A New Generation Marketer

In January I wrote a blog post titled Information Overload for Generation Y discussing how there is so much information at our hands today that it seems hard to manage.

Having been on social media and the web for several more months since then, I want to expand on that topic to say that I think people of all ages are experiencing this in one way or another. However, it may not just be information overload, it may be the failure of people to filter, or know how to filter all this data.

Think about all the types of messages you are exposed to every day: e-mails, advertisements, articles you ‘must’ read, conversations with people, phone calls, text messages, billboards on the road, menu options, news stories, and so much more. It is almost unavoidable to be exposed to all of these on a daily basis (unless you lock yourself in a deserted room all day it seems).

While it is good to consume a good amount of information each day since it is necessary for work, relationships, etc., there is a way to manage it so you don’t feel overwhelmed.

On a daily basis I used to feel so overwhelmed by my Twitter feed, LinkedIn discussions, RSS news articles and blog posts, e-mails, webinars, and advertisements on TV. However I have found ways to filter each of these mediums.

Twitter: I created carefully crafted lists to help me organize what information was coming from where so I could tune into specific topics. For example, I have a list called Influential Bloggers, another for Great Entrepreneurs and another for Awesome Marketers. So instead of watching my feed pile up all the time, I can instead decide what topic I want to see tweets from and click on that list.

For LinkedIn, I cleared out groups that I did not want to be involved with anymore if they were not relevant to what I was interested in. I then set weekly e-mails for those groups that I am still in (about 15) and scan the e-mail for topics I may be interested in reading and then further pursue those links. As for the LinkedIn home feed, most of it is Twitter feed updates anyways so I usually ignore that.

My RSS feed has been something that does still overwhelm me. In order to tune down the volume of articles, I unsubscribed to a few that I found no true value in so that I could focus more of my attention on the ones that mattered most to me. I then set aside maybe an hour a day or every other day to go through the articles, saving the ones I like (Instapaper is a great way to save articles to read later) and scroll right through article titles that don’t interest me. I have learned how to easily filter out topics I am not interested. For example, I subscribe to both Mashable and TechCrunch (and if you do as well, you know the type of volume I am talking about!) so I scroll through the list of unread articles until I find keywords that interest me and then I read on. Otherwise, I scan right through irrelevant ones so that I don’t waste my time.

Emails are pretty much unavoidable to receive and look at. I do find the social media updates a bit annoying (such as emails when someone is following me on Twitter) but I do like to receive those so that I know who is following me and I can see if I want to follow back. I also create folders to filter different types of emails in case I need to tend to them later if I receive them when I am busy doing something else.

Webinars are great to attend, but I tend to get way too many invites to them. I try to only sign up for the ones that can teach me something brand new, not repeat something I may already know. I try to attend 1-2 a week and set aside that hour to devote to learning from it and take notes.

Advertisements, well, they will always be on TV (or at least until inbound marketing takes over). I try to just change the channel when they come on, but being in the marketing industry, I sometimes like to see what they come up with for new ads. Many people I know get up or change the channel the minute a commercial comes on, but I occasionally like to watch them. (Tune in next week when I review some of my favorite current advertisements).

So while my first blog post discussed how I felt that Generation Y is experiencing information overload, I now think that everyone is experiencing it, but it can easily be managed. My above filters took time to implement and realize but they are more than worth it. I hope you all found value in this post and can become less overwhelmed and more managed in your information consuming.