Fun & easy guide to wasting time in social media

Have too much time on your hands? Want to look busy but don’t really care what happens to your hotel’s sales numbers? I present…

Use tools you don’t really understand

If you don’t really get how Facebook helps bring in new sales…don’t worry! Avoid reading those online tutorials and how-to guides – everyone knows the best way to learn is by discovering something for yourself. Spend lots of time just hanging out in social media – you’ll learn as you go.

Join new networks no one knows about

If someone starts suspecting you of goofing off and wasting time, you’ll have to move to newer networks. Thanks to those darn “Web 2.0″ conferences and mainstream media – now everyone and their grandmother knows what Twitter and Facebook are.

Don’t despair! You just need to go deeper. I hear that Agiyo, Leembo, and Jabberfly are still fairly safe. Participating in obscure networks will make others think of you as an early adopter, ahead of the curve.

Get as many friends as you can

Don’t worry who you’re connected with. The more people in your social networks, the more time you can spend looking busy. You can spend more time dealing with requests to join new groups, trying new applications, playing more games, and reading more updates. Amassing huge numbers of followers is the only important thing – it doesn’t matter how you get them.

Search for tools for the tools

Running out of networks to surf? Let’s face it: Only about 900 social media sites and networks exist. What do you do when you’ve created a profile on all of them?

Easy! Start exploring all the tools built for each site. Twitter is pretty hot right now, so you may want to try starting off with 99 Essential Twitter Tools or 140+ More Twitter Tools. You have to sign up for most of these tools, so you can get at least a few weeks of ‘work’ out of this.

Live streams are fun

We pretend our goal in getting large Twitter followings is to increase our influence. Nonsense!

It’s really so that our friend stream in Tweetdeck can be updated faster than we can read new tweets. Who knew “market research” could be such an effective way to avoid other work?

Cross promote everything everywhere

You never want to pass up an opportunity for promotion, so make sure to republish everything in every social network you’ve involved in. The more noise the better. Look for tools that update all your social networks at once: Twitter updates linked to Facebook status changes…all republished in FriendFeed.

Quantity over quality! The more content you have out there, the more time you can spend managing it.

Feed your ego

You’ve spent a lot of time writing that blog post or creating a Digg-worthy news story, so you deserve to see what response it will bring. Closely follow your blog posts & tweets for responses – checking every 15 minutes throughout the day is the most satisfying.

Track as many alerts as you can

Think you’re doing well to track 50 different websites through RSS? Think again. To make sure you never miss a story – and to be well informed – you need to subscribe to at least 500 different newsfeeds. Scoble reads over 600 each morning.

There’s also a chance a few stories will slip through unnoticed with subscriptions, so make sure to sign up for at least a few hundred alerts from Google and Twitter around all your industry keywords. Again, the more obscure the better – you want to track massive amounts of raw data.

Don’t have a plan

Plans are too restrictive! They make you think about what performs, and take away all the fun.

Don’t experiment

Experimenting makes social media sounds like science or something. Just follow your heart!

Don’t worry about ROI

Social media is just about branding, so don’t let sales numbers get in the way. It’s all about influence, right?

Ignore the clock

The goal is flow.  When you’re doing social media right, you’ll lose track of time.

If you’re having trouble losing yourself, you may need to remove all timepieces from your office. Take down that clock. Shut off your phone. You don’t want any interruptions that may get you out of your groove.

Good luck, and have fun!