It’s no surprise that we’re all taking in massive amounts of information nowadays, I recently noticed in a newspaper article that the brain processes about 16GB of new information a day. With all this going in, it’s becoming harder to cut through to people, that’s for sure. People are inundated with information and simply can’t absorb it all, therefore our brains just seem to skimming and cramming as much information as we can in order that we may need to recall some reference to something, at some point.
As a result, we’re all filtering much more in our lives. Relying on trusted sources or tools to give us the bits we don’t want to miss amongst the noise. Counting up my columns on Tweetdeck earlier today, I have thirty six, which are monitoring the fifteen hundred or so people on Twitter I follow and the 311 Linkedin connections I have. The columns are set up to monitor key words, key people, sectors and topics which I’m interested in, listening to or want to keep an eye on. By using filters in this way, I can keep a cockpit view on the things that really matter such as my most trusted business contacts, industry talk, new products or new connections being made by people I know. This means I only need to take a glance at it, two or three times a day to catch up on what really matters, in reality, it means that the top 10% of so of people I follow, make it into a column, like a modern day black book!
The more valuable content you distribute, the more your reputation can increase and the greater value you have as a syndicator of value to your network. The trick is to not do too much of it, otherwise you become a news information service and drift into obscurity. I’ve seen people on Twitter who rapid fire out news, who get unfollowed just as quickly as they crowd out users screens with information, thinking it is of value. Quality always trumps quantity when dealing with people want to filter. The more you do it yourself, the more you recognise it’s value to others.
