact, I'm starting to think that most social media services are nothing more than fancy looking productivity killers.

So I've made a strategic decision. The only social media I will actively use from here on out are blogs. Why? I love reading what smart people have to say on their blogs. Reading the right blog is actually very productive because it gets you thinking, and when you start thinking, who knows what great ideas can come to mind. And one of my favorite things to do is synthesize the information I read on other blogs and share my thoughts with the community.

This doesn't mean I'm going to kill everything else. Facebook is a must. The ability to keep up with old friends, flip through old college pictures, and write a quick non-professional blurb about myself is great. But the games and applications have to go.

I'll keep LinkedIn as well. LinkedIn is a living resume for me, rather than a network to stalk people on. Out of my 78 connections, I asked maybe two of them to connect with me. But I love when people ask me to connect. I'm able to learn a little more about them, think about ways we may be able to work together, and I don't have to do any of the work.

So that's it: blogs, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Twitter, MySpace and all the others are out. My preferences seem to be on par with what mainstream America is choosing, too. Twitter, and all the other Silicon Valley start-ups have a long way to go before a huge percentage of the population is using them, and MySpace is just a site to go to if you love spam.

Sure, the 600,000 Tech Crunch readers are trying anything and everything to keep up with the trends. But most of us don't have the time to use any more social media. So, unless you have nothing better to do, figure out what tools are most important to you and use them. Get rid of the ones you're using simply for the sake of using them. You'll get a lot more important work done.