As part of Social Media Week, I went along to an interactive talk about social media and how we work within the “noise” it generates.

I thought this might be interesting to hear about in light of our new bi-weekly focus time. And it was… although my thoughts from yesterday straight out of the session have changed somewhat…

The focus was on how media (not just social) like email, Facebook, Twitter, smartphones etc, have become so much a part of our lives that we are becoming lost in the noise. The dominant questions were:

1. How do we escape the noise?

2. How do we filter through the noise so we only hear what we want to hear?

The first point for discussion was how we can remain present in a situation and mindful with our attention, while we are being pinged, called, tweeted, emailed etc. We listened to this as we all furiously tapped away at devices updating twitter, email etc. Point taken.

The usual ideas floated around for “escaping” the noise – don’t open emails until after 2pm; timebox tasks such as responding to emails, replying to social updates; have a designated focus time (check) etc.

The comment that intrigued me, and to be honest saddened me, the most was from a woman next to me.

Using the telephone to ask someone a question while they are working is the most obtrusive and rude way of communicating. It tells them that you believe yourself to be the most important thing at that time. Emails are a much better form of communication. They are read immediately and do not interfere with your work.

When I pointed out that you cannot guarantee an immediate response with email, her argument was that when working, yes you can. Emails should always be dealt with immediately and responded to promptly.

I’m not convinced she fully considered this train of thought before opening her mouth. And I couldn’t help but think how sad it is that people would rather tap away a message on a screen than speak to someone.

One brilliant observation is how much time we spend on tasks that “only take 2 minutes”. A quick response to an email, an acceptance of a request to connect on a social channel. One attendee dumps all of these “quick jobs” into a bucket and at the end of each day (timeboxed) works through as many as possible in the time allowed.

It reminded me of the kanban idea; working through a task to completion before starting anything else. How much faster could we get a task done without those little 2 minute jobs stealing our attention?

Then came the list of social tools – how we each filter information to quieten the noise. The highlights were:

Hootsuite : a tool to manage multiple social media accounts such as twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. I wasn’t aware that you could integrate LinkedIn so I got this up and running yesterday (having fallen in love with Hootsuite months ago I was convinced it would impress me). It didn’t. You can see notifications i.e. connections’ status updates and twitter feeds that post to LinkedIn, but no emails, connection requests or anything of real interest i.e. the key functionalities.

Diigo : a social bookmarking tool that goes much further than Delicious and tagging articles and webpages. There are highlighters, ‘sticky notes’, ability to leave interactive messages for collaboration and knowledge sharing (their words. Ring a bell)? I think there might be something in this, so I am going to give it a go. It’s fully compatible with Delicious so I will report back when I am up and running.

Milestone planner : little scared to talk about this and rain on John’s TP parade. You can check it out…

Evernote : a tool to store things you want to remember (another form of social bookmarking). But with all the social tools I am already using, this just seems like a site I would need to remember to log into, to remind myself about things I didn’t want to forget.

A book was also recommended, Monkeys with Typewriters : Myths and Realities of Social Media at Work.

All in all, it was a great hour to chew the fat about social media and how we work with it. I came out with ideas, tools to try and lots of thoughts about how much has changed with the advances in social media.  The more I think about it though, the more I thought there is just one answer to it all. If you don’t want to hear the noise, don’t use the listening tool. Too simple?