My social media workflow

Now that Duncan Riley’s so-called “silly season” is over, it’s almost time to put the New Years Resolution-style posts away for the year.  Before I do that, though, I wanted to write a little bit about my social media consumption at the beginning of 2009 so that I can compare it retrospectively to wherever I might stand at this time next year.

I am particularly interested in hearing what you do that may be similar or different to my own routine.  Since social media consumption is one of those things that your friends normally don’t have a chance to witness, here’s your chance to share!

My social media habits can be basically broken down into three parts: a beginning of the day, catch-up phase, a midday working segment, and an evening entertainment portion.  Here’s how I do it.

Playing catch-up

As soon as I wake up (and admittedly often before I’m completely out of bed), I need to catch up with whatever news or conversation took off while I was catching my z’s.  My tool of choice for this is my iPhone as the web and application interfaces for the services I use make for more bite-sized (breakfastlike?) bits of news.  The routine normally goes like this:

1. Check Google Reader.  The foundation of the day’s news, Reader provides distraction-free access to the newsmakers that are most important to me.  I share items I think my Facebook and FriendFeed contacts would like, star resources I know I’ll revisit over the next week or so, and mark as unread stories I plan on interacting with more deeply in the next phase.
2. Check FriendFeed.  The Web gets a bit more personal as I move to the next layer.  I flip to FriendFeed’s excellent iPhone interface and immediately check the “Best Of” category to see which of the articles I just encountered are holding the most sway within the community.  I occasionally ‘like’ items, but normally just use FriendFeed as a social barometer.
3. Check Twitter.  Even more social now, I look to see if anyone’s replied to me on Twitter or if any breaking news has gone down more locally that wasn’t caught by the wider nets of Reader of FriendFeed.
4. Check Facebook.  Finally I have the opportunity to scan through news within the community that’s closest to my heart– my classmates, coworkers, and friends.  Anything of importance here is first to be dealt with later in the day.
5. Check E-mail.  Direct to me and much more likely to be urgent, this step gets to wait!

Getting it done

Later in the day, preferably with coffee at hand, I’m set to tackle everything that caught my attention earlier.  It’s not quite as linear a process, though, as a full-fledged PC makes multitasking much easier than the iPhone does.  Here’s what I normally do during this step.

• Fully interact with the morning’s news, including commenting on blogs, sharing articles with notes in Reader, liking and commenting on FriendFeed items, wishing people happy birthdays in Facebook, and so forth.
• If my resources allow me to write a new article for andydesoto.com or another one of my properties, I do so.
• I consult Clicky Web Analytics to see if any of my blog articles had success throughout the prior day, and if so, where that traffic came from.
• I keep up with my friends on LiveJournal (I no longer use the service myself, but there is a small group of people I still attend to there, a remnant from high school that opted not to “graduate” to Facebook).

Primarily, this is an optional segment that really depends on whether I myself have any thoughts to get out to the Web via blogging.

Having fun

The least structured step of all, my free evenings are when I have an opportunity to engage in anything that catches my interest, including any or all of the above items.  This is occasionally where computer games come into play, although not very often (yet Kongregate, Team Fortress 2, and others remain staples).  If there’s anything that needs any more time beyond what I gave it earlier, I tackle that, and depending on whether or not I spent the afternoon blogging, I may have conversation, compliments, or criticisms to deal with.

So that about describes my social media workflow.  Try as I might, I can’t safely predict what this will look like in January 2010.  How do you engage with social news?

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