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Archive for August, 2008

How to Do More With Less Time

You need better time management. You’re looking for time saving tips. Whether you’re in a huge organization, a team of 30, or a solo practitioner, it’s fairly guaranteed that you’ve got more work to do than you have time to complete it. Further, the effort it takes to keep up with people in social media and do it like a human being takes some time. In this post, I’ll talk about how to do more with less time. Part of this will be about the philosophy behind it, and the next part will be about the tools. In a subsequent post, I’ll talk about my social media workflow.

How to Do More With Less Time

I’m finding that there are two keys: have a simple system, and automate everything you can. In both cases, this allows for more time to do the work that matters to you. Remember, a good chunk of our day is spent doing things that don’t really pay us back (in any sense of the word). Part of this comes with a philosophical perspective to consider, and the other is pure business reasoning. Let’s talk about the mindset stuff behind a simple system first.

Have a Simple System

I’m a lifelong fan of Dr. Stephen R. Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and also his later book, the 8th Habit. To the end, I work hard to begin with an end in mind. That helps me center on what I should be doing. For those of you who haven’t read it, essentially think like this:

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

Sounds simple, but it’s not. If you have big things to do and little things to do, focus on the bigger ones. If you fill your day with answering email, your inbox will be empty but your important work won’t be done.

If I were to sum up WHAT I think about to keep my day flowing well, it’s this:

What’s going to move me closer towards my goals? (where “my goals” equals company goals, personal goals, family goals).

Now, let’s move into the tools.

Tools to Automate And Free Up More Time

Once you’ve got a sense of what you want to do with your time, you have to start guarding it. There are many opportunities in a given day when people will ask for some of your time, or distractions will snatch a bit away, or idle time will shift from being a refreshing pause into being a wallowing gap in what you’re doing. Time is the one variable you can work with more than any of the others. Here are some ways to give yourself a bit more time.

AwayFind is Jared Goralnick’s tool to help you keep your less urgent emails at bay. I’ve been using it ever since going through Stever Robbins You Are Not Your Inbox program. Essentially, AwayFind lets you set up a small gate on your inbox. People receive an auto-responder message (you customize it) saying that you’ve received their mail and that you’ll respond when you can. BUT, if this is urgent, just click this link to fill out this quick form.

What it does for me is gives me a way to tell people that I saw their email come in, that I’ll get right to them when I’ve a moment, and it gives the person the ability to tell me something is urgent. (By the way, so far four people have submitted via the “urgent” form simply to say, ‘I just sent you email. Did you get it?’ Not exactly urgent, so I tweaked my message to hopefully clean that matter up.) AwayFind is in Beta, but if you beg, Jared might give you a free-level account.

Jott lets you call a number, record a brief voice message, and that message comes out in text format. You can import your contact book in there, and thus, you can both send messages to yourself for reminders and later information retrieval, but you can also send quick voice messages to others as text emails. It’s a great way to get back some time while driving in the car.

SpinVox (which I talked about briefly here) is a voicemail service that translates speech to text for up to 3 minutes of voice. I’ve only been using it for a few days on my cell phone, and I’m LOVING what it does for me. I’m often in an area where I can’t pick up my phone (meetings, webinars, etc), but I can usually scan a text reproduction of someone’s voice message very quickly. I get back LOTS of time using SpinVox to cover my voicemail messages.

Google Reader is my RSS reader of choice. I use it for both reading blogs and news sources, but also for tracking social media information from other places. For example, Twitter Search has an RSS subscription button for the searches you cook up, so if you need to dashboard some social media activity, throwing it into a capable, fast-paced reader is important. I get lots of time back reading blogs and scanning information rapidly through Google Reader.

Firefox is a fast, flexible, customizable web browser. I use it more than any other application on my computer. To that end, I use it smartly, as well. I use the tabs feature to keep up a few pages that I need throughout a day (like my RSS reader, like some search information, etc). I also use all the keyboard shortcuts so that I can move even faster.

Evernote is a great tool for capturing snippets of information. It’s a lot more powerful than that, including letting you snap photos, and having a built in optical character recognition system. It also has a mobile client for iPhone and Windows Mobile, a standalone client for Mac and Windows, and a web sync. This saves me time in lots of ways, including making sure I have important notes at the ready wherever I am.

Also use some kind of text replacement application. I use TextExpander for the MAC all the time when typing. I have complete emails stored and at the ready in there, as well as all kinds of nifty html replacement information to help me with repetitive tasks.

