Saying No
Doing anything well requires the ability to keep your plates clean and ready to accept a helping of what comes next, but by saying yes to every little thing that comes along, one will be less likely to be ready to handle the things that come up. ( David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, handled this topic well in his book, Ready for Anything). In looking over all that I have on my plate, I realize that I have to go back and say no to a few things, in order to be fair to my more pressing obligations.
I should state clearly that part of this stems from my eagerness to please, and my own weakness and aversion around saying no firmly.
It’s not easy to back out of things. The feeling of guilt for not completing a project is high. The sense that you’re letting someone down is a heavy lump in your belly. And yet, once one realizes that one isn’t going to be able to maintain the current pace, and that maybe one has bitten off too much, there’s really no other path (unless pure destruction is a path).
This morning, I sent notes to several people I respect and admire telling them that I had to back out of a commitment. I know that they will be disappointed. And yet, I think they’d hate it more if I put them in a rough spot closer to their deadline.
How to Assess Your Priorities
It should seem easy to know what’s important. Your family is important. Your job is important. But once you get beyond those two, how do you assess what you do for passion, for community, and for self-fulfillment? That’s where the confusion gets strongest. In my case, I did the following:
- Made a conscious commitment to the work I’m doing for salary.
- Made a conscious commitment to find more family time.
- Made a conscious commitment to the book I’m writing with Julien Smith.
- Made a conscious commitment to the community I started with Christopher S. Penn.
- Re-assessed which projects I was doing for business development.
- Re-assessed which projects I was doing for larger community.
- Re-assessed all the “can you just take a look at this?” projects I have in queue.
What I’ve decided in my assessment was this:
- My relationship with my company is going well and I want to try some more things with them. We’re working on new projects that I find challenging and interesting (which is what motivates me).
- PodCamp still has lots of evolution left in it, and I like working with Christopher S. Penn and Whitney Hoffman.
- Julien and I worked on the book while in Chicago, and now we’re REALLY excited about what we have.
- I will still evaluate speaking and private education opportunities for companies, but will have to better assess how that impacts my travel schedule and my family commitments.
- Where I’m stuck in the weeds is with all the “can you take a look at this” types of opportunities.
What Comes Next
It’s not like I’m closing shop or not interested in hearing from you. It’s not like I want to go into a cave and just work on my job, my book, and my family. But I will be a lot more clever in how I respond to the opportunities that come across my path. That’s where I should make a clear assessment and then move on with that decision in mind.
I’m still going to attend several events over the coming year. I’ll still be active in the social media scene. I’m still working on delivering quality information based on learning, execution, and extrapolation. I’m just going to work harder on being more fair to the primary commitments in my life.
Thank You
I’m forever grateful for the support of the community at large, and for all the wonderful people who like me enough to share with me their projects and passionate work. Don’t go away. Stick around, and see who else speaks passionately on this site and on the Rockstars page. We’re moving towards a community of shared excellence, and I will do something in the coming months to facilitate that even further for people with professional interests in this space. (Stay tuned).
For now, thank you, and I wish you well on your projects.
Photo credit, Afroswede
On Managing A Community
I wonder how most organizations are handling the role of community manager. I’m curious where a community manager reports. Marketing? HR? Customer service? I wonder how organizations are justifying the cost, and what they believe the role entails for level of effort. How are companies using the role in either direction?
Depending on the organization, I imagine the role of a community manager would be different, so I’m going to walk through what the role might entail for a media and events company (like mine), and see what comes to mind. I could do the same for several other professions, but let’s start here. Want to follow along? You can help me refine it in the comments.
Strategy
My strategy for a community manager would be to accomplish the following:
- Develop an awareness center for our industry (so we can listen and know what the community at large feels).
- Build a non-marketing community outreach to deliver a voice for our organization to the industry.
- Engage the community we embrace, and facilitate learning and education from our organization’s perspective, and through relationships with other trusted organizations.
