Signal, Noise and striking a balance between the two
June 13, 2008 by Colleen Coplick
Filed under Social Media
Vancouver was recently hosted Jeff Pulver for one of his social media breakfasts, and we started talking about Twitter and how many people you actually pay attention to. I answered that I was following about 600 people, and Jeff asked how many I actually follow. That number is actually closer to 30.
I’ve been thinking about this, and then I came across a couple of posts on signal vs. noise. I’m still trying to find a balance.
Buzz Bishop, who guest posted here recently, argues that without letting in the noise, you run the risk of becoming too clique-y. That might be the case, but I want to know what happens when there’s so much noise that there’s no signal at all?
Hutch Carpenter recently posted the following Social Media Consumption Differences chart… where do you fall in here? For me, I think I play on both sides of the fence.
I agree, you fall amongst the two categories, and so do I. You are very capable and a great writer and PR person. You know where you want to find your content, yet you are open to new ideas.
In my case, with my follows (the people I do follow) I keep my eyes open to the content they provide me with, yet I still think I can learn from other people and thus I’m happy to take on new followers AND follows.
I think it all comes down to building bilateral relationships with followers and reciprocal-follows.
:) My $ 0.02
I am in total agreement, another good post!
I’m the same way, but I think it’s an ongoing balance rather than a one-way-or-the-other decision.
I try to keep my Twitter follows around 100 because I’ve found for me that that makes it manageable. Even then, I definitely skim.
I think the key is to find the people who help you in the hunt for useful and interesting information. The best ones give you stuff in their field of expertise (which is, presumably, one of yours, too) but will be just as likely to throw something random your way that turns out to be just as cool.
I wonder when the moment in human history was that “information overload” popped into being as a problem.