A few people have been asking me about tools they could use to help automate the social media process.  To which I respond, why would you want to automate it?  To use an analogy, that’s like building a little “you” robot that goes around and starts pestering people at cocktail party, then once someone decides to talk, the “real” you takes over.  Jason Falls from social media explorer has a pretty interesting post up today which I recommend that you folks read.  It talks about managing the social media overload.

I decided I would my add my quick 2 cents here and say that you don’t want to automate anything that involves people and relationships.  People can smell automation and it reminds them of spam.  If you are expecting to build a relationship with another human being then is it really fair that you should automate while they are expected to be themselves and respond to you?  Why don’t we all just build little twitter bots that can communicate for us?

Nobody said relationships was easy, social media is not easy, but instead of thinking about automation you need to start thinking about personalization.  Don’t think about how you can create an auto-responder to your twitter followers, think about how you can create a quick little message to all of them.  I thank everyone and try to add in little quirky comments to every new twitter follower I get, not because I have to, but because I want to.  I love people and I love what I do, interacting with all of you makes this worth while for me and that’s why I do it.

Sure you can use services like ping.fm that quickly broadcast a message across your various social networks, but the key word there is “broadcast” remember you don’t want your conversations to turn into broadcasts!

Please, please, please, remember… personalization not automation

your thoughts?

thanks for reading!

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