My Personal Development and an Experiment in Managing SM Time

February 2, 2010 By Nic Leave a Comment

Social Media and Social Networking are fun, rewarding and can be very time absorbing. Sooner or later though, you have to ask yourself a fundamental question: why am I doing it?

All you bloggers – why do you blog? All you Social and Business Networking site addicts, why are you members?

Bloggers

Why do you blog? Is it altruistic, happily sharing information with anyone who will read what you have written? Did you get seduced by one of the “You can make a fortune out of blogging” scams but are still waiting for the money? Is it to complement your business, keeping clients, colleagues, prospective clients up to date with your activities and offers? Unless it’s the first reason, how are you doing? Is your blogging helping your business to grow?

Analyse your time – how much time do you spend going from one site to another, seeking that “one missing, vital insight”? As Seth Godin wrote last week, reading is not doing! It’s easy to waste days reading expert after expert and what do you end up with? Paralysis by analysis together with a severe case of information overload! I’ve done it and, as my primary school teacher used to say “it’s not clever and it’s not grown up!”

It was a shock for me to realise that I’d owned some of the most important pdfs about setting up and running successful blogs and static sites for quite a while. But I’d got them when I was in a mad goldrush to get as much info as possible so they stayed on my hard drive, unread.

And I had wasted so much time since, trying to find information I already had! If I think of that wasted time, how much different things could be if I’d used it “doing”, rather than “researching”. You can add to the time wasting, the hours I spent tweaking my site’s design, rather than writing or doing things to draw traffic to the site. Part of a step forward in my personal development has been realising that pursuing Social Media for its own sake is a severe case of the emperor’s new clothes, unless you are a social media commentator or consultant.

How many of you (me included) have products and/or services that are not on your site and that could be earning you money? At the very least, they could be drawing people in.

Social and Business Networking

How many sites have you joined? I came across a software site the other day that sold an app that will register you automatically with the top 150 social networking sites… why? What’s the point? I’m in the process of quitting those few sites I have joined as I can’t keep up with the e-mails and messages. And that makes me look bad! So, I’m going to cut right back for the time being to LinkedIn, ecademy, Twitter and Facebook (and the latter only because it’s the easiest way to keep in touch with my wife’s family and our friends in South Africa.)

Focus

For me, this year is about focus; Chris Brogan introduced me to the concept of having keywords for the year rather than New Year’s resolutions and focus is one of mine. Focus on clients, on quality networking and on using time profitably – that doesn’t mean that every moment has to be monetised, far from it.

But every working moment has to contribute to success as I have defined it for myself. Yes that includes time for networking, for building supportive relationships; it includes time for acts of altruism too as giving without expectation of a return is an important value. In on-line terms, it’s about identifying those people with whom I would like to connect, engage and share with at a deep level. It’s also about making sure that key off-line relationships are nurtured.

Time Management

It’s going to be tough! I’ve already started reducing the number of feeds from blog sites and making a plan for returning to my roots with my own blogging. I’m not an SM expert, yet I’ve spent far too much time recently writing about SM rather than personal and organisational development. Focus and minimalism is the way forward for me, at least in the number of sites of which I am a member.

I’m also going to cut back to three posts a week at each blog during the working week and the review of the SM week here at the weekend, as people seem to enjoy it and I’ve sorted out an efficient workflow.

Although many of the tools may be free, social networking isn’t. There’s always an opportunity cost, if only for the time spent and sooner or later there has to be a return on the time invested.

Anybody interested in joining me in this exercise?

In Social Media Size Matters!

January 29, 2010 By Nic 3 Comments

One of the facts that gets quoted every now and then by people advising bloggers on how to write articles is that the top bloggers use the word “you” more often than “me” or “We/Our”. So I thought I’d take a look and see if this is true, or another Social Media Urban Myth.

As a starting point, I took the blogs of 8 of the top Social Media Bloggers and looked at their percentage use of “I”, “We”, “You” and “They”. In each case, I collected at least 5,000 words, which for most equates to between 6 and 8 articles.I know it’s not a very large sample of writers or words, but I wanted to see if any patterns emerged. And they did!

	I	We	You	They
Chris Brogan	4.89	0.93	3.07	0.32
Karen Skidmore	0.70	0.18	5.80	1.80
Louis Gray	0.71	0.53	1.06	1.19
Marko Saric	2.05	0.22	4.10	0.33
Mitch Joel	0.89	0.35	1.60	2.13
Nick Tadd	2.42	0.00	4.67	1.53
ProBlogger	2.16	0.00	5.14	0.00
Seth Godin	1.42	1.02	5.84	0.70

Louis Gray blogs more about developments in SM and emerging technologies, so I had thought that perhaps he would have used “me” more often, as he is often giving his opinion. But he still managed to use “you” more often than “I” and “We” combined

Chris Brogan uses the first person singular a lot in the sample tested but there’s a good reason for it – among the posts that I sampled were several explaining how he uses mind mapping, how he doesn’t use LinkedIn as he feels he should etc.. I’m going to go back and examine his more general articles to see the pattern there.

