Social Media Overload

Let me begin this post with a disclaimer: As a student of marketing, I’m all for employing new communication channels and reaching customers via social media. It’s dynamic. It’s a conversation instead of a monologue. It’s current, it’s affordable, it’s the future. I understand and completely agree. I’m all over the Internet. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, the blogosphere – you’ll find me.

That said, I have a love/hate relationship with social media. I’m at once attracted and repulsed by it. I’m constantly trying to craft my “personal brand.” Tell too much information and you can get yourself in trouble, too little, and you’re not trustworthy. Further, with Twitter and Facebook status updates, it’s so narcissistic to think that people care enough about what I’m doing to update them every hour about my contribution to the World Wide Web. And if I’m spending all this time on my social media presence – tweeting about a great article I just read or complaining about a bad customer service experience, shouldn’t I be doing something else?

Facebook scares me. I jumped on the bandwagon right as I was graduating from UGA in 2004. I was never all that misbehaved as college kids go, but still, I am glad I exited those precarious years of misspent youth before the ubiquity of cell phone cameras and YouTube postings. I’ve clearly dated myself to admitting that but I could not care less about people knowing my age. At least for now.

This is likely one of the silliest reasons to dislike Facebook, but I just have to rant. Sometimes I won’t wear something because it’s been in a Facebook picture. How ridiculous is that? Like many women, I prefer not to repeat outfits too noticeably often, but Facebook reduces the number of times I can wear something drastically. It used to be that one could get away with wearing the same dress to a different event because different people would be there. Now the whole world knows what you wore to what and when, so if you’ve been on Facebook for five years like I have, you can see that I wore a dress to the MBA prom in 2009 that I also wore to a wedding in 2005. Silly? Petty? Superficial? I know. But I also know that I am not the only one who thinks that way.

I also think in Tweets and status updates. I hear a clever quote and I want to write it down so that I can post it for my 783 “friends” to see how charming and hilarious I am. Just nights ago I literally had a social media nightmare. Not an embarrassing foot-in-mouth post, but a real, honest-to-God nightmare. I woke up in a cold sweat with Twitter streams still racing through my disoriented and groggy brain.

But just like sugar, alcohol, and red meat, social media is fine as a part of a well-balanced diet. And no Twittering at least 1 hour before bedtime.