Conversational Media Marketing

How you spell relief
With the advent of , and more recently FriendFeed and AllTop, I'm finding there is an escape route. Instead of being enslaved to the feed reader, I'm letting my friends tell me what's most important and in almost real-time.

Here's my current practice...

1. I check Google reader once (or twice) per day. I've created a must read list of blogs that, if I don't get to anything else, I at least read those. I distill the list so that it doesn't, itself, become too long. I also scan the headlines pretty quickly so as not to get bogged down if at all possible. I'm apt to hit the "mark all as read" button more quickly than I used to.
2. I refer to Alltop > Social Media once per day.
3. I monitor Twitter as often as I can using TWhirl. It's easy to become addicted to Twitter, but I'm doing my best not too allow that to happen. I mean, why trade one problem for another.
4. I monitor FriendFeed more than anything else. This app has really come as a godsend and may replace my dependence on Twitter...making it a secondary channel. I'm gradually adding friends and am appreciative of the "imaginary friend" feature, which allows me to add friends that don't use the app themselves.

NOTE: I was very hopeful about Plaxo Pulse when it first rolled out, because it does the same thing as FriendFeed, aggregating content from a variety of social media applications. I just learned that Plaxo has added more feeds recently and now offers more than FriendFeed. Problem with Plaxo is...nobody uses it...so it's out.

The truth is there's no way to completely avoid being inundated with information. There's just way too much of it. I mean, sites like TechCrunch, Marketing Pilgrim and Read Write Web roll out multiple posts per day themselves. I've just come to terms with the fact that there is only so much I can keep up with in the limited amount of time I have and am adjusting my consumption practices to accommodate.