Archive for December, 2007
Hitting Your Target for 2008
Resolutions, as you might have already determined for yourself, rarely succeed. The problem is that they’re based on thinking that stems from you thinking guilty thoughts about things you should do better. You start by thinking about your weakness, and then you make plans about how to shore up those things that you’re weakest in handling successfully. I believe that this is the heart of the problem. I think the exact opposite approach is required. I think if you want to set some goals for 2008, you have to work from your strengths.
An Easy Starting Point
Why reinvent the wheel. I like the book StrengthsFinder 2.0 as a great tool for helping you understand your strengths. Take the survey exactly as they intend you to do it, and NOT with any intention to game the system. (Here’s a hint: if you lie on this test, the results won’t be that useful).
From Strengths, Make Plans
Here’s where you can be really, really simple with your plan for 2008. Decide what you’ve done well in 2007, and decide how to improve on that in 2008. Maybe you’ve conquered the basics of blogging. Are you ready to think about problogging (blogging for money?), or are you ready to start sharing your knowledge with others(schedule a series of how-to events at your local library, chamber of commerce, etc)?
Set these plans up with very simple phrases to sum up your goal. For instance, make a goal look like this: “Produce two ebooks about social media in 2008 to make $5,000.”
In there are a few numbers. Two books. Not one. A year: 2008, not “some day.” And $5,000. A dollar amount, not a checkbox to say you’ve created a PDF.
Take simple leaps from what you’ve done well in 2007 to where it can bring you in 2008.
Make Only Three to Five Targets
Our minds aren’t especially good at managing large numbers of things to remember. We do best when we can boil things down, make icons of our thoughts, and burn a deep understanding into just a few things. Let’s work hard at building targets that you can hit by working on three to five targets only for 2008. In 2006, I had three goals: Ask, Do, Share. I would ask for help when I needed it, and ask how I could be helpful. I would take action as often as possible, instead of just talking about things. And I would share what I learned.
2006 was my BEST year. Three words. Best year. Coincidence?
Try cooking your target ideas down to just three to five things to focus on. And then build them graphically into your vision.
Make Simple Target Maps
On any given day, at any point in that day, there are things you’re doing that will advance your goals. All else will not. Set up very simple graphics (I’ll create some later this week for you) that lay out those things that advance your goals. POST THIS VISIBLY where you’ll be working towards those goals.
If your goal is to run a marathon this spring, then you need a simple goal graphic by your fridge, your bed, your TV, and your computer that says, “Running gets better with practice.” Or whatever will get you out of the house, out of the fridge, and in bed on time.
Any time you’re not working on your targets, you are not working on having a great 2008. You’re waffling. You’re making excuses. You’re doing something that’s NOT going to get you the results you’re seeking.
Fix Your Self-Esteem
I could recommend Dr. Matthew McKay’s book Self-Esteem ten times a week and still not mention it enough. MOST of our problems in life come from not having dealt with our self esteem. The best thing I ever did for myself was work on this in 2003. When I falter, it’s because I forget these lessons. When I excel, it’s because I work my hardest at following what this book taught me.
Your path to a better 2008 includes your conquering of your Inner Critic, your challenging of your self-view, and your putting in place some self-management of the things that put you in a bad place mentally.
If you do NOTHING else for 2008, do that. Read this book, with a notebook nearby, and pay VERY close attention to the lessons and advice in this book. It will help you immensely, and that in turn, will bring you closer to hitting your targets. (It will also reinforce my point of you not focusing on your weaknesses and guilt).
Just One More Book
No, not the wildly successful children’s book podcast. In this case, I want to recommend one more book that I think will make a difference for your thinking.
Dr. Stephen R. Covey’s The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness. This book is a build-up of Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which is a classic in its own right. What I like about this book, however, is that it’s built up into a nicer framework. This version is a lot better to follow than the original 7 Habits text, and I got tons more out of it.
One note: I didn’t do much with the spirituality part of the book, and that’s a fairly large chunk of the last .. I don’t know… third? of the book. That’s me. If you’re religious or very spiritual, that part might offer you lots. Me, I stick to the earlier part of the book. So, it’s a good one to consider, because it helps understand principle-based leadership, and helps you structure your thoughts around some really simple but life-changing guidelines.
It’s Not About The Books
You can do tons in 2008 without ever cracking a book. The books are talisman tools, designed to give you an external helping hand with things that are completely internal to you. This coming year, look at building on what you do best, simplifying your targets, and picking three to five things to improve.
