THE DREAM IN ACTION

photo via mavericksmath

This thought came from a comment I made on Mashable’s post on personal branding using Social Media. The book written by Dan Schwabel, Me 2.0, inspired the post.

When using social media for branding I would make 2 points.

1) Use the tools, don’t be the tools. Keep in mind that the value of social media comes through communication. You’ll need to leverage the communication but more importantly you’ll need to back up that communication. It is unlikely that you’ll be valuable to a company for social media’s sake. You need to use the social media tools to communicate your expertise or value in other areas of business/life.

2) Don’t drowned. A while back I fell into the trap of losing the productivity battle solely because I wanted to stay informed on what was going on in the social web world. Staying in tune with every update from my Twitter friends and trying to consume tons of data, I was becoming very unproductive. I spent so much time staying “informed” that I was accomplishing much less. I wrote on my blog (http://bit.ly/o07w8) about how I reduced the noise and increase the value of tools like Twitter. If you don’t appear productive, employers will not be attracted to you.

The tools can kill opportunities if used incorrectly.