The ability to relate to your organization’s publics is directly connected to your ability to listen to them.

There is a lot of pressure, and rightfully so, for non-profit and public sector organizations to have a presence on social media networks. And while I believe that the best way to understand the social media space is to just start using it, for the uninitiated this can feel like a daunting and at times a very noisy task.

The ability to have conversations in real-time through networks like Twitter or to share your day-to-day movement through location-based networks like Foursquare has fundamentally changed the way we communicate and interact. Yet at the same time, the sheer number of social networks available, combined with an increasing number of individuals and organizations using these networks, has created an overwhelming volume of information being shared.

One of the potential problems of expanding communication and PR efforts to multiple social networks is that it creates yet another channel to monitor, listen to and engage with. For some, technological immersion may mean a technological deluge.

Yesterday I took the time to review the conversations I was listening to on Twitter and came to a rather surprising realization – I wasn’t listening very well to any of them. The reason that I wasn’t listening very well to these conversations was that I was listening to too many.

I imagined a room full of the 300 people I was following on Twitter all having conversations at once. In a room full of too much noise we aren’t able to listen very well. Social networks and other online spaces are no different.

When social networks become too cluttered or overwhelmingly noisy they loose the thing that makes them attractive. The noise creates confusion, the confusion leads to frustration, and rather than using these networks to socialize, we start to withdraw.

Sometimes the most effective way to listen, and in turn become more effective in relating to your publics, is to reduce the noise and information filtering through these online streams. This may be especially true of social networks like Twitter where you can actively control who you listen to. However, a brief word of warning – be careful not to alienate your supporters. If you have built up a Twitter following by following others you may receive some backlash if you start purging your account.