Does anyone want to share their thoughts, additional resources, or ideas on how you’ll tackle 2008? We’d love to hear.
Photo credit leeroy09481
Goal Setting Tips
Help Me Solve a Problem
Thankful as I am for followers in Twitter, I need a way to streamline the process of adding people back. I’ve timed it and it takes me about 24 seconds from clicking on the message in my inbox to adding the person on the Twitter site, to comin back and deleting a message. That means, whenever I get a batch of new followers (about 30-60 a day right now), I’m going through a rather time-consuming process. I don’t want to automatically reciprocate, because I have a few rules as to who I add, so here’s what I want to do.
- Upon receiving a message that so-and-so is following me on Twitter, I want to strip the http://twitter.com/username out of the email.
- I want to dump that into a text file (that grows with each subsequent new message).
- I want to delete the original message.
- Then I’ll manually work with that text file later.
How can I accomplish this? Do I have to build a pop3 gmail account in either Mail or Thunderbird and work from THAT?
Your thoughts would be appreciated.
Media 2008 is a Mix-Get Mixing
iEllie.com is a personal blog by a college student majoring in mass communications, focusing on PR. Her blog is an interesting peek into the heads of college students and how they’re viewing blogs, media making, and media consumption. Encapsulated on the first page alone are some interesting points to consider. And before you go and dismiss the blog for being unprofessional, or scattered, or anything else derisive, think creatively for a moment. Look at it as a mixing board, or a paint palette. See what iEllie is putting out there, and from there, we can extrapolate.
In This First Capture
Notice how iEllie uses a sideways picture in the banner. Fun, not pro. Fun. It shows a human, someone communicating. Then look: iEllie goes right into making media, with an Utterz post embedded at the top, a podcast right below. She shows all her related networks (tons!), and some personal data right on the front page. iEllie’s out there, telling us who she is, but not giving away 100% of what a stalker would need (important point to consider).
Media and Motion and Media Some More
iEllie has pictures and podcasts and Flickr and tons and tons of production just packed into this page. She’s creating all the time, and using the various formats interchangeably. This gives you a sense of the mix culture. It’s not a blog. It’s not a podcast. She’s making something and it doesn’t NEED a name because there’s a payload.
Key to the game in 2008: Forget the labels, focus on the payload
Where It Gets Even More Cool
iEllie posts that YouTube clip up there alongside her media. She doesn’t single one out over the other. In fact, I’m going to bet that she doesn’t distinguish between what she makes and what she finds/cultivates/curates. Why should she? It’s the same as clipping the words out of a magazine and forming your own sentence, or writing on a page. It’s the same output at the end.
Why All The Fuss Over iEllie.com?
It’s not iEllie specifically. I’m sure she’s wonderful and all that. I just followed her on Twitter. But it’s what I saw as a way to illustrate simply all the various facets of media making, media usage, and media consumption in the coming year. If you want to distill it out, here’s what I’m thinking should happen:
- Big media (journalistic, entertainment, etc) should divert SOME of their ad budget (.01%?) to media sharing projects, liking giving people mashup clips of movies and songs.
- Marketers/advertisers have people WILLINGLY sharing stuff all over the place. Give your projects handles, and see if people will take them.
- PR types, don’t go after just the A-list bloggers. Find the iEllie’s of the world, and find legions of them, and get them into your campaign.
- Professionals and leaders of the world- iEllie is your next employee. Look at how she rolls. Is your business ready for her? It better be, because that’s your job pool right there. Someone who mixes, mashes, uses alllllllll the social networks, and considers this the same as doing work for you.
- Parents- are you equipping your kids to make media? (Don’t get into a privilege story here). If not, you’re disadvantaging your kid in this regard. Computers and the Internet and powerful tools aren’t frivolous. Ditto game systems. Ditto NETWORKED game systems. THIS is our golf, people. Halo 3 and Tweetups are the new golf courses and country clubs. At least for some.
- Media makers- are you purists? Are you mashing and re-using and mixing? Are you making it easier for people to share and use YOUR media?
Think I’m crazy? Do you agree? What’s your take on iEllie’s site?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog.
How Being Nice Impacts the Value of Social Media
Yesterday, Clarence Smith, Jr, and I took on social media, round one. Today, none other than Eric Rice gets into the conversation, and so you know there won’t be punches pulled. Here I am, Mister Nice Guy, ready to get into it with two guys who want to lay out the truth. Will I hold up?
Check out the post and find out!!!
