Selective Tweets

The administrator for that social media company I've been caged up with for an hour every Monday said blogging was demanding. And while my laziness proves this demanding theory accurate, my main concern involves content. Case in point follows:

Today I was looking through my Twitter feed and realizing that some people tweet way too much. I understand wanting to give your followers updated information, but shouldn't it be relevant? The same administrator tweeted 15 times last night about television. I know I'm new to this, but it seems a tad much about nothing important. It got me to thinking, what is the average tweet per day and which of those tweets should be fed into Facebook, if any.

I'd seen Selective Tweets used by Facebook friends for a while. But I didn't really understand how it worked. I had tried to integrate my Facebook status updates to Twitter. But since I'm a person and not a company I can't do it. Or maybe I can but am too out of touch to realize how. I could easily feed my Twitter feed to my status update, but that doesn't help my problem of too many tweets per day—it actually enhanced that problem. So onto Selective Tweets we go. So exciting!

All I have to do is add the hash tag #fb to my tweets and it updates as my status update. One small problem, I never added my Twitter handle. How else were people going to know that my checking account was fooled with again this year? See what I'm saying about relevant content? Ok so adding the Twitter handle... where exactly is that?

Can Social Media help me...do whatever it is supposed to help me do?

For an hour every Monday this April my job has required me to sit through various social media seminars. I couldn't possibly imagine what a company specifically designed to promote social media could offer a publishing company. Two days were dedicated to Facebook! What could we possibly cover? How could sitting in a conference room with a bunch of publishing underlings (and a few scattered managers) talking about Twitter, foursquare, You Tube and... Blogger (surprise, that was today's topic) help anyone connect with anything?

Oh how far I've traveled in the social media world. My Facebook and Twitter and are slowly fusing together. Family members and work colleagues share comments on work ideas and design projects. I frequently scan Twitter feed for #kidsbooks, #kidlit, and my personal favorite #pitchdarkbooks. People actually engage with these hash tags and Facebook pages. And since a lot of my work is associated with these tags, it's being seen. By actual people. And they are freaking talking about it! It's not all positive of course, but it's criticism I might be able to use to bring my design work in a direction I wouldn't have thought of.

I mean all the kids are on the social media right? Isn't my job to get these kids read some books? Let's bring it. The great experiment of social media and how I can get it to relate to my design in children's publishing might have just begun.