Define a Social Media System for Yourself

January 30, 2009 · Comments

I’m a fan of John Jantsch. He recently wrote about his social media system and encouraged a few folks to do the same. I’m game, so here are some thoughts on how I do what I do.

A Social Media System

The Tools

  • Firefox
  • Mail.app
  • iPhone (for SMS)
  • Tweetdeck

The Workflow

(Here’s where John and I differ, because I’m crazy.)

  • Constant – monitor SMS and Twitter stream. (40-60% of my opportunities come from Twitter)
  • Six times Daily(more, but I’m trying to pretend) – check email
  • Twice daily – RSS dives of my 700+ blog subscriptions plus shared items stream
  • Twice daily – blog content (sometimes more, like today)
  • Daily – review my Task list and add 14 new things to it.
  • Daily – beg Colin and Justin to save me (they take a lot of new opportunities from me and work them).
  • Daily – put really important stuff into Delicious.
  • Daily – swing by Friendfeed. I’m still not at Scoble level there, but I appreciate its intent.
  • Less Daily – Swing by LinkedIn
  • Less Daily – Swing by Facebook
  • Rarely – try yet another new social network. I’m getting burned out on them, unless there’s a huge value.

The Workload

At this point, if I summed up my systems, and how I’m spending my time, which is a little different than John’s original intent, I think it’s something like this:

  • Correspondence (of any kind) – 60%
  • Discovery (new things, ideas) – 20%
  • Execution – 20%

But there’s the rub, right? Social media is, uh, social. If I don’t correspond, then I’m aloof and I have “forgotten my roots.” If I correspond all the time, I run lower and lower on time to do new things, to plan and run my business, and to execute on behalf of clients.

In doing the work of defining one’s system, many things come up, and this exercise turned out to be more worth it than I thought. I think John’s original post is more helpful than this one, but the idea is really good, and I wanted to participate.

What’s your system look like? Blog it and maybe link to John’s great post?

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  • Great breakdown of your daily social media activities. Mine is similar, a mix of FB/LinkedIn/GoogleReader/e-mail/Flickr/etc. And of course Tweetdeck and BrightKit for Twitter accounts. As for the number of social networking sites - you're right, you have to decide which one has value for you. Since I'm the community manager at RedWire, an online community for entrepreneurs, I spend a lot of my time there. :)
  • I'm loving it that you all have decided to share your routine. For one it points out that many people have the same problem I do and that is deciding how much time to dedicate to social media activities versus execution type activities. I love the "social" aspect of social media, and am in general a people person, but it is a double edged sword when it comes to being productivie.

    Thanks for sharing,
    Matt
  • Chris,

    Thanks for doing this - you and I do have a little different approach, because we have different aims - and boy is that the point of wanting to hear your system.

    The point though that struck me the most from your post is that the exercise of thinking through and documenting what you actually do was more worth it then you thought it would be - I had the same thought when I did it and it really makes me believe everyone should do this exercise if for no other reason than if you document your system you can pay someone else to do all that social networking for you! Doh! I was kidding on that last point.
  • @John - exactly so. That really opened my head up differently.
  • Thanks for sharing. Your workflow and workload shows how someone with 38,000 followers on twitter can do things efficiently. I think everyone should review their personal social media system once in a while. It should help with the question: "Now, what did I do all day?" or, "where did all these emails, DM's come from?"
  • Chris,

    I appreciate your breakdown -- as someone who is beginning in (online) social media (gazining and contributing) this is a reality check! But, I do wonder how you prioritize your activities. Do I assume that what you spend more time on is more important?
  • By the way, how many tabs do you have open in Firefox (typically), and how many columns in TweetDeck? When I'm using TweetDeck, I'll click links that interest me, then I'll switch to the Firefox page with all the tabs. If I find something really useful to me, then I add it to my delicious account.
  • Chris,

    I honestly don't know how you keep the pace but it is always interesting following what you are up to. From a purely selfish standpoint I hope you keep up the pace because I find your content is useful in some way, shape, manner or form a remarkably vast majority of the time.

    Would love to hear how you work in the personal life schedule with all this as well. I realize that you seem to have more energy than most but we all only get 24 hours per day, right? Thanks for your hard work.
  • @Napoleon - great question. 4 columns in Tweetdeck : stream, @, search, and DM.

    14 or so tabs in Firefox, but down to 5 when I clean up my reading.

