Nosiy Tools

Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Ning, Squidoo, blogs, web pages, and the Internet are noisy. They are all tools, merely there to enable and support people in communicating a message that they believe in.

Too often, we lose sight of the fact that these tools are not the mission. The tools are not even the strategy. We use them to tactically achieve the things that we actually want to get done. We use them to see our mission move forward. To see our strategic initiatives reach fruition.

However, we trade a whole lot of our time playing. Playing is good to an extent. It helps us to learn more about the tools that we are going to use. Playing helps us to better understand how the community that we are leading will react to our use of the tools that we select. And playing equips us with tools that could be useful to us in ways that are not immediately understood.

We need to be extremely careful that we do not allow the tools to dictate how we are going to get things done. We should already have an idea about what it is that is important to us and how we plan to make certain that we align ourselves in such a way that we are able to achieve what is important to us. We must consider the problem that we are trying to solve, and then determine the best tools and tactics to achieve resolution.

The tools can change, as well as the tactics.

But the mission doesn't. The mission is static.