Are You Suffering From SNF?

January 21st, 2009

SNF. Social Networking Fatigue.

You wake up in the morning and just have to check your Twitter stream, (never pausing to consider if it’s worth refining the obvious prostate joke there). Then it’s on to Facebook. That photo your daughter posted needs a comment, and that comment your co-worker made needs a follow up comment, and look at that: Someone posted an article that’s worth reading, and — WAIT! I need to check my LinkedIn account to see whether anyone posted an actual discussion under the Discussions tab of my groups, or responded to any of my own discussion threads, and I also have to check the groups I created to see if there are any new member requests pending and oh, I forgot, I need to check the Jobs tab to see if there are any potential new clients in there, which reminds me that I ought to take a second to update my MySpace profile photo (it’s gotta match my Facebook profile pic), then hop on over to Squidoo and update a few of my lenses, then it’s on to AdGabber to see what’s been posted in the world of advertising news and discussion and, oh, I can’t forget My Yahoo! to see if any of the groups I belong to have anything new and interesting and hold on, let me check my iGoogle too and there’s a pretty good blog post I think deserves tweeting and …

Crap, is it noon already? My personal economy’s tanking — I gotta get some work done. Not to mention I haven’t even checked my FriendFeed account or uploaded last weekend’s party pix to Flickr yet.

It all leads to SNF: a result of the imperative that burns deep within the inner geek, the info-sponge instinct that drives us to be plugged in to all things all the time. It can be exhausting … and it can be a (sometimes fascinating) detraction from the job at hand.

And (so far) there’s no little blue pill to address it.

Takeaway for marketers: If you’re getting involved in the social networking scene, you have to add value … because this is the sort of mindset into which you’re planning to insinuate yourself.

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