If you can afford it, get a wireless cellular modem for your computer. I got one from work and now I have no idea how I wasn’t doing this all along.

What I Do With All This

Giving you a list of applications and saying this will make your life better is like sending you a box of paint and wishing you well on your new portrait career. Let’s go through a few ideas on how to do more with less time, and how I use my philosophy, methods, and tools to do that. Let’s just run through that now:

• Guard your time. If you have work to do, ask yourself repeatedly if this work moves forward your main goals. Learn how to minimize the work that doesn’t.
• Work towards checking email less frequently in a day, and also not being a slave to your phone. We forget all the time that these tools are supposed to be helpful, not constant distractions.
• One trick there: kill notifier lights, buttons, sounds, and other indicators, and instead, schedule a task on your calendar or however you keep your appointments, where that task is to check your mail. (I haven’t gotten that far yet, but I’m working at it).
• Find pockets of idle time and use them for something productive. When I’m grocery shopping, I Jott little audio reminders to myself to follow up on later. When I’m sitting in a waiting room, I read books on subject matter that nourishes my career. I use drive time for LOTS of things to go along with driving.
• Build your projects to be modular, so that you can work on them when time comes up. Blog posts are a great example. I keep a text file where I can jot ideas for future posts. Then, I go back and flesh those in from time to time, or delete them, if I can’t remember what my notes meant.
• Learn polite ways to decline things. We say YES to wayyyyyyyy to many things. Learn very warm and polite ways to say no. (Here’s a great audio podcast by Stever Robbins about saying “no” that I need to listen to often.)
• Decide how much of your down time is really recharging you, and whether some of it is just idle for idle’s sake.

I know that some folks are going to retort and say that rest is important, that overworking one’s self is a bad thing, things like that. You’re absolutely right. All those things are true. I love relaxation and rest. I love finding time to rest and recharge, play with my kids, that kind of thing. My point is, if you need to find more time, there are ways to go about doing it.

Your Additions

How are you finding more time? What have you found out about the way you work that might be helpful to others? What tools are you using that maybe we should consider for this list? Let’s talk about that in the comments.

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, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.

Photo credit, Jarosław Pocztarski

Great PR Manners Go a Long Way

First, look at this great PR letter sent to me by Scott Duehlmeier from the Summit Group:

Chris-

Good evening, my name is Scott Duehlmeier with The Summit Group (PR/AD agency) in Salt Lake City, Utah. We recently created a social media department, and are working with a client who specializes in the creation of social networking platforms. I know they have very specific announcements coming up, and I was wondering if you even like to receive these types of announcements (elearning, online collaboration, marketing, social networking, corporate training.) The last thing I would want to do is just start blindly sending press releases or other correspondence your way, without even an introduction email asking you if you would even be interested in receiving these type of announcements.

I know you must get countless email a day regarding this type of thing, so I wanted to at least send you an email introducing myself and gauge your interest level. I’ll be in touch, thank you for your time.

Best-
Scott Duehlmeier

THE SUMMIT GROUP COMMUNICATIONS

So what? Manners, that’s what. Scott wrote me a very polite, very personal-seeming opt-in letter, asking me if I wanted to receive more info from him about clients that fit the profile he perceived about me from my blog. Answer= yes.

And in great part, it’s because Scott did a great job of sending a human-sounding letter.

As my storyteller friend Clarence would say, “Marinate.”

How Jive Software Sees Enterprises and Community Software

I had a chance to talk with Sam Lawrence, CMO of Jive Software about what’s coming out in his 2.5 release of Clearspace, Jive’s enterprise community software platform. (Note, we use the 2.0.x version of Clearspace to power Project Dogfood). There are a bunch of features that will no doubt get covered everywhere but very capable people. What I wanted to talk about was some of what came out in the conversation with Sam.

How Social Software Merges with the Enterprise

First, it has to integrate with the tools they understand. Sam showed me how Clearspace integrates with Salesforce.com, for instance. This was interesting. Because now, if I’m a sales guy and I’m getting ready to call one of my prospects or clients, I’ll get anything said anywhere within the Clearspace product about that company or prospect as information before I make the call.

If you’re a social software provider, or someone looking to advise companies on social software, think about this kind of usage: merging what Mzinga’s Rachel Happe calls “unstructured data” in with a typical contact record.

Easy and Easier Still

Sam mentioned that Clearspace has an email in and out feature, that allows mobile users and others to get information in and out of the platform simply, and through nothing more than an email interface (for instance). It should be easy to use a community platform, and it shouldn’t always require a full web browser. Most enterprise customers aren’t using iPhones.

