7am: Social Media's Finest Hour

There's something about 7am.

It's at that time when I am still in bed with the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 sounding in the background and the smell of freshly brewed coffee indicating its presence on the bed-side table.

However the start of the 7am news usually causes me to sit up and reach for my smart phone, which has been charging-up nicely through the night.

So what do I see first? A selection of a few unread email messages, Facebook updates and Twitter tweets that came in just before 7am.

A quick glimpse of each (no more than 2 minutes in total) is all takes before getting up. In that time those snippets of incoming information have entered my waking brain which, absent of anything else to start the day, has entered my conscious thinking.

This morning - at 7am for 2 minutes - I ingested snippets of breaking tech news from Computing, New Media Age and Tech Crunch, contemplated today's London Groupon voucher, look through the Google News10 email with search results for 'Tesco', and read a message from those members of the R&D team working 5 hours ahead in Bangalore.

These short snippets of tweets, updates and email headlines continue to swirl through my mind as I stand there in the shower / search for clothes / sip my coffee. I ponder what I've learned - and I keep thinking of it randomly throughout the day. Basically this information has, whether I wanted it to or not, set my day's agenda!

I actually became conscious of the 'power' of 7am a few weeks ago when I was on holiday. Bizarrely I actually missed it! The 7am info-buzz connected me back to the world after a night of sleep. Without it my mind seemed to feel it was missing something.

I raised my awareness from 'conscious' to 'wildly aware' when I attended a Microsoft Creative Technology showcase last week. One of the presenters has a company that runs social media on behalf of several celebrities and sports-people. He spoke of the '7am broadcast' that occurs 24 times a day, time-zone by time-zone around the world. Twitter Followers and Facebook 'Like' Fans would receive their favourite celebrity's tweet at 7am. Feedback had found that this was the most effective time for the celebrity or brand to be remembered for the rest of the day.

The effectiveness of Social Media continues to fascinate me - and now it has a 'power time' of 7am. These days it seems that millions of people are experiencing that '7am' moment as they wake and pick up their smart-phone left charging by the bedside.

If they follow you - and you talk to them at 7am - they are likely to remember you all day. 7am is, quite literally, Social Media'a finest hour.