<p>When Jessica H Lawrence left her job with the Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council in Redlands, Calif., to pursue a new life in New York City, she arrived in late January without a job, an apartment or someone to keep her warm through the winter nights. <br /><br />But in less than six months, she found all three – and all because of Twitter.The job came after a friend’s tweet inspired her to attend NY Tech Meetup, where she applied for a job and became the managing director. She found her apartment after sending a Twitter message to the founder of the Midnight Brunch supper club. That scored her an invitation and — after meeting the owners of the brownstone where the meal was held – the cellar apartment, too. As for the boyfriend, a founder of The Noble Rot wine club, she discovered him when she began following the Rot’s Twitter feed. <br /><br />“So you can see why I have this undying love for Twitter,” said Lawrence, 32. Yet her devotion to one social network is not an act of sentimentality – it’s part of a careful strategy for combating social media burnout. In a time when anyone with Internet access is expected to be engaged on multiple networking sites and keep a day job, Lawrence decided to focus on a singular site rather than to spread herself thin among a half-dozen.<br /><br />The relentless pressure to partake of the newest networks was underscored in June with the debut of Google (Plus), Google’s social networking site. According to Nielsen, social networking is now the most popular online activity, ahead of sending emails, searching the Internet and playing games.<br /><br />Put another way: One in every 4 1/2 minutes spent on the Web is spent on a social-networking site or blog. And last year the average visitor spent 66 per cent more time on such sites than in 2009, when early adopters were already feeling digitally fatigued.<br /><br />“I’m on tech overload,” said Lawrence, who has Facebook and LinkedIn accounts yet barely uses them anymore. “I already feel like I’m experiencing slow death by email.” While she loves technology and has been experimenting with Google (Plus) since it was introduced, “I’m having a really hard time justifying adding yet another social tool to my toolkit,” she said.<br /><br />But any attempt by weary networkers to scale back is complicated by the proliferation of websites like Klout and PeerIndex that are busily computing users’ influence scores to rank them in an online hierarchy. <br /><br />The most active and organised users of social networks have daily routines for grooming their digital identities. Generally, these routines rely on automation and syndication. For instance, websites like Ping.fm, OnlyWire and Hellotxt enable users to post the same content across multiple networking sites with a click or two of a mouse. Other sites, like Buffer, SocialOomph and TwitResponse, allow users to write postings months in advance and schedule them for publication at a later date.<br /><br />“Automation, both in terms of when content goes out and the syndication, that’s what keeps me from going insane,” said Josh Kaufman, the author of “The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business.” “Otherwise it would just be too much to manage.”<br /><br />The answer was no, but so far Kaufman, 29, of Fort Collins, Colo., has kept his social media routine to less than 30 minutes each morning (well, except for the day he spent pruning the list of people he followed on Twitter to 85, down from an indigestible 1,500).<br /><br />That said, he keeps his social-networking dashboards open on his computer all day to absorb their hiccups of information. Because he works alone, he likes the ‘water cooler effect’ of his friends’ feeds: the ease with which he can say hello to someone far away, if only for a moment. <br /><br />Alienating effect<br /><br />Some users think all this networking is leading to alienation. “I like to spend the time with someone in a restaurant than spend the time on Foursquare telling people I’m in the restaurant,” said Graham Hill, 40, the founder of the website TreeHugger and the design contest LifeEdited. For instance, he will read a book on his Kindle, upload inspiring quotes and ideas to his Amazon account, then edit them into tweets, which he schedules to be posted over the course of several weeks via the monitoring service HootSuite.com.<br /><br />Some day, he hopes to hire someone to edit and post content for him so he can spend more time offline. “The in-between times are important,” he said, referring to life’s idle moments, like standing in line at the bank or taking a taxi, “times when you should be checking in with yourself instead of trying to be somewhere you’re not.”<br /><br />Plenty of people have taken a social media detox, or opted out only to opt back in again. Lawrence said she evaluates all networking sites by asking herself a single question: “Will it enhance my life?” <br /><br />Suffering from social networking burnout? Here are some tips to help manage your digital life. 1. Take stock of the sites you have joined or may want to join. CheckUserNames will show you 160 social networking sites and search them to determine if your name or brand is available for an account or if it’s already been taken. (Sorry, John Smiths.)<br /><br />2. Streamline. If you’re often logging into multiple social networks to repost the same content, sites like OnlyWire, Ping.fm and Hellotxt let you update several networks with a single mouse click.<br /><br />3. Plan ahead. When using Twitter for business or personal brand building, you can write tweets in advance and publish them automatically at a later date with services like Buffer, SocialOomph, HootSuite, TwitResponse, FutureTweets and Pluggio.<br /><br />4. Consolidate. Sites like Digsby and Netvibes reduce desktop clutter by providing a single dashboard to send emails and instant messages, and update all your social networks. If the only thing you want to open is your email inbox, NutshellMail will take a snapshot of the updates on your social media sites (including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Myspace and YouTube) and send them to you in an email digest. <br /><br />5. Create a landing page. If you’re on multiple networks, it’s probably because you want to connect with people. Sites like Retaggr and DandyID allow you to create a free digital business card and a Web page with links to all of your networking pages, blogs and websites. (This also helps keep track of your digital footprint.)<br /><br />6. Tame Twitter. Want to remove your inactive Twitter followers? Nest.Unclutterer promises to do it for you. Searching for someone by name on Twitter is exasperating. You can save time and limit frustration by looking for them on Listorious instead. <br /><br />7. Measure your progress. If you use social media to promote your business or brand, you can monitor how well you’re doing with sites like SocialReport, TwentyFeet and SproutSocial. To find out how influential you are, there are sites that assign ratings to people, like Klout and PeerIndex.</p>