Customization and Less Heavy IT Department Lifting

Lots of the changes in 2.5 might seem a bit aesthetic at first, but think about it: If you are building a social software platform and it is to be supported internally, you’ll want something that allows people to change and fiddle with most of it without a lot of effort required from IT. Why? Because they have other, bigger fish to fry. I like this as a trend, and I hope other platform providers continue to make things easily customizable, and yet not especially difficult to manage.

Further Integration

We have to stop thinking of social software as an island. It’s going to be part of the fabric, and that requires integration points, connectivity to the way people create business processes, and flexible enough to fit within an organization’s existing business styles. I saw lots of that in Jive’s latest release, and Sam talked about the company’s further efforts in that department for future visions.

Takeaways

I believe social software has a good opportunity to find its way into the enterprise in a much bigger way. There are other great companies doing this kind of thing as well. I’m excited by what I see from my friends at Mzinga, Telligent, and other platforms working in the enterprise software space.

For the rest of you looking to take your products to an even larger audience, especially if you’re hoping to become part of the way business is done, I think the future comes only once we give people adequate bridges forward from the present.

Here’s a video Jive made of their product, if you want more details:

Clearspace 2.5 from Jive Software on Vimeo.

On Twitter and Listening

Several months ago, Christopher S. Penn told me that I should use SpinVox to convert my voicemail into text. I thought it was a good idea, but I was using another product entirely for another different reason. But the other day, I tweeted something on Twitter about deleting hundreds un-listened-to (what’s the right way to say that?) voice mails. It was just me blabbing into the wind that I had too many voicemails and had decided to throw them away.

Except that James Whatley was listening. It turns out that the @whatleydude is also the “social media chap” for SpinVox, and while other people offered me a kind and understanding, “Dude, that’s a lot of voice mail,” James heard opportunity. (There’s word that Pat Phelan had something to do with this, too, but that’s unsubstantiated).

James set me up with a trial SpinVox account, sent me the information (customized for me) on how to configure my account for my specific carrier, and got me on my way. I set the service up in a few minutes, and then had my wife make a few test calls. It’s pretty cool.

As a review, this is like, months and months (years?) late. The product has been out for a while. But whatever. If you want to try something interesting, SpinVox is a speech-to-text voicemail translator, and it worked pretty darned good for me. I plan to keep using it for a while and see how it changes the way I do business. (Thanks for that, James!)

If You Are a Business

Are your customers online? Well, I say yes to most folks. If so, are you listening to blogs, to Twitter, to other sources of information? HOW are you listening?

I use a lot of free tools to scan the web and pay attention. I use Technorati, Google Blogsearch, and Twitter Search to name a few.

There are other tools. One is Radian6. I worked with them on a series of Twebinars (twitter meets webinar), and the last of these comes up Tuesday the 19th at 2PM (tomorrow as I’m writing this). The details are here. I’m doubly thrilled because CEO Marcel Lebrun is going to join me live in the studio to talk with folks about the importance of listening.

If you’re a business, do what James Whatley did with SpinVox did and listen. Do what Marcel Lebrun calls “listening at the point of need.” And build your business around your customers’ needs and not the other way around.

What do you think? Have you seen examples of this?

Are You a Vendor

In a post on Advertising Age, Millie Olson brings out the question of whether an agency is a vendor to a customer or a business partner. The comments are interesting, too. In a conversation today with Mike Lewis, President of the Business Marketing Association for the greater Boston area (we’re working on the New Marketing Summit together), he mentioned that PR firms are often selected by a company’s marketing department, as part of a vendor selection process, and this surprised me (mostly because I’m a technologist, not a professional marketer).

I guess I imagined that the senior team picked them out. My last boss and business partner, Jeff Pulver, most definitely picked out his own PR firm. I was on the calls, but it was his decision. So, maybe it varies per organization, or maybe PR firms are often the vendor executing on a marketing department’s strategy. (You tell ME in the comments, okay?)

Pull this back from the specifics above, and think about your use of social media, the value you’re attempting to add to a business, etc.

Are you a vendor?

It’s a bigger question to consider than you might originally think. It’s a question of how you choose to connect and do business with companies. This question affects how you talk about what you do, how you price it, and how you choose to come to the negotiating table.

To the point in Millie’s article above, she viewed herself as a partner. People in the comments section said that marketers (especially external agencies) aren’t usually partners- they’re vendors. There’s a HUGE difference between two entities thinking of each others as partners versus a company thinking of itself as the prime and you as the vendor.