Reporting Structure
My company is a fairly flat organizational structure. At my office, a community manager would report in to me as the VP of Strategy & Technology. Why? Because I’m charged with setting the tone and the look and feel of the content for all of our events. To me, the role at my organization would be to help me build on the customer experience.
Duties
My community manager (and I’ll use the feminine pronoun to save both of us the “he or she”) would have accounts on the following platforms:
- Ning
- YouTube
- Google Reader
She would have responsibility to set up tracking and alerts for keywords specific to our industry, to subscribe to several industry blogs, podcasts, and video channels, and to subscribe to certain topic categories on YouTube.
She would comment on appropriate blogs. Not about our events, but about the topics at hand (the comments would at least have a URL back to her blog, so that’s enough self-promotion on that front). Listening and commenting would be the bulk of her first three months’ duties.
She would blog when she felt comfortable with the space.
If we decided to grow a Facebook or Ning community, she’d help facilitate good conversations there, too.
Measurements
I’d measure my community manager on the following:
- Responsiveness to communications (blog comments, emails, twitter messages and forum threads) less than 24 hours max.
- Number of QUALITY blog posts read and shared via Google Reader.
- Number of meaningful comments (more than a few words, on topic, pertinent to the space) on appropriate blogs, videos, and other media per month.
- Overall quality of her Twitter stream ( maybe a 60/30/10 mix of industry-related / personal @ comments / and off-topic).
- Engagement on our blog/community/network. (Number of subscribers, number of comments, number of links out to other blogs from our community site).
- Number of quality blog posts and linking posts (probably a 40/60 split between original and linked, though some would argue for 30/70).
- Eventually, number of links from other sites to our blogs and media.
Success of the Project
I’d feel our community manager was a success if she accomplished the following through her efforts:
- Empower the listening ability of our organization to our community’s needs and desires.
- Build an awareness of our organization through non-marketing efforts, measured by favorable or at least non-negative mentions on other blogs, forums, and in Twitter.
- Deliver a blog and/or media platform that’s useful to the community at large, and that grows in number of subscribers as well as engaged commenters.
Overall, I believe these efforts would be measured by an increase in attendance at our face-to-face and virtual events, an increase in subscriptions to our newsletter, and a larger blog commenting community. This would be a win to our organization, and would thus be worth the expense of another salaried employee.
YOUR Turn
How would your organization incorporate a community manager? Where would they report? How would you measure their efforts? Do you see any flaws in my suggestions? Are YOU a community manager? How does this sync up with your world?
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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.
Is Your Community For Sale
Andrew Baron might or might not be joking about putting up his Twitter account for sale. If he’s joking, he’s gone to the effort of putting it up on eBay. Baron’s influential, known for creating and running Rocketboom, and a strong supporter of the video community. So, on one side, I could say that he has a valuable community of supporters. But on the other side, this is an interesting question: is your community for sale, and how does that work?
Can/Will Blogs Do It
Jerry Seinfeld had a great quote about baseball fans just “rooting for laundry” because of all the stars changing teams. With the rise of multi-writer blogs, and the looming potential for influential blogs to be bought up into larger networks or even mainstream media, how will that work?
If you’re reading Web Worker Daily or Copyblogger or Engadget or TechCrunch or another three or four dozen influential blogs, you’re reading a multi-author publication. So, if you align yourself as part of that community, and that community is sold to a larger publication, or if it merges, etc, do you just go along and stay a part of that community?
My guess is yes. In situations where there are people deeply tied to a publication, but there’s still a sense of more than one person stirring the pot (Copyblogger *is* Brian Clark, but it’s also his guest writers, and could ultimately be taken over by someone else), I think we can move as a community with it. I think.
But As a Twitter Account?
Not sure if Andrew will get his money. But then again, if he got even $100, that’s kind of interesting, because who’s out there thinking it’s worth $100? Not because ANDREW isn’t worth that, but what’s a Twitter account? It’s like selling your phone number. Doesn’t mean much unless you pick up when I call. Right?