Take My Google Reader Shared Items PLEASE
Google, I love shared items. I love, love, love that you’ve equipped me with tools to share things I like, to pimp my own blog, to go out and find other people shared feeds and get a human-aggregated view of the web. I love it to death, and I’m glad you’re sharing the tools with me to involve other people in the game.
Okay, I get that this was like the old days when hotels put the porn movies on the bill so your boss would get angry at you. I get that. I can understand that businesses might occasionally get caught with their digital pants down, and that maybe a few strategic next moves might be sussed out by something in a shared items field. I get it. I really get Scoble’s point that the PR team could’ve done a much better job.
But I Still Love You
And I’m still using you, and I’m still going to share the hell out of things I find interesting, even if half of it is resharing what Robert and Geoff Livingston and other friends have already shared once. Because the data is still big and interesting and important, and it’s getting sucked into the fanblades of great projects like Steve Gillmor’s The Gang. I want MORE sharing.
I would throw away direct RSS subscriptions to MOST blogs if I had enough of the right aggregators in my Reader. Telling you now, I’m following more people’s shared items links and Twitter links than I am reading a blog straightforward these days, and there’s a reason. Google makes it even FASTER and easier to use this information for something.
So there. I’ve said it. I’m GLAD Reader shares my Items. Want some? Subscribe to my shared items feed.
Twitter at Velocity
Twitter is tricky sometimes, especially when you have a bunch of people added into the stream. It’s something that I will blog about tomorrow at greater length, but I wanted to just jot something, almost as a note to myself, but that might bear some consideration. Twitter, I believe, is two different things depending on how many folks you’re following, and I believe it should be viewed as completely different apps, or at least uses, depending on which way you’ve got it set up. What follows are some facts and information that will be part of a backstory for an upcoming post. You might find it interesting, just to see what Twitter looks like through a different lens. I wonder what Robert Scoble’s take on this is. He’s got a lot of followers, and I know he reads a lot of his threads, too. (No, not searchbaiting you, Robert, but I bet your complementary post would be equally revealing).
Some Quick Facts
- I follow 2,548 people (as of Dec 26th)
- I am followed by 3,059 people (thank you!)
- 1 page of tweets on the webpage, when following that many, equals just under 1 minute of time.
- 48 pages back equals 1 hour
- A typical page of @replies to me equals 1 hour.
What This Means
- I can’t always respond to everyone’s @reply, but I read them all.
- I don’t read every tweet you send. No matter who you are. I don’t read every tweet I send.
- I use Twittersearch and Terraminds extensively, and even then, I miss some of what you’re trying to tell me.
- Twitter has some bugs that occasionally make you THINK you’ve followed someone, but might not notice that it didn’t go through (It took me 4 weeks to add @judell). Sometimes, that’s why I haven’t added you back.
- Even if I don’t see your every tweet, you’re probably still a good person.
- Even if I might not have added you back, what you say is still valuable.
Where This Will Go Tomorrow
Tomorrow, Clarence and I will talk a bit more about the “niceties” of social networks, and how these come back to bite us in some ways. We’ll discuss some of the things that people do in the name of being polite, some of what people do to “lunchbox,” and some of what people do to try and stay on top of it all. It will be a complex post, and Clarence and I both have different ways we approach this. I think it’ll be worth checking out.
But for now, I just wanted to blog the background of what it is to read Twitter at velocity. My way is DEFINITELY not right, nor recommended. It’s just what I do. Your mileage WILL vary.
Keys to the Gates of Social Media
Conversations can be so cool. Clarence and I got into a conversation about how Twitter presents information, especially the difference between following friends and following conversations. It led to a collaborative blog post between Clarence and me. What we’ve started here, hopefully, is a conversation, and not just a statement. We don’t know all the answers, but we know what we want.
Add your thoughts to this conversation, and see if maybe we can better understand Twitter and social networks in general a little better.
Thanks, Clarence. That was a great conversation, and I’m glad it turned into something bigger.
Photo credit, CC Chapman
No Predictions for 2008- NEEDS
Predictions are all over the web right now. I *could* follow that trend, but I won’t. Instead, I’m going to tell you about my NEEDS for 2008, and hope that they thread well with where the Internet is going. I’m going to bet that lots of you have similar needs, and insofar as you’re smart, and know smart people, if we surface our needs, perhaps we’ll find our solutions faster.
