Methods of Engaging in Social Media

First, let’s level-set what we’re talking about here. When I talk about scaling your efforts, here are the efforts I’m talking about:

• Listening/monitoring for PR, for customer service, for marketing opportunities, for R&D opportunties.
• Customer service.
• Client relations.
• Social marketing (such as two-way sales conversations).
• Sales prospecting (including two-way conversations, but also listening).
• Publishing (blogging, video, etc).

Of these six, everything but “listening/monitoring” assumes a little bit of two-way participation, meaning that you choose to comment on the other people’s posts and statuses, etc. This takes time, as well. It’s part of the relationship-building, however, and can’t be skimped on.

Approaches to Assigning These Tasks

Listening/Monitoring – In my estimation, every social media effort has to have Listening/Monitoring at the core of it. I tried thinking of exceptions, and couldn’t (without accepting that some people choose to be scammy). That said, you can opt to split the listening/monitoring chores out such that each member of your team that will be touching the social web owns some level of the process. For instance, your PR person can use the tools to listen for crisis issues, for storytelling opportunities, etc. Your customer service team can use the tools to enhance their customer service channel. Your marketers can listen for opportunities. Thus, you’ve already looked at how to split the vast bucket of information that comes in during listening. Someone should still own it. Maybe that’s the product lead, the manager of that line of business, whoever is responsible for the bottom line. They should have their eyes on listening the whole time.

Customer Service – Some companies already have this nailed down. Dell and Comcast have built great customer service integrations using social channels. Zappos has, as well. This area seems the most important to scale. Customer service is a tireless experience, and requires prompt attention. Thus, you need a deep bench. I think Frank at Comcast has 14 people on his team at this point, to give you a sense of it. Of all the social media tasks, this is tie for the most time consuming and most important (client relations would be the other). Learning how to scale this might be nuanced and customized, but just by knowing that it’s the hardest part might be enough to get you a little further in this part.

Client Relations- I split out client relations from customer service, because I think this part includes managing things like Facebook groups, managing blog comments, etc. It’s the “there’s no problem, but I’d like to keep you warm” part of business. You sometimes see “community manager” in this role (though I see the best community managers as a blend of a few of the above topics). This is tied for first place in time-consuming with Customer Service. People want the warm touch. It’s also the hardest of the brand promises, because if you’re nice to me on Twitter, but your counter help stinks, did you really move the needle? I vote no. With time, this one requires perhaps even more special care and attention. If you start offering this to your customer base, you’ve got to maintain it. Toy with the hours spent here at your own risk.

Social Marketing – By social marketing, I mean things like finding new customers via Twitter, or coming up with YouTube challenges, things like that. This clearly falls into the marketing department of larger companies, and it falls on the shoulders of whichever of your small business partners markets the best. Like all roles in a small business environment, you should cross-train. Don’t get lulled into thinking that just because Surya has a Twitter account that he’s the only one who should do social marketing. This is probably the easiest to scale, but it’s also the one where you can see the most obvious results of marketing effort. For instance, if you build a loyalty program and you need sign-ups, you can count pretty easily how many people took advantage of your offer, so you now whether or not to add attention to it. This is probably a lot less personable than client relations and customer service, so can likely be scaled the easiest.

Sales Prospecting – Your sales team (or you, if you’re a company of one or two) should already be realizing the sales benefits of the social web. Every day, someone’s out there talking about their needs, and giving you a sense of how you could sell to them. It’s lots of opportunity and requires a bit of time, but not much more than old fashioned prospecting. Switch out some of your time from sifting through phone books or wherever you find your customers, and put it into using search tools on the web to find new clients. Also, for ongoing relationships, if you’re not keeping tabs on their social presence, you’re missing the opportunity to know how they’re doing before you make your important sales calls. This doesn’t take a ton of time, but requires you to build it into your process.

Publishing – Blogging, shooting videos, all that stuff – that’s where some of your time gets eaten up, and yet, that’s where a lot of the value comes from. In seeing some of the comments from my post about redrawing, a lot of people offered that maybe I should blog and tweet less. That’s where I get my revenue. This post? It will generate a query for business where someone wants me to further customize and formalize these processes for their organization. I give it away to you for free, and you can run with it, but someone will ask for that next step, and I’ll make money from that. Thus, publishing should never be considered the thing to slip. Hell, it’s the product sometimes, and other times, it’s the best advertising you could ever create. Never skimp on publishing.

Where Does That Leave You?

I’ve told you that everything’s important and that nothing can be cut back. So where do you scale?

• Spread listening/monitoring as deep as you can.
• Enhance customer service and deepen that bench internally.
• Add to client relations when you can, from internal resources. It pays off.
• Social marketing can be augmented by external help.
• Sales prospecting is a sales job, but can be augmented.
• Publishing is important, but can be augmented by external help.

That’s how I see it. Again, if you’re talking about smaller scale operations, you’ll have to find the mix. I’ve put it almost in order of importance, from top to bottom. You can shuffle it a bit. Is that how you see it?

