Social media: Isn’t there just some #%@& button I can push?

This morning, robocommunicator Neville Hobson, who keeps everyone awake by tweeting in his sleep, shared the headline, "Sky News Closes Second Life newsroom," and remarked wistfully, "The end of an era."

Doncha hate it when an era ends before you knew the dadgum thing'd begun?

Well, I figgered this was as good a time as any to blurt out a hillbilly question that has nevertheless been nagging at me for some time:

When is somebody going to organize social media?

Why I Ask: Every time I write something that I think is cool or do something on behalf of a client that I want to draw attention to, I spend several manic hours dashing around Internet 2.0 like a stoner in a Mexican grocery store.

I'm posting the thing on my blog, on Twitter, in LinkedIn groups, on Facebook. If there’s a video, I gotta do YouTube, if I’ve got some pictures, I’ve got to FlickR, and if I’ve gotta pitch bloggers, I’ve got to dicker. And we're not even talking about social media press kits about which Shel Holtz has had roaring debates for years, but which I still have never received, let alone sent.

No doubt, I should be more organized. I should have all these potential promotional possibilities in a spreadsheet somewhere. Or just a checklist, scrawled on a piece of paper and taped to my typewriter. But who has time to get organized between these desperate and increasingly regular attempts to achieve critical mass in hopes of going viral?

Every time, it’s a wild morning spent pitching all these knuckleballs and then a wild afternoon spent catching them—and meanwhile remembering all the networks I should have sent it to. How could I have forgotten Communitelligence.com? And knowing in the darkest chamber of my heart that I failed to do some crucial search-engine optomization bullshit.

Why doesn’t someone take pity on people like me—no, take advantage of people like me—and invent a single site that walks you through all the social media possibilities in a systematic way, the way a travel website helps you book your travel—flights, rental car, hotel, etc.—and actually lets you do the whole shitterroo from there?

Not that this electronic worksheet wouldn’t be cumbersome and tiresome. There’s no getting around the fact that there's a lot of different stuff to say to these different groups and on these different forums, and you have to say it differently to each. And of course no automated site could tell you which niche audiences to pitch. (Or could it actually remember your preferences and prompt you not to forget Communitelligence.com? Oooh, who's the robocommunicator now, Hobson?)

What we need is something to walk us through the social-media self-promotion process, so that the whole thing is just a little more organized, a little less frantic.

The job of launching an idea or a product would probably still take all morning, and the resulting dialogue would probably still take all afternoon. But at least with a system, a social media launch would have a beginning, a middle and at least a simpering excuse for an end.

I’d pay five dollars per promo for that modicum of peace of mind.

More likely: I will buy Shel Holtz or Neville Hobson dinner next time they're in town if they'll only come here and point all of us straight to the site that does exactly what I'm talking about.

Or that did for the last five years, before it recently closed down because it ran out of customers still as stupid as me.