    @Business Podcast Co Host with No Name But Hey - What's most important to growing business is connecting with people. So, I have to try and balance that.
  • I feel like I have so much to learn and this post was helpful and also exciting that I roughly use the same formula per day..except I don't constantly follow twitter as my server has been down for 4 weeks - well up and down.

    With all this how to reading and writing, I am still without a clue as to how one makes money? and I don't seem to learn how to do things fast enough - I need an IT person to add things to my blog for me and put up my posts...

    I only follow 80 blogs. And I am being followed by more and more people on twitter, but don't know what to do with them?
    Back to the tutorial.
    I enjoy reading what you write and am so glad you have such good archives
    Thank you
  • Thanks for sharing. It made me spend some time outlining my own habit.s It's a very enlightening process.

    Doug
  • Chris - is social networking your only form of marketing? I divvy out time to speaking, face-to-face networking, sales meetings, phone calls, etc.

    I'm in a heavy acquisition phase so my time looks about like this...

    20% Blog
    20% Post on other blogs
    20% Write articles
    20% Correspond w/ clients and prospects
    5% Networking events/speaking
    15% Writing next book, business planning

    What about everyone else? Can I see more breakdowns?
  • I read that post by Jan Jantsch and although I'm an artist (using social media to build my business) and not a social media expert I added my two cents here: http://kabai33.com/2009/01/27/keeping-up-with-s...
  • My system is much more dynamic than that considering that I manage an online community at work and deal with tons of user-generated content, emails and other stuff related to WRAL.com and GOLO. For me to think that I can have a set system on a daily basis would be a big mistake because it simply cannot happen for more than three consecutive days. But having two monitors is what saves my life and allows to me at least try to keep one toe in the SM waters throughout the day.
  • Sharing one's daily routines and tools is a very interesting idea that doesn't necessarily have to be limited to social media. All of us have our collection of tools and daily habits of using them. I'd be very interested to read about how others work. Not just celebrities.
  • Thanks for sharing, Chris! It's informative and motivates to join the fun and post my own system.

    Of course, I wish I was an independent consultant (he says with tongue in cheek) that could get away with only 20% execution!

    I'm afraid my list, to reflect reality, is going to add up to something like this:

    correspondence--80%
    discovery--30%
    execution--40%

    Such is the life of a services provider. :-)
  • Chris, what a timely, relevant post. I just put on my to-do list, "figure out social media strategy" and this helped me a lot.

    I was curious - you said you limit your time on social networks. I am part of a handful of Ning social networks and am trying to convince my boss to let me start one at work but fear it won't add value (we are a membership assocation). How do you decide what social networks to join? How many are you a part of? What do you find valuable about them?
  • Chris:
    I winced as I scrolled your routine...
    Mine: I do what I must during the workday, do a little extra I can when I can create some time, and I catch up all the time!
    Thanks for the good read.
  • Chris, very thought provoking post. I have increased my social media presence a lot this past year, and most of that was planned but I haven't sat down and put this level of analysis around my all my activities. I feel a blog post struggling to get out. Thanks!
  • wow, 700 blog subscriptions? And I am struggling to keep up with 150 of them. It will be interesting to see the blogs on your list.
  • Impressive. Could you give us a list of all the tools you used to put that into practice? And as Khalid said would be interesting to have a look at your feed subscription.
  • Shannon Carroll
    Chris, thanks for sharing. It's quite time consuming keep up with all of the social networking mediums, sometimes I wonder "is it all worth it?" I understand the risks far outweigh the benefits and you can certainly learn and share valuable information with others. Although the time it takes to keep up with it all sometimes hinders me from getting my daily duties done.

    As college senior, Facebook is quite popular and and probably the most prominent networking site among my peers. I have found that twitter is becoming more and more prevalent but a lot of my peers don't know enough about it or find it unnecessary. As I have started using it, I can already see the benefits from following top CEOs and business execs that I would normally never have the chance to interact with. It's great and your efforts don't go unnoticed!
  • vivatsale
    Hi, Chris,

    I've been reading quite a few of your posts lately :)

    I'm just getting started, but I'm finding that I:

    - usually start my day off with TechCrunch, PopURLs, and Tumblr
    - have HootSuite, Tumblr, and Google Analytics up all day long
    - check links from Twitter (usually Mashable), review PopURLs (digg, delicious, & dzone mostly) throughout the day
    - find myself doing Twitter searches at night
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