Where did my social media efforts get off track?  That is something that I’ve been trying to understand these last few months.  Whether writers block, or busy with work, moving, family time, or whatever; I’ve lost track of what I was trying to accomplish in my social media efforts.

This is rather troubling to me since I seem to have lost focus somewhere back in September.  I’ve rethought my topics time and again, got sidetracked reading the feeds I thought I enjoyed, and failing to use the time I did have available to me to good effect.  The result is that I’ve floundered.

This post is not a declaration of a new direction, nor is it a launchpad of new resolutions to do better or post more, etc…  It is, however, a post about how blogging can get away from you, and how social media can be a bit overwhelming without a least some kind of plan.

Now, the plan thing really starts to make more sense.  While I’ve been blogging for awhile (three years this month), I really hadn’t had a clear focus on the why of it all.  Because of that lack of definition, I’ve started and dropped several blogs.  I currently have three, two of which are languishing in the dim corners of my mind crying out for content.

Without a plan, you may wander like I have from topic to topic, trying to find inspiration that would drive me to write more, share more and have fun doing it.  Two of my blogs are on things that I’ve always been passionate about.  Snowmobiling and mobile devices.  But even that hasn’t helped me post on a regular basis or create media to support the blogs and make them interesting.

What I’ve found in the past year and a half (or so) is that I’ve become very interested in topics that I’ve no training in, no previous knowledge of.  However, they have pushed me to grow in ways that I never thought of and for that I’m grateful.  These topics are personal branding and social media.

So, I’m just going to “hunker down”, as it were, and keep working my way through to where I seemed to be.

Interesting aside when I was trying to wrap up this post.  Jeremiah Owyang had a great post in Some Conversations have shifted to Twitter today.  I wrote more on Twitter in 4 hours than I had in the whole month of November on all blogs and social sites combined.  More on that topic later, but it demonstrates how one event can change things.