martin zeman's blog

Lately I have been re-thinking my personal social media strategy. What the …? You know: blog, Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. It’s not that I wouldn’t have anything else to do but it has started to become a bit of a pain. With me recently picking up twitter it got a bit overwhelming and I realised I wasn’t really clear on what I had been trying to achieve with those tools while at the same time realising their importance and usefulness if handled well.

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I got a bit confused as to who I write this blog for. Is it my friends and family? Is it potential elexu investors or future elexu users? On a related note – what should be my topics? I have read an advice that in order to have a successful blog you should only have one main topic. I thought about it and realised that having a successful blog is not really my primary aim. What I want is to have a freedom to write about anything I find interesting or important.
And that’s how it’s going to be: this blog will be a reflection of my thoughts through times.
At the same time I want to use this blog to shape my views and opinions through discussions with you – I am really really grateful for all your comments and emails I love to hear your views and stories and find them very interesting. I often learn a lot so please keep talking I am listening.

Linkedin

Linkedin used to be my favourite social network, I found it to be the most useful one. But after I quit full time employment a perceived value of Linkedin has dramatically dropped for me. I still see Linkedin useful just not as much as I used to before. I think it can provide the most value to full time employees and particularly job seekers. Maybe the next time I will use it it will from the side of an employer to find people to join us in elexu, who knows?

Twitter

I am a late follower to the twitter game, until recently I haven’t felt a need to use it. I am still figuring out how to best utilise it but at the moment I am enjoying it as a dynamic RSS feed, discovering interesting articles.
Also it seems to be a simple and unobtrusive way to connect with interesting strangers. Anyway it’s definitely a tool which you can’t understand without actually using it.

Facebook

I haven’t been a regular visitor to Facebook – there has been too much information and it was too time consuming to find pieces I would be really interested in. However FB now offers ways to filter a lot of that noise out so I am planning to give it another shot, tweak my settigs and become a bit more active there.
I have synchronised FB with Tweetdeck which is an excellent tool that enables me monitor both FB and Twitter at the same time without explicitly logging into those sites – love it.

Google+

While I like many Google services particularly Gmail, Maps, Calendar and Picasa, I don’t see Google with their Plus succeeding as a social network. I don’t plan to be too active there.

I have always felt that saying something obvious is a waste of time and that it’s perceived as a stupid show-off.

And? That’s obvious, why are you telling us?

Well I am not so sure it’s true anymore. Check out this awesome video from Derek Sivers.

Obvious to you. Amazing to others. from Derek Sivers on Vimeo.

It happens to me often. I spend a long time thinking about a problem finding out a simple and elegant solution – from the past point of view it would have looked amazing but to my present self it is obvious – just a common sense.
Another great example is when I read books – something that looks like the greatest revelation at the moment of reading it seems obvious a minute later.

The challenge is that we often need to communicate to people who don’t have the knowledge we have, for them some things don’t look obvious so if we want them to understand us we need to state what seems obvious to us. The difficult part is to identify what is obvious to us and not obvious to others – this problem is called Curse of Knowledge (very well described in Made to Stick).

I guess it’s safer to state more rather than less. I need to practice that it’s not intuitive to me.

What do you think? Does it happen to you? Do you feel bored or offended when someone states something obvious? How would you go about distinguishing between what’s obvious to everyone and what’s obvious only to you?