Time to Recognize and Manage the Noise

Brent Pohlman

Why am I talking about this topic?

This topic really hit me last week. I decided to get serious about managing my email notes and to my surprise I could not believe how many emails I was receving. I decided it was time once and for all to start unsubscribing from all of these sites that I had supposedly signed up for over the past 10 years. The results were astounding. I know I must have unsubscribed to over 200+ email lists last week and I keep unsubscribing more and more. I was receiving so many emails and most of them I was never reading mainly because of time or interest.

A few years ago, I also cleaned up the list of people I follow on Twitter and Facebook. I was able to get my numbers down to 300 and 150 respectively. I was tired of building so many types of lists. I decided to follow only a select group of people.

When people tell me they receive over 1,000 emails a day, I now second-guess as to whether this is a good thing or a very bad thing.

I think people are being consumed by this topic of noise and we are being hit with information from many channels. We can try and ignore it but the fact is, it can be a bid distraction and it can waste a lot of production time. It is time to really look at the way we read information and create information and try to create a better experience going forward.

What are we doing as marketers?
Are we contributing to this list of spammed emails or information we share on Twitter or Facebook? I really believe all of us are spamming others to some degree.

Right now, I believe the value of social media as a marketing channel is losing its power. Social media is becoming the place for news and gossip. Is it important that we follow all informaiton associated with our favorite team, local news or national news. Is it critical that we are the first to know about these incidents? I ask myself these questions and I see myself pulling back and spending less time on social media sites.

Over the last few years, I thought the answer was content marketing. I was not alone. There was a resurgence in blogging and people were sharing more content. Now, this model has also been oversaturated with a lot of the same content being shared on different subjects. I have once again scaled back from producing content everyday to sharing articles 2-3 times a week. As a result, I am seeing a whole new level of interaction that I had not seen in the past. My old philosophy was to produce all kinds of content in the hope that one of those articles would go viral. Now, I spend more time writing about topics that no one else is addressing and I use this content as my theme for the week.

As marketers, I am seeing a trend toward spending less time on social media and more time in other areas. This is where each person must decide where to spend his/her time.

Where am I spending my time?

Now, I am spending my time in the service area. How can I provide a better experience for my clients and the readers of this blog. It starts with looking at things much differently than the general public. I am working on improving our company website. It needs to be more “click-friendly” with easy access to information and the ability to faciliate client questions. Internally, I am looking at improving processes to improve production processes to better serve clients. Yes, marketers should be close to the processes they market and sell.

I’m also listening much more to internal and external clients’s needs. It is important that everyone has a voice in the process and hopefully through collaboration, more ideas with respect to new products/service and better production/service will result.

I am also reading more. I find myself reading books and developing better ways to process the information I am receiving on a daily basis. It is one thing to read for the sake of reading. It is much better if you can read something that actually helps you become a better person.

Finally, I am finding value with Linkedin. I think it is critical to connect with people and build a network of people in a wide array of disciplines. I use the Linkedin search funciton to to do the following:

• Search industries and connect with people from industries my company works with.
  
• Search professional contacts in the areas of marketing, digital marketing, blogging, CMO, Graphics, Video
  
• Search local contacts for managers and directors of high profile companies and innovative startup companies

I look for people who have a minimum of 10 shared connections. This helps me understand that others I am connected to also value this person as a connection in their network. It also keeps me from connecting with everyone which is not a good approach, and is very spammy.

Summary

I think people are being consumed by this topic of noise and we are being hit with information from many channels. We can try and ignore it but the fact is, it can be a bid distraction and it can waste a lot of production time. It is time to really look at the way we read information and create information and try to create a better experience going forward. It really comes down to making sure we are getting our news and information from the best people and sites and minimizing our time looking at information coming from other sources. In just one week of cleaning up my email accounts, I have been able to reinvest that time into work that is making a difference. It’s a lot of work to unsubscribe and defriend and unfollow, but the time savings I will receive going forward will make all the difference. There is a huge return on time! Try it and you will be amazed.

Picture Source: Pixabay

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