Communities Aren’t Locked In
If this decade’s web technology legacy tells us anything, it’s that community is fluid and mercurial. Friendster to MySpace to Facebook to (we’re still waiting for the next one), and we’re still moving. We can jump in a heartbeat if you bug us.
So how is someone going to buy your community? What’s your community mean in a monetary sense, if you walk away?
What’s your take?
Do You Know Who Your Customers Are
For those of you looking to use social media towards a business end, do you really understand your customer base? Do you understand how things like conferences and blogs and making media relate to bringing in business?
In media making, there is often a triangle:
- The people who want what you’re talking about.
- The people who want to know those people.
- You. The media maker.
On this list, your customer is #2.
#1 is your community.
You can sell into your community, but in media making, the bigger opportunities are in the folks who want to know your community.
And then, there’s the rub, because unless you’ve built that covenant with your community, you cannot just let loose #2 all over your community. It would be BAD. Capital B. Know whether you’re building a community or developing a marketplace. SOMETIMES you can do both, but that’s not the norm.
Food for thought.
What it Felt Like to Have No Blog for 8 Days
Friends have asked me what it was like not to have a blog for the last eight days. It was interesting. First, I felt like I was without a voice. Sure, I had Twitter, but I didn’t have any place to really stretch out and share my thoughts. Yes, I could utter or make media in other forms, but I felt like my main voice was completely taken away.
I felt deaf, too, because the conversation that I’m used to hosting here at [chrisbrogan.com] was somewhere else. It was on other blogs, all over the place, and sometimes, I’d participate, but other times, I felt like I missed everyone else’s opinions and feedback. I felt like I couldn’t hear you as well, because you weren’t able to simply connect through here.
I felt blind, because I use my website as a way to know whether or not what I’m saying matters. I watch for the impact, and try to improve my message when it feels like I’m faltering. With eight days fewer subscriptions to my site, I felt like all my momentum was gone, or at least, I couldn’t see it.
Blogs Aren’t Everything, But They Make a Good Home Base
Several people were looking for more information about me over the last week, and they found very little when swinging by my crippled site. If you click through and look at the website itself, there’s a picture of me, contact info, and all kinds of information on what matters to me. Without my website, you had to guess based on the other places where I make media.
This all made me wonder about companies who don’t use blogs. Maybe you don’t know because you haven’t felt it, but there’s a huge (HUGE!) difference between a static website where you try to collect leads, inform people, and take orders versus a site that builds into a conversation, a voice, a listening post, and a way to see your impact on the marketplace you care about. If you work for a company that doesn’t have a blog, can you share with us why your organization doesn’t blog?
Should all companies blog? Not sure. But boy, I sure felt wrapped in gauze by NOT having some kind of sounding board back and forth.
What’s your take? What do you think?
Oh, and if you’re not a subscriber to this site, please consider subscribing for free or getting a copy sent to your email inbox:
Photo credit, JMurawski
Back in the Saddle
After EIGHT long days, I’m pleased to report that [chrisbrogan.com] is back up and running. It’s a long story as to what went wrong. At first, I blamed my original hosting provider, because they upgraded their servers, their software, and several pieces in between, but after some help, it looks more like I had a runaway plugin or some other corruption that crushed my site.
Thanks
Special thanks to Andy Quayle of TechBurgh for being a first responder, and for giving me a hosting spot within moments. I didn’t end up using it, but Andy, who is amongst other things a first responder for medical situations, was a first responder here, too.
Around this same time, KEITH Casey from Casey Software and Why Go Solo made a little holding file for all my front end blog files. Thank you so much for that, Keith!
Thanks to Aaron Brazell of Technosailor for taking apart my website, piece by piece, digging in deep to the SQL, and finding the problem. Without Aaron, I would’ve continued fighting my former hosting provider instead of finding the problem. Aaron also offered my site a home, and I’m grateful for that.
