I wanted to talk to you about the larger story of what I’m doing. Sometimes, it gets lost in the shuffle. Partly, I want to talk to you about the different ways you and I connect, and why I can’t always say yes. I guess I’m feeling bad about that a bit. But also, I want to share what I’m doing in general.
My Two Main Focuses
My biggest amount of time and effort goes into two areas: people and ideas. I spend hours and hours each day maintaining as many relationships as I possibly can. I do this across several social networking platforms as well as through email. My research is quite often based on scouring information, trying new software, learning new skills from other disciplines, and comparing what all my various friends, clients, and colleagues are doing. This all gets synthesized into potential useful execution elements and strategy points.
I spend a lot of my time figuring out the way businesses will grow from use of these tools, and talking with people about that, as well as about their own challenges.
You’re Very Passionate, Too
Quite often, I get a very passionate email or direct message from someone who seeks my thoughts on their social media project. I try to respond to as many of these as I can, while still leaving time for working with clients, learning what comes next, eating, visiting with those people who live in my house (you get the picture). More often than not, if I show even a little bit of interest in what someone shares with me, what comes next is a request to partner up and take their cause or project to the next level.
It’s important that you understand where I fit in your ecosystem with regards to this.
How I Try to Help
My role over here (see me? I’m waving over here) is to equip you with ideas, starting points, leads, and potential next steps for your execution. My goal is to build armies. (I told you my 3 words back on January 1: equip. needles. armies.) By that, I mean that I’m educating as many people as I can so that you can do it yourselves. Why? Because you don’t need me to do what you know how to do. The more I show you how, the less you need me. Make sense?
Your role, should you choose to accept it, is to decide whether or not what I’ve given you is useful (part 1), then decide whether or not you want to do that for your organization (part 2), and then decide whether or not you need some professional help taking the strategy further and eventually implementing/executing (part 3).
I do #1 and #2 for free every single day. I helped shepherd in the movement around free and inexpensive events called PodCamp that take place wherever you or someone in your community chooses to hold them. I post blog entries every day. I have a newsletter relaunching in a week that will give you even more information for free.
By the way, know what else you get for free? You get the wisdom of the really smart people who swing by and add their perspective in the comments, and who generate trackbacks to their brilliant posts on their own blog. These people are almost always smarter than the original post, and definitely have ideas that you should follow every bit as much as you do mine.
How I Make Money
Beyond that, if you need above-and-beyond implementation help, if you want a strategy consult, if you believe you require some individual attention for delivering more awareness, lead generation, sales, and ongoing customer engagement, that’s where I make my money.
I love engaging with people and talking about social media. I speak several times a year at different conferences of all sizes. I participate in as many interviews and podcasts and whatever else as possible. I also create as much free and useful media as I possibly can in any given day. It’s the right thing to do on many levels, and it’s because my goal is to equip you to be able to do lots of this yourself.
My company is New Marketing Labs. We are a small online marketing agency, focusing primarily on how social media improves sales marketing and business communications. We work primarily with larger companies like Citrix Online, Cisco, Microsoft, Comcast Interactive Media, and folks like Bresnan Cable, Awareness Networks and more. In every one of those projects, what gets me the most excited is that we strive to find a way that social media and other online marketing technologies can be useful to improved business communications.
Everything Else
Beyond this? I work on one charity a month. I work on keeping up family relationships. I work on building my team at NML so that we can take on new things. I work on meeting and staying connected with friends.
Is it working? Who knows? But I’m having a hell of a lot of fun this year, and looking forward to what comes next.
What about you? What are you working on?
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