As can be seen from the table, all of the others use “you” almost twice as often as they use “I”, the exceptions being Seth Godin who uses “you” 3.5 times as often as he uses the word “I” and Karen Skidmore who uses it a whopping 8 times as much!. This is entirely consistent with SM articles being about engaging with other people and drawing them in. With the exception of self -disclosure articles of the type Chris Brogan has been writing recently, most of us would soon get bored with, and probably stop reading, writers who used “I” twice as much as they use “you”.

There’s a lot more I’m going to be analyzing, such as percentage of past, present and future orientated words, the percentage of nouns vs verbs etc

The conclusion? These people are some of the top in their field – anyone wanting to be up there with them needs to be looking at their writing style. The small words matter. You will find another article here that examines the subject in more detail, and announces a new service for writers.

Filed Under: Digital Coaching Tagged With: Chris Brogan, favorite, Great Writing Tips, Karen Skidmore, language, Louis Gray, Marko Saric, Mitch Joel, Nick Tadd, personal growth, ProBlogger, Seth Godin

Books on the Social Media Revolution

December 31, 2009 By Nic 2 Comments

Four Social Media Books

I’m sometimes asked to recommend a book on social media and social networking and thought I’d post a few ideas from some of the social media experts here; these are all books that I’ve read in the last 12 months!

	Trust Agents – Chris Brogan, Julien Smith This is in some ways similar to Penny’s book in that the focus is clearly on creating trust. Because trust is key to building social media reputations, the authors define those who understand the value of, and set out to create, trust as “trust agents.” It’s a mixture of the theoretical and the practical and is well worth a read, if only because it is written by authors with over 10 years of online social media experience
	Know Me, Like Me, Follow Me – Penny Power Know Me, Like Me, Follow Me is different from the other three social media books. She uses her experience as a co-founder of ecademy (I often describe this as my ‘base’ on the internet) and the trials and tribulations it went through to make important points about her belief that social media offers a better way for business people to meet, connect and help one another solve problems and expand their businesses. It is written in a warm, very personal style and is a great read. If you want a book that goes into details about how to make use of the many social media tools out there, Mitch Joel’s book would make a great companion read to Penny’s book.
	Crush it – Gary Vaynerchuk I am a huge fan of Gary V., of what he has done for the wine industry and for his business and of the way he uses video blogging, the new kid on the social media block. I have to confess that for me, what makes him so good at video blogging, his speed of delivery, his enthusiasm, his ‘flow’, doesn’t come over so well in the book. That said, the checklist in appendix a is worth the price of the book alone, for those who are new to social media or who what to make sure that they have covered everything.
	Six Pixels of Separation – Mitch Joel Whilst I have listed the books in no particular order, this is my favourite of the four when it comes to social media’how to’. It’s a great book written in a relaxed style that covers everything you would want to know about social media, and more! Mitch emphasises that he is not a technical person, he is just one of us. It takes on an ambitious task, to unify the concepts of Personal Branding, Digital Marketing and Entrepreneurship, and achieves it in a clear, fun and provocative manner. Full of case studies to illustrate the points he makes, this book offers a complete set of social media tools, tactics and insights to empower individuals to reach a global audience and consumer base with a few clicks of the mouse, and almost all of them for free.

Social Media Books – Recommendations

So, my recommendations? I enjoyed all four and think anyone wanting to find oute about more about social media will benefit from reading any or all of them. And recommending books is always difficult as it’s so much a matter of personal preference and each of these books has much to offer.

All of the books are written in easy to read styles offering examples of best practice for everyone to emulate.

Mitch Joel – Full of Social Media Tools, Tactics and Insights

However, if I had to make a recommendation, it would be to buy Mitch Joel’s book and if you want to add a semi-autobiographical account from a woman who’s been there, read Penny’s too. Then get on the internet and watch Gary V’s videocasts and hop over to Chris Brogan’s blog (one of my favourite blogs) for a full set!

However, to repreat what I wrote above, any and all of these books make a great read for the social media afficianado, as are the authors’ blogs each of which features in my list of favourites.

Filed Under: Digital Coaching Tagged With: book reviews, Chris Brogan, Digital Coaching, Gary Vaynerchuk, Mitch Joel, Penny Power

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