Social Media As A Part Of The Whole

Late Sunday morning, I opened up my Google Reader and read a blog post that I never wanted to read. In her post Why I’m Hanging Up My Blogging Hat, Jean Sarauer explains why she’s giving up blogging and disabling her Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts, among other things.

In a nutshell, when Jean’s blog crashed, she asked herself what she would do if she didn’t blog and concluded that blogging was distracting her from other important activities. She felt that blogging had consumed her life.

I hate to see Jean leave the blogosphere, but I understand where she’s coming from.

Right now, social media and building a personal brand through social media are all the rage. You don’t have to look hard to find people stressing their importance, and it’s not hard to let yourself feel as if you have to devote hours and hours of your life toward blogging, Twitter, etc.

I myself jumped onto the bandwagon a little over a year ago. At first, it was so new and exciting, almost an obsession. After a few months, it seemed as if I may have hit a peak, or maybe I had hit a period of slow growth.

And then life happened. You know, those things in your personal life that need more attention. In Jean’s case, life happened when she had to help her father move from his farm to an apartment. And then work happens. It may become more demanding or require things of you that it didn’t require before.

And I asked myself if I was neglecting my blog, if I was hurting a brand that I was trying to build and project. But I realized that conditions had changed, and so had my priorities. There are many aspects that go into building a brand and marketing yourself, and sometimes you have to focus on the offline aspects of it more than you can focus on the online aspects.

But my situation is different from Jean’s. Helping other bloggers was the focus of her Virgin Blogger Notes, and also she has a much larger community to maintain.

I will miss Jean’s blog posts as well as her comments on my own blog and her support. It seemed that for a brief period, I may have thought that my social media efforts were of the most importance. But now I know that they are merely a part of the whole. My social media efforts are a supplement to everything that I do offline.

It seems that some people have made a name for themselves purely through social media and the Internet. Because of this, I think that we may unintentionally overvalue the power of social media. It’s important; it’s powerful. But it isn’t everything.

I’m sorry that it’s taken me so long to get to my point. But my point is this: please don’t let your social media efforts get in the way of your offline business, your passions, or your relationships. We must all learn to balance these various aspects of our lives and also how maximize the benefits that each aspect offers.