Google Buzz is a Time Burglar

(hint: that’s a bad thing)

If you are a Rizzo Tees Blog reader that has followed me on Twitter for some time, you’ll know me to be a rather prolific tweeter (30,000 tweets and going strong).  I cannot help myself, and the reason is three-fold:

• Twitter is my number one eFriend maker and my number one sales channel. I love my new eFriends, and I like sales.
• I really, really enjoy shooting the sh*t with people. It’s just fun, but perhaps not a good use of my “business time.”
• I am easily distracted by the constant flood of awesome information that Twitter provides me.

I <3 the Internet because I devour current events news, and I can say without hyperbole that the Internet is a million times better at delivering this to me than newspapers.  And now Twitter!  It’s like Fark on steroids! Instead of waiting for Drew and Fark crüe to release new stories, Twitter is releasing like 100 tweets to me every second!  Just hook it up to my veins!

Bullet points 2 and 3 above are a real challenge for me.  Tim Ferriss would puke on himself if he knew how much time I spend Gchatting, Facebook chatting, Twitter rapping, checking emails, and now blog writing!  Notice I didn’t even say “t-shirt order processing” or “t-shirt inventory management.”  Which brings us to Google Buzz.

Knowing what you know above, can the introduction of Google Buzz possibly be a good thing for me? Well, know this – on debut day, I spent 5+ hours on it. Twitter actually felt lonely.

I think Google Buzz has alot of promise, but at some point I need to hit the brakes here.  David Meerman Scott has a great blog post explaining why he is not on LinkedIn.  He basically says, “There are enough ways to interact with me. Just come to Twitter or Facebook and do it there.”  While I’m more in the camp of Lewis Howes as far as the importance of LinkedIn, I respect David’s decision here – he’s doing what works for him.  He has shunned a major social media platform, and he’s getting on just fine.

We have to be mindful of not using social media as a “bullhorn” – talking 100% about ourselves and 0% about others.  The 80/20 rule is a good one.  But perhaps it would not be a bad idea to proactively choose to use Google Buzz as a bullhorn, and continue to use Twitter and Facebook as tools of interactivity. Follow the 80/20 rule on Twitter and Facebook, but consciously say to yourself, “I can’t be interactive on yet another Social Media platform, so I’m going to maintain a presence on Google Buzz, I’m going to buzz out links to my blog posts or my eCommerce site, but that’s it.”

What are your thoughts on this?