For those complaining that social media doesn’t scale, the trick is this: we equate these tools to personal relationships. Because of that, we can’t just open a “call center” for many of the touchpoints. However, as we move forward, and these tools become the new phone, the new radio, the new TV, it’s no longer going to be a world of solo trust agents, but trust agencies.

Will you be ready?

Photo credit Bill Lapp

I can’t keep up.

If I just manage my inbox, that’s about 10 hours of work a day (600 new mails divided by 1 minute each). If I spend time on Twitter, on Third Tribe, on Facebook, on my blog (in the comments), that’s another 3 hours. If I take two phone calls or do a webinar, that’s another 2 hours.

We’re up to 15 hours before even doing production of anything (no blogging/writing/creating for clients).

I looked through my Flickr photos at some of the fine people I got to see at SXSW. In almost all cases, I saw them for only a few minutes. I did my best to be attentive, to show that I cared, to make sure I learned about something that was on their plates. But I rarely got any deeper than that.

To fix this, I have to redraw my lines. I have to rethink how I connect, and reconsider how I will continue being of value to you. Before I’m no longer a value.

Extend Relationships

My friend, Jon Swanson has told me for years that I need to build disciples. By this, he doesn’t mean mindless sheep (a post for another time). He doesn’t mean that I just teach the masses and the masses do. He means extended relationships. At the end of the story, Jesus has 12 guys doing a lot with their own interpretations on how to implement their beliefs.

Does the Bible language freak you out? Michael Jackson, in designing This is It, pointed out that the dancers that swirl around him in each performance were to be extensions of how Michael expressed himself in dance. So, they weren’t just doing something to do it. They were giving Michael even more reach than when he just did it himself.

I have this, of course. I have New Marketing Labs to help execute social media execution ideas for our client partners. I have friends and colleagues in this space who have lots of similar interests and different approaches. I will call on it more.

Shining the Light Even Brighter

There are others doing exceptional work in this space. I’m a fan of Jason Falls, Jay Baer, Valeria Maltoni, and many others. I’m going to work harder to point out the people in my network who do great work, and I’m going to help others find them to start meaningful connections that match what you deserve.

By shining the light on others who are doing good work, I’ll hopefully point you to opportunities I can’t service or that aren’t the regular fit for New Marketing Labs.

Rethinking My Direction

The work we’re doing at NML is strong. What I’m doing with me overall is a lot more foggy. I’m going to rework that and be very crisp and clear on what you’ll get from me in the coming few years. That way, we’ll know better whether what I’m sharing aligns with your interests.

The sense of where I’m heading is that I’m stretching a bit out of just marketing and I’m going to work on equipping others for business success through education and experiences.

In other words, I’m going beyond social media and helping show how human business works.

Redrawing My Connections

I can’t keep up with every email and contact as it stands. I’ve got Diane working more than enough hours just negotiating my speaking and travel arrangements. We’ll figure out how to redraw the ways I respond so that it’s manageable, reasonable, and timely. I can’t have you waiting so long in between touches.

In the End

We all do this. I’m just laying it out so that you understand where I am, but more so, so that you understand how we must all process, reconsider, rethink, and redraw the way we do what we do. What got us here won’t always get us there.

Make sense?

Save Yourself a Blog Post or Twitter Comment

If your immediate response is, “Well, that’s the price of success,” just save it. That doesn’t help anyone. And yes, it’s the price of success. Learning how to scale is incredibly difficult.

The difference between me and others in that regard is that I’m the only one actually sharing the process with you, so that you might learn something out of it for your own efforts.

I’m not sold on Google Buzz. It’s very noisy. Heck, if you’re following me there, you’re probably wondering what it’s about. It reminds me of Friendfeed, with the conversations looping under every piece of information. It’s also a lot like Facebook, in that sort of “wall post, comment” dance kind of way. I’ll probably come to tell you why I love it in some future post, or maybe I won’t. I never liked FriendFeed, though Robert Scoble always raved about it. Now, not all noise is bad, but allowing yourself to be buried in it isn’t very helpful.

I am thinking of attention as currency, and am going to recommend that you set a budget.

Attention as a Currency

Part of what Julien and I wrote about in Trust Agents is that attention and reputation and trust are all currencies that aren’t as easily swapped out. You can pay for attention, at least for a little bit. Advertisements are a purchase of your attention. You can’t exactly pay for reputation, though you can buy the trappings of reputation quite easily. And you can’t buy trust. But things like Google Buzz are about attention, and that’s kind of the baseline currency for the higher-level instruments of reputation and trust.

Attention is worth something to me. Your attention is very important to me. (And when I say “me,” replace this with your company name, and you’ll see what I’m driving towards.) Being responsive and attentive in two directions is very important to me.

How You Use Attention Decides a Lot

I have many projects on my plate right now. Too many. I have things I’ve promised friends that need my attention. I have client obligations for New Marketing Labs. I have new friends that I want to explore and get to know. I have lots of places where I can spend my attention.

