Social Zero

What is Social Zero? I should probably insert a joke here about my high school days, but it actually isn't anything to do with that.

If you read this blog regularly you probably know I am an enthusiastic user of Merlin Mann's email productivity "thing" (his words!) Inbox Zero.

Recently I have been applying this to an even bigger attention sink than email... social media.

This might seem a little crazy. After all, social media isn't email. You can't read everything on your Twitter timeline (or you certainly shouldn't try to!) let alone respond to it.

Inbox Zero isn't really about emptying your email inbox though. In Merlin Mann's own words:-

"It's not how many messages are in your inbox it's how much of your own brain is in that inbox"

That is just as relevant to social media as it is to email.

In this context then, Social Zero means the application of this philosophy to social media. This post is my take on one way to achieve it.

Some basics

Firstly, this stuff does matter. Social media can be a huge distraction if you allow it to be. Can you really afford to let the rhythm of your working day be dictated by a random flow of messages and notifications? That way madness lies!

Secondly, my Social Zero technique relies on you having implemented Inbox Zero or some other sensible way of dealing with your email. If your inbox is already a dumping ground for 1000s of messages awaiting action then it probably won't help you.

It's not my place to tell you what to do, but if you are in this situation then try using Inbox Zero for a couple of weeks to get a grip of your email first. You won't be sorry.

Finally, a word about "push notifications". If your iPhone pings every time someone replies to a tweet then you are saddling yourself with some real time / attention management problems.

The very first point covered in most time management or productivity courses is to turn off your "You have Mail" notifications so that you, and not your email software, dictates where your attention will be focussed.

As painful as it may seem, the same thing applies to social media. If you ever want to achieve any kind of focus and flow you need to kill these, or at least mute them during working time.

Inbox Zero vs Social Zero

Social media is a more complex system than email in terms of the way you interact with it.

Firstly, there is probably more than one platform in your social-sphere. I use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and FourSquare (roughly in that order of precedence) and that probably isn't untypical.

Each platform then has its own mix of push and pull interactions; however there is a broad hierarchy of things which require you to react in some way (which I will call inputs) common to them all.

In order of importance these are:-

1. Private Messages (your LinkedIn inbox, Facebook mail, Twitter DMs etc.)
2. Mentions (public messages on Google+, Twitter etc. directed to you, but visible to all)
3. Notifications (network updates of new followers, RTs or re-shares etc.)
4. Search Results (results of searches you have set up via RSS, columns in Tweetdeck etc)
5. Timeline (the unfiltered timeline of those who you follow... your personal firehose!)

Private Messages and Mentions aren't that different from email (which we are all familiar with) and so they fit easily into the Inbox Zero methodology. All that is needed are a couple of technical steps, which I will talk about later in the seperate and aggregate section.

Notifications and search results are also fairly straightforward. Again, all you really need to do is separate and aggregate.

The timeline is more difficult to manage (and doesn't really resemble email at all). I have covered this in a separate section about Managing social media along with some other things which don't fit the email mould.

Seperate & Aggregate

To my mind, the absolute worst way to manage social media is by using the basic web interfaces for Twitter, LinkedIn etc.

Why is this? Remember all the different inputs we looked at? Well if you login to Twitter then these are all lumped together in one place. The same with LinkedIn. How can it make sense to have to deal with all these individual websites every day?

There are plenty of tools out there which can help you to get a grip of your social media inputs. Take a look at options like HootSuite which allow you to use one web-based client to manage several platforms or Boxcar on iOS devices which sends you push notifications from Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and even Google+ (via a clever trick using Google+ email notifications) from a single client.

To achieve Social Zero though, I actually recommend a simpler tool. Good old email.

To deal with these inputs effectively you need to follow a two stage process:-

1. separate all of the inputs from each social service (DMs, search results etc.)
2. aggregate them so that you can see all the inputs of a particular type (e.g. Direct Messages) from all your social services in the same inbox.

To my mind the simplest way to do this is with email. Despite the "Twitter will kill off email" lobby's protestations, email is the only channel which all the social services support. There is no need to wait for an API to be made available (yes, I'm talking about you Google+) or find that your chosen client misses out a key platform.

All you need to do is to switch on email notifications for every input you believe deserves your attention. (A quick note here:- by far the most painful notification is "Notify me when someone comments on a post I have commented on" as anyone who has been deluged with "isn't he/she cute" follow-on comments on someone's Facebook baby photos will tell you! Think carefully before enabling this one).

The next step is to simply set up rules in Mail or Outlook to filter the notifications into appropriate folders. A basic structure would be something like:-

1. Social - Messages
2. Social - Mentions
3. Social - Notifications

After setting up all of this, you basically have another series of email inboxes which can (and should) be processed using the standard Inbox Zero methodology.

Thoughts about Processing

Processing is basically the same as for any other incoming email.

However, the "social" part of social media does lead to some interesting questions about how you should do this. For example, how often do you need to do each of the following:-

1. Triage (another term aptly used by Merlin Mann) - scan your inbox for urgent stuff (professional referrals, complaints) which needs a quick response
2. Run through and reply to messages which are part of an ongoing conversation
3. Review new followers and decide whether to follow them back
4. Process... back to inbox zero so that all messages are deleted or have an action placed in your trusted system (part of the Getting Things Done method).

The answer will depend on why you are using social media (depending on whether you are in-house counsel at your company or in charge of managing social comms the emphasis will be quite different), but there is a tricky balancing act here.

If you reply to tweets every five minutes then you won't get much work done (unless tweeting is your job of course). On the other hand, if you only respond to conversations once a week then it is going to be difficult to maintain any kind of relationship or engagement.

There is no easy answer to this as signing up for a Twitter account doesn't come with a service level agreement and it is an evolving area. If you have a business account though and you won't be monitoring or responding out of hours then personally I would mention it in your profile to manage expectations.

Other than that it is a case of working out what is right for you.

Managing

Social Zero also requires another, more proactive, stage which doesn't really apply with email... Management of your accounts and presence.

Within this I would include anything that isn't directly driven by an input such as:-

1. Deciding on new people to follow
2. Sending out unprompted content and updates
3. Reading your general timeline
4. Adding people to Twitter lists

Again, I would work out how frequently you need to do each of these (e.g. read a snippet of timeline every couple of hours, find new people to follow once a week). Then, these need to be added into your work schedule so that you can do them at the appropriate times and ignore them the rest of the time.

This may sound a bit clinical, but if you are serious about using social media without it taking over your life then you need to consciously and mindfully take control of the time you allocate to it.

Searches can be useful here too. Given that you can't read your whole timeline it may make sense to set up some searches (where the platforms allow this) so that you don't miss any messages which incorporate a relevant hashtag or term or are from a particular group of users.

The mechanics of this are a bit beyond this post, but the results of these searches obviously become one of the inputs in your Social Zero methodology.

Does it work?

Social Zero as described in this post is really aimed at individuals who are trying to incorporate their own social media within their workflow.

If you a social media professional or handling it for an organisation then you may be better of using a proper social CRM tool (like CubeSocial which I have posted about previously) which is tailored to this kind of team use.

You will also need to think about the best way to actually post updates on your various social platforms (cross posting using IFTT or using HootSuite or TweetDeck could be good starting points) as this is really only aimed at managing your inputs.

Apart from this my experience is it works well as part of an Inbox Zero approach. As with Inbox Zero itself though it only works if you implement it and use it!

I hope this post provides some useful ideas on using social media without sacrificing your productivity (or sanity!). If you have any other tips on the subject please share them in the comments.