nic-oliver.com

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?

Wow, a lot of good articles this week in my Google Reader feed! It’s been very tough reducing the list to a reasonable length, but I managed it in the end – happy reading!

Is it Time to be Ditching Traditional Marketing? by Karen Skidmore
Karen argues something dear to my heart – that traditional marketing is still a very important part of the mix.

Leverage What You Have and Take Your Blog to the Next Level by Darren Rowse
Mr R. looks at what makes blogs grow.

Building a successful business blog by Jim Connolly
Discusses the often forgotten point that if you try and do everything yourself, the success of your blog will be limited to your expertise in a wide range of specialist areas.

No More Websites. Only Publishers by Mitch Joel
Mitch Joel looks at the need for businesses to rethink the role of their website

Social Media Misconceptions 2 : “I have profiles on all the main sites/networks, so I’m using social media” by Nick Tadd
Does exactly what it says on the tin in the title.

Should a Blog be Your Social Media Hub? by Jay Baer
Jay Baer looks at possible alternatives and ends up answering his question with a “yes”.

What Every Blogger Should Know About Design When Buying a Theme by Seth Godin
Getting a new design for your blog is both time consuming and expensive. Seth Godin looks at the key issues involved.

How to Be a More Relational Blogger [Tips for New and Established Bloggers] by Darren Rowse
More from ProBlogger, this time discussing the idea that a relational approach and community feel are still one central aspect of many successful blogs.

Wake Up! You’re a Blogger Not a Crackhead by Seth Godin
If the article was poor, I’d still have included it for the title. But it’s not. It exposes the danger of being adicted to blogging, and explores 3 areas of potential addiction.

Points of Contact by Chris Brogan
Make a very important point – we can have so many points of contact that we end up neglecting people.

Massive Traffic 101 by Court
There’s so much sense in what Court writes here and it is in the same spirit as Seth Godin’s post on “Crackheads”.

Other posts you might like:
Social Media Superstars’ Greatest Hits – Week 3
Social Media Superstars’ Greatest Hits – Week 2
That was the week in Social Media Blogging

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!

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.

Wow, I’ve read over a hundred really cool articles this week (thank goodness for Google Reader)!

Again, in no particular order, here’s my pick of the week.

Will The Business People Please Stand Up? by Amber Naslund
I have to confess up front, I like Amber’s blog and could easilyhalf  fill this post with her articles. But this post struck me as being important as it makes a point that is often neglected: The most successful people in business are People who can admit what they don’t know, and seek knowledge or help.  The article is full of wisdom and if you have the time, treat yourself to the follow up article, Tough Love.

How I Leaped from Pagerank 0 to 4 in 21 Days Without any Connections by Henri Junttila
This article is included as it offers a golden tip. It’s so easy to focus on our blog and on filling it with great content, but commenting on other people’s blogs is what drives visitors to our sites. It’s something I have been very lax at and is one of my goals for 2010.

Branding Battle: Favicon to the Rescue by Seth Godin
A comprehensive post about the importance of, and how to create, a favicon. It never ceases to amaze me how many cool looking sites don’t have a favicon. And for those who use WordPress, there’s the useful plugin Shockingly Simple Favicon

Convert shortcomings into advantages — without lying by Jason Cohen
Sometimes it’s easy for the sole trader to become a little gloomy when trying to compete with much larger organisations. Jason Cohen’s article does a great job of turning some of the perceived weaknesses of the small organisation into strengths.

Deepen Your Networks by Chris Brogan
Another blogger whose articles I always read and possibly my favourite article of the week, this should be printed out and placed by the screen of every blogger or blogging wannabe. The bullet pointed list providing tips on how to deepen your network are worth the price of a book. And Chris says, it only takes a couple of hours a week to deepen the quality of relationships with people in your network. This is definitely one of my key words for 2010 – ‘focus’.

Does Your Customer Want What You’ve Got to Offer? by Sonia Simone
An article that gives great advice about the content of our articles; it uses food as a very cool analogy.

Can We Live In Private and Demand Companies Be Open? by Louis Gray
The theme of the next article is exactly what is says in the title and comes on the back of the weird announcements recently from the head of Facebook.

Use it or lose it! 5 Tips on How to Keep Your Blogging Regular by Darren Rowse
A candid article by Darren Rowse that warns of the perils of taking your blog’s readers for granted or not keeping in regular contact with them.

Why a portfolio of web content is as valuable as a portfolio of property by Nick Tadd
A very thorough piece from Nick Tadd about SM and the need for clear objectives

How to set up your mobile blog design – Step-by-step guide by Marko Saric
An extremely comprehensive article that does exactly what it says on the tin – provides a step-by-step guide to setting up your blog design for mobile platforms.

Happy Reading!

Howard Mann, author of Your Business Brickyard wrote the following in Seth Godin’s free e-book ‘what-matters-now’ available here

“There are tens of thousands of businesses making many millions a year in profits that still haven’t ever heard of twitter, blogs or facebook. Are they all wrong? Have they missed out or is the joke really on us? They do business through personal relationships, by delivering great customer service and it’s working for them. They’re more successful than most of those businesses who spend hours pontificating about how others lose out by missing social media and the latest wave. And yet they’re doing business. Great business. Not writing about it. Doing it.

I’m continually amazed by the number of people on Twitter and on blogs, and the growth of people (and brands) on facebook. But I’m also amazed by how so many of us are spending our time. The echo chamber we’re building is getting larger and louder.

More megaphones don’t equal a better dialogue. We’ve become slaves to our mobile devices and the glow of our screens. It used to be much more simple and, somewhere, simple turned into slow.

We walk the streets with our heads down staring into 3-inch screens while the world whisks by doing the same. And yet we’re convinced we are more connected to each other than ever before. Multi-tasking has become a badge of honor. I want to know why.

I don’t have all the answers to these questions but I find myself thinking about them more and more. In between tweets, blog posts and facebook updates.”

I believe that too many people on the love it/loathe it side of the social media issue think it’s either or. We need both – face-to-face and ‘virtual’, on-line communication.

Social Media is another communication method, another marketing opportunity, another revenue stream. Some will be highly successful using only on-line or only bricks and mortar; others will take a blended approach. However, I believe that two things are true whatever the business model. You have to:

1. Love what you do

2. Love your cusomers

When the social media dust settles, I believe that people will realise that the technology speeds things up but that the values, communication skills and customer-focus requirements are the same as they are when dealing with people in the physical world. What the internet does do is level the playing field in many industries so that the small business can compete effectively with, and sometimes be better than, their larger counterparts.

And the other thing that many people will have to accept, and sometimes learn the hard way, is that whatever they right, on any forum/blog/website, will be there in black and white forever!