Virtually disorganised
An informal lunch meeting with a number of colleagues from the Procurement Leaders Network and the Procurement Intelligence Unit, focused on how the hell we could organise our social networking and web 2.0 efforts a little better.
Hosted by Sigaria CEO Mark Perera, we spoke about the benefits of LinkedIn, the ubiquity of Twitter, the rise of Posterous and Flavors.me and how they all interact with each other in our work and personal lives.
It was a dizzying session – trying to get to grips with your online profile is more difficult than you might think. And making it all work for you while preventing your online presence taking up a few needless ones and zeros is even more of a challenge.
For example, I currently have two Twitter accounts, one of which is automatically updated by my professional blog, and a Procurement Leaders’ news feed, and which also automatically updates my LinkedIn status. The other, a personal account about a passion of mine (cycling) is automatically updated by a Posterous.com blog which I use to spread the word on geeky bits of bike bling.
Obviously I have a LinkedIn profile, where I am the owner of the Sustainable Sourcing group and which, as I said, is updated by my Twitter account. I am also a member of a variety of publishing, media as well as purchasing groups on LinkedIn and regularly contribute there.
Then there’s Facebook – that hardly gets used anymore but does have a frightening amount of information about me and my friends, and more than a few discrimating photos of (occasional…) drunken behaviour. (Okay, perhaps slightly more frequent than occasional).
And let’s not forget Tumblr, which is used to keep family and close friends up to date with the frighteningly rapid development of my wife and I’s little boy William (obviously this links to a Vimeo video account as well – it would be silly not to, wouldn’t it?)
And finally, I also have this blog.
So, short of turning the entire lot off and retiring to a Cumbrian cave (it has been done, and will be the focus of a future article) to live out the rest of my days in ignorance of web 2.0 and whatever the next buzzword might be (don’t even get me started on Google Buzz) it’s abundantly clear that my online world needs a bit of a spring clean and the lunchtime session provided the starting point of efforts to organise my online existence more efficiently.
For an erratically disorganised hack, who is more at home among piles of random notes and two-foot high stacks of paper, this is in no way straightforward.
First? Consolidate my myriad online profiles through the use of this blog, and potentially a Flavors.me profile (if I can get beyond the spelling), and take it from there.
Second? Crack open a beer and contemplate how complicated life has become…
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