Social Network Hubs
Marc references these here, and I agree. I want something that lets me hub my social networks together. I want to thread Twitter, Utterz, and Seesmic together. I want to have everything in a nice hub that lets me see the threads better. I need it. I can’t just traipse all over the Internet trying to follow conversations. Too much work, and not enough reward. I think apps like MyBlogLog and Lijit are close, but we need more.
Bacn Management
I want set-once, use-often rules for bacn. There are now transactions that I have to do over and over again that I want to be one-touch. Here are a few examples:
- Receive email (bacn) from Twitter that CoolDude is now following me.
- I check out CoolDude, determine if he’s a linkbot, a friend-adder, or someone who seems legit.
- I check that CoolDude twitters primarily in English (as I can’t do much with other languages).
- I follow CoolDude back if he follows those rules.
Time per transaction: 25 seconds, give or take the speed of my connection. Fine, if you get 2 or 3 followers a day. Not fine if you get more than that.
Other bacn “actions” I want to turn into one-click: friend adds on Facebook, friend adds on Flickr, and now that I think about it, social network “adds” everywhere.
Data Tools for Humans
We’re in an age where people are flinging REAMS of information at us. I follow about 120 blogs fairly closely. Robert Scoble reads over 800. With the Google Reader friends concept and shared items, I cover an even larger spread of info. Well, there are two ways to get at that data. One is to read it all linearly, which means I’ll skim and scrape and deep-dive and forward and clip, but at a frenetic pace, to keep up with my personal subset of everything going on out there.
This can be done MUCH simpler using business intelligence tools that are normally in the hands of enterprises. For all I know, I might be able to do some of this in Yahoo! Pipes. But even that’s a lot of work for the average Joe. I’ve got a feeling that Dave Winer would know a few more ways to do this, too. I look at his Club140 project and realize that what he’s doing with RSS outputs, mashing them for his own interests, was a great way to point out to people like me that we don’t have to read this info in a big glut. We can parse in lots of ways, figure out what matters to us, and filter the information we’re receiving. (Look for a related post on this soon by Clarence and me.)
We need data tools. Human ones. Ones that we can poke a few times and get what we need out of the flood.
Clouds for the Commons
In 1995, Bill Gates wrote in The Road Ahead that we’d start using software applications that blurred our perception of what was on our desktop and what was on the web. He was right in lots of ways, just really early.
Changes like the announcement of Mozilla’s Weave signal that we’re getting further away from the notion of a desktop (or even laptop) PC. I’m mobile. I use whatever browser I’m near. And even that’s starting to break down a little. I use mobile apps on my BlackBerry Curve all the time, meaning that it’s not the endpoint that matters to me. It’s the information.
Clouds for the commons means that services like Amazon’s S3 and EC2 and SimpleDB are just the beginning of what we all need. More of our services need to be more persistently managed through the Internet, with display variety for which endpoint we’re using. I’m using Gmail for my email, which plays great on a laptop and a cell phone. I’m looking for more of these apps to work fluidly between devices. I need it, as I’m more nomadic in my business practices than ever before.
It’s close, but I hope to see more announcements in 2008 to round it all out.
Flexible Media Purchases
I’m writing this in a bookstore. Behind my laptop are some books I’m browsing. In ALL cases, I want to buy the books, but I’d really buy them if I could get a three-media-types bundle purchase. I want to buy the paper book, an ebook, and an audiobook, for an extended price that’s more than a hardcover but less than the three piece parts. Makes sense, riht? I want to read the book when I’m on the beach. I want to browse the ebook to do finds and searches on parts I want to remember. I want the audiobook for the car.
And not just book media. I want to buy the DVD for a movie as I’m leaving the theater. And that DVD should come with a discount on a larger release of features later down the road. (You know who did this well? The team who did Virtual Hot Wings). Why lock me into watching the movie and then waiting a fake few months for the DVD? Will this chew on movie theater sales as some have predicted? Not sure, but would the bump you could charge for a movie-and-a-DVD make economic sense? Hell, add in the Soundtrack/score while you’re at it.
“Need” Might Be Strong
But as we’re sinking in more and more data, I want the Internet to work for me. Slaves to machines? I don’t know about you, but I’m more of a slave every day, and I need tools. I need tools that will shape information the way I need it. I need ways to better manage these new flows such that I can be even more helpful. And I don’t see why I can’t have them.
How about you? What are your needs? What are your tools of choice? How are you managing this now, or are you?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog.
