By Dennis D. McDonald

According to Mike Elgan, tech media mogul Leo Laporte has withdrawn from social media:

Leo announced in a blog post today that he's stopped using Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook. (He had previously dumped Facebook and Instagram, and yesterday stopped using Twitter and Tumblr.)

This is how I responded to Mike's announcement on Google+, which is my social media channel of choice:

A lot will depend on whether your goal is to "build an audience" or not. I like Google+ and stopped using FB and Twitter long ago -- the quality and variety here on Google+ is so refreshing and I can easily control being exposed to hate and idiocy, unlike other social media platforms. But then, I'm at a place in my career where "building an audience" is not my focus; I want to publish interesting stuff and in return be exposed to interesting stuff, and the large and small groups I follow here on Google+ are especially refreshing, and most are not directly focused on my consulting but on my hobbies and interests. I still focus a lot on my own blog, too, and I promote my consulting through relevant content and direct email.

As far as Leo is concerned I stopped watching his various shows quite a while ago. It wasn't because I didn't like them, it's because I found his free-ranging video style to be inefficient in transmitting information. I like the guy but sometimes his meandering style just frustrated me too much. I'll take a well edited 3 paragraph news story any day over a ten minute video chit chat.

FWIW, I think what Leo has experienced the reality of what I call "social media decay." Once upon a time I was a major proponent of social media as a mechanism for relationship building but was naive about how it came to be misused by marketers, haters, and Trumpists. See : http://www.ddmcd.com/?category=Social+Media+Decay

Copyright (c) 2018 by Dennis D. McDonald