Is the clock running out on your social media use?
The single most often asked question I hear about social networking and media: What’s the point?
The second most often asked question about social media: How on earth can you find the time for all that stuff?
By now, I’d hope TIS readers have a fair grasp of the answer to the first question. But that second one seems to still be confounding quite few folks, and for good reason. Social networking has — quite fairly, I think — earned itself a rep as having the potential to create great big sucking black holes of time for even the most productive among us.
So, if it’s all that and a bag of baked chips, but it’s also the time suck from Hades, then how are we mere mortals supposed to ever make sense of social networking as part of our marketing plan? How in blazes do we do this stuff — this Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/BrightKite/MySpace/Tumblr/Plaxo stuff — and still have enough time left over to … y’know … actually do our jobs, let alone run our businesses?
Excellent question, seriously. And I have ten answers. Over the next ten days, we’ll look at each of these ten rules in more detail.
My goal with this series isn’t to lay out some hard-and-fast dictates, despite my use of the word “rules” — but rather to get you all thinking about ways to make adjustments to your work flow patterns to accommodate something strange and new and wonderful: the wacky world of social networking.
Sometimes, the smallest changes are the most effective, and I’m a big believer in doing only as much as is required to achieve the stated goal. The TIS motto — well, one of them — is: maximum results, minimum effort.
The ten rules that we’ll be looking at in this series are:
- Rule #1: Know Your Goals
- Rule #2: Create a Plan Based on Your Goals
- Rule #3: Separate the Personal and the Professional
- Rule #4: Get Superhero-Skilled in Task Management
- Rule #5: Give Up Multitasking and Embrace Mindfulness
- Rule #6: Take Advantage of Tools to Automate & Streamline
- Rule #7: Manage Expectations — Yours and Others’
- Rule #8: Keep Social Networking Activities in Perspective
- Rule # 9: Make a Schedule and Stick to It
- Rule #10: Get Offline Every Once in Awhile
The first installment in this series is already up here. I’ll update this post with links to the other posts as they’re published, so bookmark this post and come back daily for the next installments.