If You ARE a Vendor

There are ways you need to structure your ideas and offerings and how you intend to do business, if you’re going to take the stance of being a vendor.

• Remember that your job priority is your client’s success. Be clear about that in your work, in your positioning, and in how you propose things.
• Build relationships with several clients. Putting all your eggs in one basket is a great way to find yourself looking for a new job.
• Structure your business arrangements so that you can serve your client in a modular fashion. You might now always be the right person for the job. Don’t be a jerk and hook yourself in just because you’re the vendor on the other parts of it.
• Look for opportunities where you DO offer a value-add to other organizations, and position yourself appropriately in your efforts.
• Be clear in your contracts and in the deliverables. This is where vendors (especially less professional/experienced ones) get into trouble quick.

With regards to what you’re doing, are you a vendor? How are you finding the waters out there? What other advice would you offer other vendors? And what do you think about Millie’s ideas?

Photo credit, Mshades

Nine Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts

You’re writing and podcasting and videoblogging your face off and it’s starting to feel like no one’s paying attention. You want to get the right comments, and meaningful conversations started, or you want your peers to come and start a lively discourse. How do you get your best posts out there in such a way that people will come by and add to the body of work? (Note first that I’ve said “best posts” and not “every post.” If you abuse any of this, it goes poorly for you pretty quickly.) I have nine ideas to share your best posts in ways that aren’t heavy-handed, and aren’t likely to get you tuned out by the people of your various communities.

Nine Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts

1. Bookmark your best posts on Delicious. Once it’s in there, there’s a chance someone might happen upon it.
2. Stumble your best posts on StumbleUpon. Some folks disagree with stumbling your own work. The way I feel okay with it is that I stumble approximately 9 other people’s great blog posts to every one of my own.
3. Post an intriguing title and link to the post in LinkedIn’s status message.
4. If your post is about a specific industry or relates to other great blogs, find a recent blog post that has related information. (Now, this is different than what you MIGHT normally do, so pay attention). In the URL part of the sign-up form, put the link to your post, not your blog in general. In the comment body, don’t talk about your amazing post. Just offer genuine commentary on the post you read, and share your thoughts and ideas. Repeat: don’t mention the post. (If your comment is great and worthy, people will click through and check it out.)
5. Share your post on Facebook. I really like BlogCast, which used to be FlogBlog. It’s got a nice interface.
6. Share your post in FriendFeed automatically, and let the amazing community there decide if it’s interesting.
7. Try Zemanta. Zemanta is a blogging tool that either adds on to your browser (Firefox only, I think), or comes now as a WordPress plugin. It allows you to find related stories and post them at the bottom of a post. When you’re part of the Zemanta community, I believe your stories also go into their list of potentially related stories. I’ve seen traffic coming in from Zemanta-recommended links.
8. Don’t forget Twitter. I find lots of my traffic comes from Twitter, especially because I don’t ever just post a link. I ask questions, inspire comments, etc.
9. Write blog posts that others will find useful. I know it’s not a technology answer, but it’s the truth. If your posts aren’t that useful to other people, they won’t be popular. People won’t care. If you’re re-blogging news that several other larger sites have covered, who cares? If you’re telling us about your day at college, who cares (unless you’re a great writer)? Make it really good, useful stuff, and we’ll come along for the ride.

**Update: Here’s what people on Twitter said you should do:

Perhaps you have some other ways to promote? Do you have any recommendations? Do you have disagreement with the ways I shared above? Let’s talk about it.

Photo credit, KungPaoCajun

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Stand Up to Cancer

Tara has posted a great video on her blog related to her Stand Up for Cancer project. I talked with Tara a few weeks ago about the project, and it looks like it’s launching in a great way. I saw Kevin Dugan’s post about it, and got the chance to take a look myself.

Now it’s your turn. Read Tara’s post and join in.

Lots more to do here.

Content Networks and Storefronts

Back in May 2006, I wrote that content networks are the new blogs. With all kinds of great information out on the web, I posited that people would start needing aggregations of content. Though many of us on the web know how to roll our own collections of reading material, the general public doesn’t want to go through all the work. Content networks cover more than just blog networks, and there are a few other ways to slice the pie than just thinking about blogs as ad platforms. Here are some quick thoughts about content networks and storefronts.

Content Networks

On one side of the equation are content networks. These include things like Weblogs Inc, Gawker Media, and some of the other larger media creations. They include new offerings like Stowe Boyd’s /Edgewards (congrats, Stowe). In a way, Alltop can be seen as a content network (though it is mostly an aggregator pointing to the individual sites. Even I had a stab at it back in 2006, with the help of Kevin Kennedy-Spaien and Whitney and Becky and Megin and some others.