Finally, thanks to Justin and Eric Rasmussen of GimpTV. The two of them worked their heads off and set me up with new hosting, walked me through the parts of shifting my domain around that I didn’t understand, and performed HOURS of free labor (well, they haven’t submitted a bill yet) to help me get all settled into my new place. I met these guys, and their other partner, Michael Murray, two years ago at the PME, and even then, I suspected they were decent people. Turns out they’ve helped me many times over the years, in many odd ways, delivering key help at exactly the right time.
Without Andy, Aaron, Justin, and Eric, I’d still be stuffed up on Tumblr and there’d be no website. By the way, TWO different opportunities were almost blown by my not having my good site up and running, which has sold me once and for all on the value of a good design with lots of readily accessible contact info.
Thank you, everyone. As with most things in my life, a community effort saved the day.
A Foul Bastards Tale - RATED PG13
I know a guy on Twitter who goes by foulbastard. He is notorious for off-the-wall messages, but seems to me to fall into the category of “person pushing free speech for creative and artistic ends.” Recently, his account ran into trouble, and he found himself unable to use Twitter. I asked him for his story, and he gives it in just a bit. WHY am I sharing this? Because I think there are some points about how communities deal with people who use the tools in ways different than the “norm,” and because it was interesting to hear how Obvious’s Biz Stone (one of the guys behind Twitter) responded.
The following is written by Foul Bastard, with a response written after FB’s piece by Biz Stone. Now, Foul Bastard:
On most days I would normally be found tossing obnoxiously entertaining tweets around Twitter as @FoulBastard but since Monday night Foul Bastard has been silent. Twitter suspended my accounts without notice. The catalyst for these suspensions seems to be my new website http://www.breastsoftwitter.com. The Breasts of Twitter is a blog that contains a collage of Twitter-user submitted breast photos. Originally it was suggested as a joke, but when I opened my email one day and found the first submission I knew destiny was calling. That’s when I started a Twitter account called @TheBreasts (which I like because it sounds absurd) and began following people to promote my project. I collected the photos by asking all of my female followers to contribute. Most of them responded in a friendly and playful manner, several decided to participate; some apparently got upset and blocked me. The collage was posted Monday, March 3rd at 9am and the site received 640 visits that day.
Monday night I logged into @TheBreasts on Twitter, clicked update, and my tweet disappeared into the ether. Having already been suspended once before I was familiar with this behavior. Twitter has an atrocious disciplinary system. When they suspend an account they lock it so that your updates do not appear in any timeline but everything appears functional. They give you no warning that your account has been disabled. This is confusing since Twitter is not known for its technical stability. The first time I was suspended I spent a day thinking that Twitter was just not working right, again.
Now I know better, and I am not accepting this as a harmless lack of protocol. What Twitter did to me was wrong. They suspended both of my accounts and they have not replied to my support requests or the post I put on GetSatisfaction.com. I have no way of knowing why they did this.
Some people have speculated that Twitter banned me because I used their name in my http://www.breastsoftwitter.com website. Maybe, but I think if that were the case and they wanted me to stop they would have gotten in touch with me directly instead of creating a monster. They do have my contact information after all.
The thing I love about Twitter is the freedom it gives you to express yourself any way you see fit. People are free to follow and unfollow you at will; there is no pressure. In fact, I’ve had people unfollow me and then follow back with a different “non-business” account the next day. It’s democracy the way democracy was meant to be. But when people are being silenced because of…well, I don’t know why; Twitter won’t tell me, democracy fails and creativity dies.
