A Freelance PR's Buzz Angst | Waves PR, freelance PR consultant, UK

A Freelance PR’s Buzz Angst

Claire Thompson, freelance PR consultant, Waves PR

I have just deleted my Buzz account. Whilst it was giving me personally some really valuable information, I have no idea what other people were seeing. As my Google account is a private one, often used for stuff for the kids, I was concerned about what I might be giving away.

Ultimately, the time may have come to set up a separate Google account for business purposes.

I’m happy to accept that I’m not a natural early adopter, just not enough geek creds, but this forces me to relive one of my greatest angsts. Missing out.

Take Google Wave. I recently signed up for it and sat there waiting for something to happen, thinking I must be doing something wrong.

I work on my own/generally with one person to answer to on an account, so mostly don’t need collaborative docs. I wouldn’t open an email account and expect someone to email me. Well maybe one or two selling dodgy gear, but no-one I’d seriously want to talk to. So I can see the error of my ways. I’m not quite sure what I expected. But I was there.

Disillusionment followed. I was so excited when I was invited to my first real life collaborative working Wave, I loved it’s pace and randomness…. only to find that everyone else hated it and went back to a good old fashioned Google doc.

But I still wasn’t gonna miss Buzz when it happened. I was going to get there with everyone else. I signed up at the first opportunity.

And then had one or two alarm calls that made me think I should wait. I have just deleted my account.

And so I freefall into a state of perpetual angst.

You see I was one of the very first Twitter users. I followed one of the geekiest of geek tech journalists but after a day or two of knowing what he’d had for breakfast, where he’d had coffee and even when he’d trodden in something unpleasant, I had to move on. It was sucking my time and really NOT developing my relationship with said journalist at all.

So I came off it. The rest, as they say, is history. A whole scrummy eco-system evolved with me still thinking that all it was about was bland, mindless stuff.

It was hard work to pedalling back up to speed, and as as many of the rules are unwritten, except by people who can be relied upon to tell you the wrong rules, it takes a while to get the lay of the land.

I’m now using Twitter as a valuable business tool (as well as helping maintain some friendships). But you can see my angst. By dropping Buzz now I fear that I will miss out on something really, really exciting for me and my clients.

It’s a bit like arriving early to a party. It may be the quiet moment when you get to have a really great conversation before the music cranks up, but more often it’s the embarrassed silence of people who have little in common and the host (ess) is running around like a blue ars*d fly. Or the time when some nutter attaches themselves to you.

I’m suspect I need to accept that I’m always going to be a ‘fashionably late’ kinda girl.

But I so achingly don’t want to miss out. What’s a girl to do?

Tags: PR, public relations, social media

communications, tech & telecoms | claireatwaves | February 22, 2010 4:22 pm

4 Comments

By Joshua Hughes, February 22, 2010 @ 4:55 pm

My thoughts precisely. I’ve yet to be convinced by either Buzz or Wave. They both seem fairly clever, but why use Wave when you’re already on Twitter 24/7, and why use Buzz when you can use Facebook? I just can’t spare the time update yet another social network! But perhaps I’m just an old curmudgeon who doesn’t like change…
By Paul Sutton, February 22, 2010 @ 6:15 pm

I’m in your camp on this, Claire. Although I haven’t actually deleted Buzz (yet) I pay no attention to it and it’s probably only a matter of time. The single reason I still have Buzz enabled is because I think I SHOULD have it on. It doesn’t add to my life in any way whatsoever and, if anything, confuses it. I wrote on my own blog last week about Buzz being a series of contradictions, in which I referred to it as ‘the bastard child of Facebook and Twitter’: http://tribalboogie.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-google-buzz-will-fail-and-succeed.html I love Google, but I really hope Buzz fails!
By claireatwaves, February 22, 2010 @ 6:25 pm

LOL. Not sure I want it to fail, as I enjoyed getting the info, but was very concerned I was spamming people (although I didn’t seem to be getting anything from the folk I ‘followed’) and I have NO idea what people could see on my account.

Still like Wave – but it’s definitely not a game you can play alone!