We all know that the moment you log into Facebook, you can kiss a good chunk of time away. Facebook has suggested at several advertising conferences that the average user will spend between 20 and 40 minutes logged in per day. Some people take that to extremes as Tech Crunch reported. But it does raise an interesting question on how we spend our time online.

With new and specialized social media sites showing up on almost a daily basis, how do you find the time to use the ones you have and the ones you want to use? If you are not working in the social media industry, use of these sites during work is usually frowned upon due to it’s nature of taking away productive work hours. Does that mean when the 5pm bell rings we all rush home to update our blogs, status, and journals?

Absolutely not. Instead we find other ways to keep our social media in check and our listeners informed. iPhone users can now update their Word Press blogs from their phone with a variety of clients. Live journal offers an audio to blog service so you can call in updates. Mini clients for Twitter exist so we can run them in the background and update as needed. However, all of these input devices require time no matter how small it is to update.

The experiment here is this. Take one day of your life and track how much time you spend on social media sites. Better yet, track how much time you spend consuming any media type (social media sites, TV, radio, film, gaming, etc.) and compare them. You will probably find that Social Media are gaining ground on your total consumption time to the detriment of something else. This could be a good thing in that you are unplugging yourself from programming media (tv, film) and doing something more interactive (games, social events).

Personally, I have to limit my daily social media consumption otherwise I can go down roads of information I may never come back from. Not that it is a bad thing, but when it hampers you from remembering to take out the recyclables, then there is a problem.

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What I do want to write about is something that occurred to me during C.C. Chapman’s talk about Building Your Brand Through Passion and Community. He was discussing a common topic where Podcamp Boston is really a venue for sharing ideas and connecting like-minded people. This is something we take for granted at conferences but then I started to think about social media in general.

The point of Social Media usually is to connect like minded people for the sharing of information through a technology portal. However, we still find the need to physically connect through the social media device of a conference. No mater how advanced a social media site can become, the human factor still can not be overcome. Being able to stand up and ask C.C. an immediate question, have him query the audience for an answer, then connect two people together for the answer could be accomplished solely on the digital realm. But we like sharing these experiences in person. Matching the face to the idea is exciting, new, and fun. Something about being able to exchange ideas and have the completely unusual and random things happen drives us as people to be more creative.

Maybe conferences just need a sexier word for them in this Web 2.0 era? Live Social Media Events could start to take the world by storm. But you know that in the end all we are doing is just fulfilling a need that gets lost through the translation mechanism of technology. People are social creatures and we still need to sit down and break bread with someone from time to time just to remember what the social part is all about.

(NOTE: I did want to provide a link to the video of C.C.’s talk and of the impromptu jam session on Sunday but I could not quickly find links. If you know where they are, comment and I will add them in)

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