8,690 personal disruptions in April (so far)

I spend just as much (if not more) time deleting or ignoring spam than I do responding to wanted or relevant messages. Here’s a snap shot of what made it through my spam filters this month:

• 7,643 spam emails
• 909 spam blog comments
• 72 event or group invitations on facebook
• 42SMS spam messages from this site
• 24 calls from 1-800 numbers

It took me 45 minutes to clear my email inbox, about 30 minutes to clear out daily blog spam, 12 minutes to review & clear out facebook invitations, 7 minutes to ignore and delete SMS spam messages received from this site, and 12 minutes of ignoring 1-800 calls to my mobile device.

That’s 106 minutes of lost personal and or professional productivity in April.

That’s about 21 hours annually… or about three working days of productivity.

How much time have you wasted this month managing unwanted disruptions?

We live in fragmented times. We have less time and patience for disruptions… which is probably why social media ads on sites such as MySpace and facebook (managed by Google and Microsoft) have under-performed against expectations. 

They’re busy looking for innovative ways to disrupt your conversation on your favorite social networking site instead of looking for innovative ways to add to the conversation.

Facebook learned the hard way that you can fake or force advocacy with their beacon product… but they were on the right path.

Create advocacy  

How? Add to or facilitate the conversation by providing something of value.

Looking for an example? TD Bank has done a great job with this on facebook by creating widgets and pages that offer students something they find useful - a room mate bill organizer. Check out their widget and fan page on facebook 

Now back to deleting the spam that has accumulated since you started reading this article…