P/PC Balance in Social Media

It’s impossible to be on Twitter or Facebook for 5 minutes without learning something new. People across the world are talking about all sorts of things, and providing useful links to pretty fantastic websites. This is occurring literally all day and all night, without exception. It’s quite fascinating actually.

General browsing will bring “random value” – value on all sorts of subjects. You can also be specific and dig into topic areas and really get exactly the information you want. Tools like TweetDeck work like a dream when trying to do this. It’s no wonder that Sky News rolled it out to its staff recently.

Executive producer of Sky News Online, Julian March, said this about the TweetDeck rollout:

“The big change for us in 2010 is evolving how social media plays a role in our journalism. We no longer ghettoise it to one person, but are in the process of embedding throughout the whole team.”

With all of this information, it’s extremely easy to get sucked in. It’s easy to spend all day reading, collecting information, bookmarking, and filing. But doing only this will get one nowhere. There has to be a balance between collection data, and using data.

Stephen Covey explains this principle very accurately in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He calls it the P/PC Balance. P is Production, and PC is Production Capability.

You have to keep Production (using data to produce workshops, products, etc) and Production Capability (research, crafting your skills, etc) in balance – otherwise you won’t be effective.

His words:

Effectiveness lies in the balance. Excessive focus on P results in ruined health, worn-out machines, depleted bank accounts, and broken relationships. Too much focus on PC is like a person who runs three or four hours a day, bragging about the extra ten years of life it creates, unaware he’s spending them running. Or a person endlessly going to school, never producing, living on other people’s golden eggs – the eternal student syndrome.

In the Social Media space, it’s very easy to be a victim of the eternal student syndrome. Our industry literally changes daily. New developments at Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc shift the way we do things every so often. Company buy-outs and mergers are pretty common and no longer surprising. It’s easy for us to consume all of this information disproportionally to our actual use of the information.

I have learnt, from Covey’s teachings, to adapt this principle to every area of life. And I would recommend that you consider the same.

Covey:

The P/PC Balance is the very essence of effectiveness. It’s validated in every arena of life. We can work with it, or against it, but it’s there. It’s a lighthouse.

Social Media is very powerful. But a low-information diet will help us keep the P and PC balanced.

Photo credit: johnjoh