But attention is finite.

With that in mind, it becomes a matter of budgeting and management. How much one-on-one can I invest, because that’s where the real value of social media kicks in. How can I get more information to more people in a one-to-many format, because that’s my only hope at scaling. This is what we have to ask ourselves daily.

How NOT to Get Sucked Into Buzz/Twitter/Facebook

Ask yourself this question CONSTANTLY: where can I add the most value to what matters most to me and the people who care about me?

I love spending time on Twitter and getting to know people. I do a few hours a day inside Twitter, but for every bit of time I spend just talking back and forth with people to prove I’m human and that I care, I’m also collecting information for work, for clients, for story ideas, and more. When I feel like I’m just chatting for chatting sake, I ask myself, “where can I add the most value to what matters most to me and the people who care about me?” The answer is rarely, “by chatting about plane delays.”

If that doesn’t work, use a timer. I have a very simple egg timer software application for my Mac. I set it often. Want the real one? Go to a kitchen store (do they have those any more?) and buy a green pepper egg timer or a cat-shaped one. Whatever. Simple, and yet it works. Allot yourself time.

Budget. Set an attention budget.

Spending Some of Your Attention

My current favorite tool on the web is Google Wave. Wave is like Google Buzz’s stuffier older brother. When used right, it can be a place to share collaboratively around projects. Julien and I are writing the paperback version of Trust Agents with the help of Wave. I’m planning my next business with Wave.

Why? Because it’s where I’m getting value for my time.

I spend my attention on my blog. Why? Because it’s what matters most in helping others and building my community.

I spend my attention on my book writing. Why? Because it’s going to help me grow new community members and find people who aren’t already in the circle.

See where I’m going?

Set Up a Real Attention Budget

What if you did something as simple as take a spreadsheet and put in the top 3-5 things you wanted to spend time on in a day? Just list them out. Put the first thing first (Thank you, Dr. Stephen R. Covey). And so on. Now, what if you made that a sticky note? What if you made that your desktop background? What if you followed your own attention budget?

What would you be able to accomplish then?

And what does your attention budget look like? Want to share?

Photo credit 4000f

Here’s my reasoning:

We can only visit so many applications regularly as part of a flow. Right now, my current “go to” applications are: email, Google Reader, calendar, Facebook, Twitter, email marketing (Publicaster), Evernote, slowly Google Wave, and that’s about it.

In a business flow, they work something like this:

• Mail and Twitter – communication / media making
• Reader – monitoring and story gathering
• Calendar – scheduling / appointments
• Evernote – “storage” information (like my frequent flier card #’s)
• Google Wave – project collaboration, like figuring out how things will work for events, etc.

Inside Wave, I started a wave to myself called “Threads.” In there, I have the status of Open, Waiting For, and Scratch Pad. I edit them as I have things come in. So, if someone needs something, I throw it in the “open” section until I get it done.

What’s missing are things like “deadlines,” but you know what? I don’t use deadlines, and if I have a deadline, I use the calendar. What’s also missing are some automated functions, like being able to “checkbox” closed a task. But I don’t care. I just delete.

The point, I guess, is that I’m using Google Wave as a task manager because it’s starting to fit into my flow. All my tools have to fit some kind of flow or I won’t use them.

Have you ever mapped your own flows?

And what do you think of the idea?

It’s amazing what we do when the half hour seems free or extra. Instead of just throwing it away, here’s a list of things you could do instead that might improve your business relationships.

If You Have an Extra Half Hour

Perform a few of the following tasks.

1. Write two recommendations on LinkedIn for people’s work you can vouch for.
2. Read and comment on five blog posts(especially if they’re up-and-coming bloggers vs the pros).
3. Go to search.twitter.com, put in a few topics you’re interested in, and comment on a few conversations.
4. Go to Alltop.com and discover some new blogs in a category that matters to you.
5. Read and Stumble a few good blog posts. Share them on Twitter and Facebook, too.
6. Write a list of blog topics to come up with in coming weeks.
7. Reply to the five oldest emails in your inbox. See if any of the replies would be better as blog posts to help more people.
8. Investigate two new websites or technologies that might or might not impact your work.
9. Teach one person you know about something you know about social media.
10. What would you add?

You probably have a few more ideas for what to do with a half hour. Let’s list them here.

Photo credit lepiaf.geo

Can’t see it? Click HERE.

What do you think?

When did we start expecting this kind of turnaround? When did we all opt to be Pavlov to the dinging bell? Who said this was how business gets done?

Equally interesting is that this seems to be the expecation regardless of time of day, and on weekends as well. I received a query on Saturday evening, and found a somewhat more anxious email in my box before noon on Sunday.

We’re all to blame. It’s no one person’s fault. But it doesn’t have to be like this. We can reinstate boundaries and manage expectations. Business has to move fast, but do we really want the future where we’re all tethered to Twitter?

Not even I want that.

Photo credit Deja V Maker

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.

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Photo credit, Jarosław Pocztarski

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