<p>When Jessica H Lawrence left her job with the Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council in Redlands, Calif., to pursue a new life in New York City, she arrived in late January without a job, an apartment or someone to keep her warm through the winter nights. <br /><br />But in less than six months, she found all three – and all because of Twitter.The job came after a friend’s tweet inspired her to attend NY Tech Meetup, where she applied for a job and became the managing director. She found her apartment after sending a Twitter message to the founder of the Midnight Brunch supper club. That scored her an invitation and — after meeting the owners of the brownstone where the meal was held – the cellar apartment, too. As for the boyfriend, a founder of The Noble Rot wine club, she discovered him when she began following the Rot’s Twitter feed. <br /><br />“So you can see why I have this undying love for Twitter,” said Lawrence, 32. Yet her devotion to one social network is not an act of sentimentality – it’s part of a careful strategy for combating social media burnout. In a time when anyone with Internet access is expected to be engaged on multiple networking sites and keep a day job, Lawrence decided to focus on a singular site rather than to spread herself thin among a half-dozen.<br /><br />The relentless pressure to partake of the newest networks was underscored in June with the debut of Google (Plus), Google’s social networking site. According to Nielsen, social networking is now the most popular online activity, ahead of sending emails, searching the Internet and playing games.<br /><br />Put another way: One in every 4 1/2 minutes spent on the Web is spent on a social-networking site or blog. And last year the average visitor spent 66 per cent more time on such sites than in 2009, when early adopters were already feeling digitally fatigued.<br /><br />“I’m on tech overload,” said Lawrence, who has Facebook and LinkedIn accounts yet barely uses them anymore. “I already feel like I’m experiencing slow death by email.” While she loves technology and has been experimenting with Google (Plus) since it was introduced, “I’m having a really hard time justifying adding yet another social tool to my toolkit,” she said.<br /><br />But any attempt by weary networkers to scale back is complicated by the proliferation of websites like Klout and PeerIndex that are busily computing users’ influence scores to rank them in an online hierarchy. <br /><br />The most active and organised users of social networks have daily routines for grooming their digital identities. Generally, these routines rely on automation and syndication. For instance, websites like Ping.fm, OnlyWire and Hellotxt enable users to post the same content across multiple networking sites with a click or two of a mouse. Other sites, like Buffer, SocialOomph and TwitResponse, allow users to write postings months in advance and schedule them for publication at a later date.<br /><br />“Automation, both in terms of when content goes out and the syndication, that’s what keeps me from going insane,” said Josh Kaufman, the author of “The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business.” “Otherwise it would just be too much to manage.”<br /><br />The answer was no, but so far Kaufman, 29, of Fort Collins, Colo., has kept his social media routine to less than 30 minutes each morning (well, except for the day he spent pruning the list of people he followed on Twitter to 85, down from an indigestible 1,500).<br /><br />That said, he keeps his social-networking dashboards open on his computer all day to absorb their hiccups of information. Because he works alone, he likes the ‘water cooler effect’ of his friends’ feeds: the ease with which he can say hello to someone far away, if only for a moment. <br /><br />Alienating effect<br /><br />Some users think all this networking is leading to alienation. “I like to spend the time with someone in a restaurant than spend the time on Foursquare telling people I’m in the restaurant,” said Graham Hill, 40, the founder of the website TreeHugger and the design contest LifeEdited. For instance, he will read a book on his Kindle, upload inspiring quotes and ideas to his Amazon account, then edit them into tweets, which he schedules to be posted over the course of several weeks via the monitoring service HootSuite.com.<br /><br />Some day, he hopes to hire someone to edit and post content for him so he can spend more time offline. “The in-between times are important,” he said, referring to life’s idle moments, like standing in line at the bank or taking a taxi, “times when you should be checking in with yourself instead of trying to be somewhere you’re not.”<br /><br />Plenty of people have taken a social media detox, or opted out only to opt back in again. Lawrence said she evaluates all networking sites by asking herself a single question: “Will it enhance my life?” <br /><br />Suffering from social networking burnout? Here are some tips to help manage your digital life. 1. Take stock of the sites you have joined or may want to join. CheckUserNames will show you 160 social networking sites and search them to determine if your name or brand is available for an account or if it’s already been taken. (Sorry, John Smiths.)<br /><br />2. Streamline. If you’re often logging into multiple social networks to repost the same content, sites like OnlyWire, Ping.fm and Hellotxt let you update several networks with a single mouse click.<br /><br />3. Plan ahead. When using Twitter for business or personal brand building, you can write tweets in advance and publish them automatically at a later date with services like Buffer, SocialOomph, HootSuite, TwitResponse, FutureTweets and Pluggio.<br /><br />4. Consolidate. Sites like Digsby and Netvibes reduce desktop clutter by providing a single dashboard to send emails and instant messages, and update all your social networks. If the only thing you want to open is your email inbox, NutshellMail will take a snapshot of the updates on your social media sites (including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Myspace and YouTube) and send them to you in an email digest. <br /><br />5. Create a landing page. If you’re on multiple networks, it’s probably because you want to connect with people. Sites like Retaggr and DandyID allow you to create a free digital business card and a Web page with links to all of your networking pages, blogs and websites. (This also helps keep track of your digital footprint.)<br /><br />6. Tame Twitter. Want to remove your inactive Twitter followers? Nest.Unclutterer promises to do it for you. Searching for someone by name on Twitter is exasperating. You can save time and limit frustration by looking for them on Listorious instead. <br /><br />7. Measure your progress. If you use social media to promote your business or brand, you can monitor how well you’re doing with sites like SocialReport, TwentyFeet and SproutSocial. To find out how influential you are, there are sites that assign ratings to people, like Klout and PeerIndex.</p>