Photo credit, jared
Social Media is a Set Not a Part
Corporations are built of very distinct pieces. People understand their jobs, their duties, and how they will be measured. This very thinking is industrial in nature. It fits well in 1900’s-era thinking. If you are a machinist, your job is to turn out perfect gears. If you are a painter, your job is to paint your parts expertly and waste less paint. But in an age where pretty much everything about humanity is a mash-up (we do “work” in cafes; we build businesses by giving away products for free; we let our customers decide our designs), thinking of our organizations as specific piece parts might be the death of companies in the next few years.
A Complex Interaction With Spillover
My thoughts keep coming back to Rachel Happe from IDC who said that the main benefit and value of social networks (and social media, by extension) is to capture unstructured information that otherwise rushes past without a “bucket” to connect it to the “memory” of an organization. Meaning this: there’s lots of useful information that comes from making social media and using social networks that benefits more than just one “department” at a business.
Let’s illustrate this with an example:
- Ravi posts on his blog that he just bought the Garglesoft Bookreader, and it’s not really all that great for what he wants it to do. He’s mad that it won’t let him download books from other sites that aren’t Garglesoft.
- Natasha in Garglesoft customer relations sees this post in her “listening” RSS feed, and bookmarks it with del.icio.us, such that her colleagues in other departments will get the post in THEIR “listening” feeds.
- Sonya in Garglesoft engineering sees what Ravi’s posted, and realizes that it’s not that the Bookreader can’t do it, but that the feature just isn’t as obvious as it seemed to internal engineers. Sonya Clipmarks the part of Ravi’s post she wants to highlight, drops it into an internal wiki, and then notates for the next release of the app how this might work differently. She twitters (or whatever the enterprise version of Twitter will eventually be) this update to her product management colleagues.
- Sonya then blogs on the Garglesoft Bookreader project blog (an external blog) showing Ravi’s post, and/or posting a screencast step-by-step explanation on how to do what Ravi wants to do. She concludes with a promise to review the feature for the next release of the Bookreader.
- Meanwhile, Ramesh in HR notes that Ravi has lots of great ideas in his previous blog posts, and passes on Ravi’s LinkedIN profile to the software engineering team, to consider Ravi for a future project.
In this example, social networks and social media were used by customer relations, engineering, and HR. We could’ve layered in marketing (perhaps pointing to a collection of helpful how-to videoblog posts, etc), and some other departments, but you get the point, right? It’s more than one department using these tools in concert.
Is It Worth It?
Taking this kind of approach with social networks and social media will eat into the time spent working on products. That’s a reasonable opinion. I can see senior leadership worrying about that, and they’d be right, if their people were off biting chumps on Facebook and not actually interacting with people with an interest in their products and services.
But what better way to stay plugged into the world of your customers than to try and be where they are?
Oh, but this raises another whole point. What if your business is B2B? What if your business is totally offline? What if your business has nothing in common with the Internet’s demographics.
There are still ways to participate with social media. For instance, there are some great B2B blogs out there. There are some great podcasts that give you information on how people approach things in the offline world. You’ve got to look for them, but they’re out there. And besides, if you’re reading the Social Media 100, it’s pretty likely that your customer base is online, or that you’ve already figured out how to approach the offline world with what you learn here.
Playing the Chessboard, not the Piece
Learning to play chess means understanding how all the pieces work in concert. It means understanding how other players might focus on one piece, but neglect others. It means understanding that things set up early in the game might execute later for a more full impact. The same is true with implementing social media practices at an enterprise.
Look at your organization’s informational needs. Don’t start by pushing social media tools down people’s throats, but instead, look for the problems different parts of the organization might need to solve. In my example above, I had Ramesh in Human Resources scanning blogs for potential suitable employees. Can you imagine your organization finding talented people by the media they make online? I know folks who’ve picked up their job from what they’ve put on their blog. (Um, me, for instance).
How does your organization pass information around internally with regards to projects? Could you see them benefitting form reading external sources of information? Do you know which tools would work best for them to aggregate all they’ve learned?
Use Simple Pieces
Would your organization benefit from making media themselves? Why not start them with simple tools like Utterz (which works on any cell phone), and video tools like Magnify or Seesmic , which let you record video straight from your browser using Flash? Just like learning chess, organizations probably should learn simpler tools before moving into something larger. (Although as a side note: thinking about training and then re-training might make one consider their toolset longer before rolling something half-baked out into the world).
How Would YOUR Corporation Integrate Social Media?
Could you see your company building social media and social networking tools into their practices? What would the barriers be? Where would they stumble? Have you tried? What were the results? What was the push back?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog.
Photo credit, dbking
