Social Media: It's All A Matter of Balance

As you can see by my archives, I started this blog a couple of years ago and I just have not contributed to it on a regular basis. The truth is that since we published my book around the same time, we have been consumed with building and managing a new website and a new blog at www.lifetomax.com, as well as learning about a whole new business. Naively, at first we thought that since much of publishing involved activities like marketing and creative production, we wouldn't have much of a learning curve, but things are just different enough to sometimes make things quite challenging.

Of course as you all know, advertising and marketing are also changing at a lightning speed, so it is easy to feel overwhelmed. Still, when I look back over the last couple of years, I am very proud of all that we have learned and consequently, how much more we have to offer our clients in terms of expertise. Now we can share from our firsthand experiences what it can mean to your business to build your network through such social media venues as blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. We can also advise you that all of this new media can be an incredible suck of your valuable time and resources if not carefully managed. And despite the many opportunities new media offers, we firmly maintain that it still does not surpass the need for a sound strategy or good creative work.

Much of the transition to new media reminds me very much of how the introduction of computers for graphic design changed the advertising and design industry. There were those who resisted the change, preferring to cut rubyliths by hand and to sketch designs with markers. Others embraced the change to such a degree that it produced a bunch of over-designed, muddled imagery that had no concept or selling point. Neither approach survived for very long and the same will be true of social media. Just like life, we must find the balance to be truly effective and happy with the results. So those of you who are tweeting about having coffee or driving to work, quit wasting your time and ours. Use Twitter--and all social media for that matter--when you really have something to say or really want to get some feedback in a hurry. About the rest of the stuff, we don't care a Twit!