As a member of the Twitter community I make an effort to have interesting and unique content. I don’t mind when people unfollow me, despite my occasional rants to the contrary. Of course I believe that if you don’t follow me you’re not cool. If you don’t feel that way too then maybe you don’t believe in your message much. But I never take personal offense when a follower leaves. What offends me is that Twitter has locked my accounts and will not communicate with me at all. I generate content that draws readers to their website. I create content that is broadcast across a global network, and that content directly benefits them, I am a contributor and a customer. It doesn’t matter that Twitter is a free service, it’s a business and their practices are appallingly unprofessional.
The response from my followers has been astounding. Now operating as @FowlBastard I have recovered a large percentage of my follower base and they have been demanding that Twitter unfreeze my accounts. Further, they have created a support avatar with a black ribbon and a large red FB which is being sported all across the Twitterverse. I was elated to see this kind of support. I honestly didn’t know it was there. When it was announced that @Roadhacker had created @FoulBastardArmy and it grew to more than 130 followers I realized just how massive the power of community can be.
That’s why I’ll stick with Twitter and work through this like a bad marriage. I just want them to recognize that there is a problem with their communication and fix it. Had they done that in the first place this whole mess would have been avoided.
FB
http://foulbastard.blogspot.com
–
I sent this post to Biz Stone, who works for the company who makes Twitter, Obvious. Biz responded quickly with the following:
Twitter does not censure content. Freezing the @foulbastard account was a case of mistaken abuse which we have since corrected.
Because of the opt-in nature of following another person on Twitter we don’t have a spam problem but we do get some folks who try to abuse the system for some reason or another. When enough people block an account on Twitter that usually indicates some sort of attempted abuse—this is how the Twitter community lets us know when something is not quite right.
In the case of @foulbastard, enough people had blocked the account that it raised some red flags and we froze the account. When we learned that this was not a case of abuse, we replaced service. We plan to refine our internal tools so we can more accurately maintain a quality service without stepping on any toes—this is a good learning experience for us.
–
There are a few points of interest here. One is that Twitter is self-policing. You can’t GET spam if every user has the option to unfollow and/or block a user. Beyond that, the community has mechanisms (lots of people blocking) to signal a perceived misuse of an account. So, in ways, the system protects its own.
In the case of Foul Bastard, this is someone who has a different use of Twitter than most folks, but I don’t see it as particularly malicious or outrageous. Might not be my choice, but if I consider FB to be an artist, then this is his “Jackson Pollock peeing” type of art. Should this be banned? (From Biz’s response, it wasn’t the intent, but I’m asking in the larger sense).
What’s your take on this whole thing? Where are the boundaries? How do the edge players use a service like Twitter?
Buy a Domain for Email or at Least a Gmail Account
Several friends of mine recently left their job all at once (the company had a mass layoff). I checked in LinkedIN, and it looks like I’m now missing a way to directly contact at least 70 of them, because they used their business email address as their primary point of contact. My goal in writing this is to get you to consider one of two options: either buy a domain to use as your email address, or at least get a gmail account.
Why NOT to use your ISP’s email address
Say you make your home email address your primary point of contact. If your home address is yourname@comcast.net, what happens when you shift from Comcast to Verizon? You’ve just lost a bunch of folks who only knew how to reach you the other way.
Why NOT to use your business’s email address
Times change. People move. That’s one reason, but the other is this: sometimes, your company doesn’t want your company being represented by the places you visit and use that email. For example, we had a CTO who pointed out that anyone in our company contributing to security forums online using their work email address would be terminated. Why? Because every time someone from my company’s security team asked a question on such a forum, it signaled to hackers (who read the same forums) our company’s vulnerabilities.
Buying a Domain for email is easy
There are plenty of providers. I use 1&1, though I don’t give them the highest marks. Lots of people use GoDaddy, and if you use them, check around with your favorite podcasters, because some have deals with GoDaddy that save you money and give the podcaster a few bucks, too. The cost for a domain, especially if all you’re going to use it for is email, is around $6US a year right now (yes, you can find cheaper, or more costly).
