Steve Rubel wrote this in a recent Advertising Age column.  With all of the social networking sites and Web 2.0 tools out there, he offers readers a few interesting tips on effectively managing this participation.  A brief summary of his piece on how not to get bogged down with social media streams:

1. Find a daily or weekly roundup of the top news items in your particular market.  This will be extremely helpful in narrowing down the number of feeds, Web sites and blogs that you monitor–and that you might wish to comment on.  For example, Sarah Evans and David Teicher recently started Commentz, an email recap of the hot conversations around PR and new media.  This industry update led me to Steve’s column.

2. Use an RSS reader or feed aggregator as a database.  These tools allow you to browse and share all types of content, as well as set up folders to archive items you may want to come back to in the future.  For me, TweetDeck is particularly helpful for skimming through what’s happening with my contacts across Twitter, Facebook and more.

3. Allocate certain time for social media use.  Steve notes that he tries to make unusable time usable again.  Bookmarking tools like iCyte offer another way of returning to content that you may have flagged in order to prevent social media overload.