How I use social media in 6 points

Just posted on Facebook to explain to my family & friends why they see so many tweets on Facebook right now.  I’ve been using social media tools since long before the term was coined.  I suppose that’s obvious - I was using the web from it’s first days in the early nineties, as a Physics undergrad, and evolved with it from there.

How I use social media today:

1. I use LinkedIn for anyone with any tangible business relationship but primarily people I have at least actually physically met at some point.  The barrier to connecting to me on LinkedIn is pretty low, which I think makes sense as people tend to not abuse LinkedIn with spam
2. I maintain a Tumblr blog which I’m mainly going to be posting startup / VC funding / hightech stuff on, with the occasional post about stuff that’s related to personal interests without being TOO personal (so for example autism fundraising is okay, night out involving drinking and debauchery won’t make the cut).  Tumblr is definitely the best simple blogging tool out there and I’ve pretty much ditched all other blogs that I’ve written on or for (though I will continue to make the odd post for Andrew Naylor’s dotsnews blog). [EDIT - interesting that I've since moved away from Tumblr back here]
3. I’ve started tracking my comments on other people’s blogs where possible using Disqus (a service I think has huge legs and if it catches fire is going to be very big).  
4. I keep Facebook for family and actual friends past or present which allows me to be more personal, but within the context of the fact that Facebook’s increasing encroachment into other territory with Facebook Connect is making it more and more of a reference point for third parties.  Which is why I, unfortunately, tend to ignore or turn down Facebook friend requests where other social tools would be better.  It’s important to me to keep Facebook as somewhere I can be relaxed and informal with people who already know me and who I am and don’t need pointers towards my best points and who are already perfectly aware of my many weaknesses and limitations :-)
5. I am testing out some of the other social tools like social bookmarking (which I’ve resisted to now) on stuff like del.icio.us and similar tools, though I’ve never really found them all that helpful over the years, so don’t know if I’ll keep that up.  I am also experimenting with FourSquare, partly because of my history with mobile location aware services, partly because it’s a hot investment of one of the smartest VC teams active today, and partly because it’s a bit fun (though with so few of my friends on it I don’t think I’m getting its full potential right now).  I’m trying out blip.fm too.  I’ll keep testing new services as they come out to see if they work.
6. Finally I use Twitter as my main point of entry.  I tweet out posts on blogs.  I have set up most of the other tools to automatically tweet when I use them.  I try to tweet everyday thoughts and random ideas as well as retweeting links I think are worth reading.  I also set up Facebook to let Twitter automatically tweet updates to my Facebook activity stream.  That way all the other tools, pass through the Twitter feed, into Facebook.  

I am going to see how all of this works over the coming months.  Some areas will see increased interaction.  Some will see less usage.  The aim is to minimize the amount of time taken out of my day keeping up with social networking tools, while simultaneously keeping as active as possible on all services.

I know most of you who might chance on this and read it don’t care about many of these things, and just use the service in a casual way dipping in and out occasionally, and that’s fine.  I suspect we’ll all become more entangled with these tools over time.  Being in Silicon Valley one tends to be an early adopter of these technologies and it’s important to understand where they’re taking us, so that one can get ahead of the curve.  Many will crash and burn but some will become valuable.  In the interim, I am going to try to make best use of them and see how that goes.

Links:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/richardjordan
http://richardjordan.tumblr.com    [EDIT - this blog is now taking over from tumblr]
http://disqus.com/RichardDJordan/   [EDIT - surprised this didn't take off more]
http://www.facebook.com/richardjordan
http://delicious.com/richardjordan     [EDIT - stopped using]
http://foursquare.com/user/richarddjordan    [EDIT - just can't be bothered to use]
http://blip.fm/RichardJordan     [EDIT - stopped using]
http://twitter.com/richarddjordan