Or Gmail
I recommend gmail because it’s easy. It’s web-based. It’s flexible. You can use it with a mail application on your desktop, with a BlackBerry, and in lots of other ways. It has powerful search, and is widely accepted as a good import gateway for most social networking sites, meaning you can make your friends portable.
Equipping YOU
The basic idea, in case I wasn’t clear, is that by making an email presence that points directly to YOU, people will know how to reach you, no matter what the circumstances of your employment or your choice of ISP on a given day. It’s about maintaining connectivity.
What do you think?
Photo credit, Joe Shiabotnik
The Community Play
Publishers are scratching at this right now: how do we turn our publications into communities? In the magazine world, FastCompany swapped their magazine site out for a social network with a magazine stuck in there between the member content. Last year’s Gnomedex conference used IntroNetworks to power people-to-people connectivity before the event started. Webkins knows it’s not about the cloth or the stuffing. But they’re just the start. There are too many obvious community business plays laying on the table waiting to happen. Why?
Here are some community options for some organizations not yet doing such:
Hotel Social Networks
Forget loyalty programs and miles. Imagine a program where business types can opt in to expose that they’re staying at a particular hotel, and that they’re amenable to meetings about product pitches, but not job offers, and for the next four days. The upside? I’d pay EXTRA to go where the business opportunities would make it worth it.
Fear Factor: stalkers and other liabilities. This can’t be too hard to solve, can it?
Harry Potter
They’ve merchandised the hell out of the books, everything from pretend wands to real jelly beans, and they’ve got a massively multiplayer videogame in the works (or did they launch it?), but what’s missing is a place where fans of the books and movies can get together, talk about them, create their own fan fictions and mashups, and otherwise sit there in a barrel to be hit with opportunities that would work best for them.
Fear Factor: kids in the mix means different privacy laws, so, stalkers/predators are part of it again.
The NFL (or Your Sports Industry Here)
During this past year’s SuperBowl, I was at a local cinema pub watching my team melt down on a 40 foot wide screen in a room full of people. I’m a casual attendee, but sports fans are crazy passionate. Where there’s passion, there’s an opportunity for a community play in social networking. Why not some kind of site to share videos, pictures, audio, and more? It’s obvious the difference in quality between what an NFL fan will produce and what a huge organization dedicated to the best crafted sports media can whip up. Allow for profiles, for chats, and maybe even for on-NFL-site fantasy football, an opportunity you want anyway, and haven’t figured out how to approach.
Fear Factor: my only guess here is copyright and other legal stuff.
Trade or Non-Profit Associations
Most trade association websites are brochureware from the 1990s. They have a home page, an about page, a contact page, a calendar, and maybe one more wild card page. Here are situations where you’ve got hundreds and/or thousands of members and prospective members who might also find value in connecting to each other, as well as to you. Make it easier. Build a space for connecting side-by-side as well as the part of your site just giving out information.
Fear Factor: I don’t think there is a fear factor, unless it’s just fear of cost to upgrade their sites.
Any Where You Have a Population of Like-Minded People
There are community plays inherent in most every situation where you’ve got tons and tons of motivated customers waiting to be converted into even more valuable community members. I could keep naming them, but the above are some examples that should get your head moving. In all cases, I provided a fear factor that might keep people from executing. You may or may not agree with me that these are the reasons why people wouldn’t execute a community play. But if you disagree, you’ll have to share what else might be holding them down.
Whatever the case, I think there are opportunities not yet being explored. What do YOU think?
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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, Sarimeh
The Difference
There’s a big difference between:
- wanting better-served customers vs. wanting more customers.
- incorporating empowerment vs. talking about it.
- proving that your employees are your number one asset vs. saying it.
- informing vs advertising.
- sharing vs. selling.
- talking about the future vs. investing in it.
- doing vs. saying.
- being the change you want from the world vs. bitching about what hasn’t changed.
- helping vs. watching.
- building a community vs. targeting a market.
But you know that. Right?