I continue to believe there are some great opportunities for content networks. I think that most of the models are trending towards ad platforms, and that’s okay. It’s what people know and understand, and people are making decent money doing it. Others are just gathering good stuff under the same banner so that others know where to find it. But there are other models.

Storefronts

Another way to use content is to help people market a product. Some people use this as part of their effort to do affiliate marketing. For instance, there are review sites built essentially as a means to sell products. There are also coupon sites, blogs, and other web platforms built just to sell things.

I believe there’s an opportunity here for bloggers. I think that well-crafted custom content would be a much better way to sell products and services than typical ads. More than half of what Copyblogger and Problogger teach you pertains to being able to write great content.

There are a few ways to implement this. It could be towards the sale of products or services, such as an affiliate marketing model. There are many blogs who trade great content for potential affiliate sale revenue.

Another model is as a lead generation tool, such as what Corante and Beeline Labs have successfully executed several times. In those cases, the sale isn’t direct and related to the site. It’s more a matter of creating a marketing funnel, where there’s a conversion point, and then the leads become actionable for business.

You could say that [chrisbrogan.com] follows the lead generation model. I do get some business from my website for CrossTech Media or for just speaking gigs. Mostly, I write to inform, share my explorations, and give you some potential new tools to consider.

I plan to investigate affiliate sales a bit more over the coming months, but not necessarily on this website. And in all cases, I think disclosure if what is most important when mixing a content site and a sales site. I don’t think they go well together naturally.

Disclosure: Still The Important Part

It’s a little tricky for bloggers. Are we disclosing our relationships? Are we spelling it out when we have a professional relationship with some product or service that we’re talking about? Does your audience know your stance? Seth Godin posted his position on this. I recently added a Disclosures section at the bottom of my About web page, so that you’d know where my most likely biases are. (By the way, if I missed something that I should disclose there, just point it out and I’ll add it).

I believe that if you’re blogging about how great a product is, AND you’re trying to sell some of that product, you might mention that relationship. In creating my Disclosures section on my About page, I opted to spell out the relationships I have with companies who’ve given me something to review.

In most cases, I’ve been lucky, because I’ve reviewed products that I really like, and I enjoy what they can do. When I get to the situation where someone sends me something and it’s not really all that and a bag of chips, what I’ll have to do is be fair and honest in that reporting. That might upset the company, and might cause a problem for the marketer who sent me the product, but if I don’t do it that way, the negative impact is this: I’d be telling you about a product that I wouldn’t endorse.

(By the way, do you think all the products endorsed on TV are actually appreciated and used by the celebrities? I think we have an opportunity here as bloggers to be a bit more open about it).

What’s Your Opinion?

Content networks like the ever-expanding TechCrunch and Giga Omnimedia empire are one thing. Storefronts that convert from content like FastForward or Daily Candy are another.

What do you think about either of these models? Do you see the benefits? Where are the risks?

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, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.

What the Barenaked Ladies Know

I don’t need to go to concerts much any more. I don’t like waiting in line. I don’t like standing around. My ears hurt if it’s too loud (too much heavy metal as a high school kid). And honestly, I don’t connect the same way with a big concert hall full of people.

But a guy playing guitar in the bathroom? I’m right there with him:

What if YOUR media was that personal?

Thanks to Sandy for turning me on to this song.

Consider a Marketing Funnel

Brian Carroll gave some interesting advice in an interview with Chris Coch at ITSMA. He talked about creating a marketing funnel, and how this differed from a sales funnel. In brief, his interview covered five points:

1. Create a marketing funnel.
2. Create a universal definition of a lead.
3. Use the phone.
4. Ask about goals—don’t sell.
5. Define lead nurturing—and the right people to nurture.

The full interview is here.

If we think about how this applies to social media, it’s something we need to consider (somewhat) differently.

You might be blogging or podcasting for lead generation. If so, how are you helping sort your audience from your leads? If you’re making media, that’s a starting point to a conversation. Are you asking your audience about goals? If you need to further qualify a lead built from your online efforts, is the phone the next step, or are there steps in between?

The idea of a marketing funnel, where one builds up even more information and distills even more who might be a prospective customer or client, versus who is simply enjoying the media, is something worth considering for your business. Have you looked at your media that way? How will you discern who’s just consuming your media versus who’s interested in doing business with you? What comes next after your blog post or video?

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, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.

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