Getting in Shape and Achieving Success in Social Media

January 4, 2012 By 1 Comment

Workout gloves
You’ve decided that this year will be your year to get into shape. You’re going to hit the gym a few days per week and start eating healthier. You stop by the gym and sign up for a new membership plan with the towel service and free personal training consultation. After getting a new membership card to add to your keyring, you leave stop by your local sporting goods store to pick out your new workout clothes. You grab a few tops, a few shorts, new super comfortable socks and a pair of running sneakers. On your way out, you grab all of the new health and fitness magazines from which you’ll find your fitness plan. Next up on this journey is a stop by the grocery store to get only the healthy stuff. While you’re at it, you stop by the vitamin store because you think a multi-vitamin will do good for this “new you” and while there the store associate tells you about the benefits of protein, creatine and a few other supplements so you pick those up too.

Now that you’re back home, you put together your workout plan based on a few “have killer abs in 10 days” and “flab no more in 25.2 days” type articles in the magazines you bought. The next morning you pop out of bed and head to the gym.  A few exercises in and you’re exhausted. Remember, you haven’t worked out in forever.  You head home, take all of your new supplements and cook a healthy meal.

You maintain this routine for the next week or so with your motivation at an all-time high. Saturday comes around and you’re ready to weigh yourself. You *must* have lost a bunch of weight since you’ve gone to the gym with your new clothes, superhuman sneakers, fitness magazines, supplements and healthy eating (minus the occasional grazing of snacks). You step on the scale and you’re horrified to see you only lost a couple pounds. Disappointed you walk away and wonder why. You’ve been so focused on getting healthy so what happened?

The problem is that you were focused on the wrong things. You were focused on feeling like you were getting healthy instead of actually working on getting healthy. You got caught up in the cool clothes, supplements and quick fixes that the fitness magazines told you would work. See any correlations to social media?

We get caught up in fiddling around with the spacing between our social sharing buttons or the fastest shortcut to more followers or to having the newest gadgets that will make your content amazing. We become frustrated when we’re not in the “Top 25 Twitter Users for the First Week of January” list. We become disenchanted, blow social media off and claim that it doesn’t work.

Getting in shape (and staying in shape!) and long-term success in social media both require the same thing: focusing on what matters. The people who I know that are really in shape rely on a basic set of equipment and exercises. Every day they have to make a conscious decision to make time to workout, cook healthy and other things such as getting enough sleep, take supplements or however else they lead a healthy lifestyle. They grind on an ongoing basis with a focus on small wins (e.g. trimming a few seconds off their mile) and achieving long-term goals (e.g. lowered blood pressure).

This holds true for social media, as well. Many of the folks that are looked up to in social media have gotten there because they grind it out every day. Whether it’s writing new blog posts, doing research, engaging in social channels or any number of other tasks, they are consistent. They didn’t buy their followers, they earned them. They just didn’t get a keynote speech handed to them, they worked their tails off for years producing content and building their resume as a professional speaker.

You may be shaking your head at this point saying that you know all of this – it’s all old-news. However, every morning I see people at the gym focused on the wrong things. And every day I see people in social media who are focused on unimportant tasks or hunting for the next shortcut.

There is no magic pill.  Stop trying to take shortcuts. Understand what really matters. Stay consistent. Stay focused. Any questions?

Filed Under: Fitness, Social Media Tagged With: , ,

Three Words for 2012

January 1, 2012 By 4 Comments

Pillars at the Lincoln Memorial

It’s that time of the year again where we look at the new year full of vigor and motivation, ready to take on everything that the upcoming year has to offer. However, it’s so easy to get bogged down and sidetracked from accomplishing our goals that by the time we look up again, the year has already escaped us.

This is why for the past few years I’ve joined Chris Brogan and several other friends in choosing three words that will serve as my guiding pillars for the upcoming year. These three words will help me to accomplish the goals that I have set out for myself, both professionally and personally.

Over the past month I’ve been working on my 2012 plans and getting myself organized and set up for the upcoming year. This past week I sat down with just my notebook and drafted a long list of potential words. There were many that hit the cutting room floor but that will still impact my year.

My three words for 2012 are: Consistency, Balance, & Ship

Consistency

This is actually one of my three words from 2011 that I’m choosing to include again for 2012. It’s an area that I need to continually improve on and will be a key to being able to achieve what I’ve set out for myself this year. I need to remain consistent in my processes and systems that help me to stay productive. I need to remain consistent in my presence and level of engagement on social platforms and in my writing. I want to stay consistent with my fitness and nutrition. 2011 was a big year for me when it came to fitness – I lost 50lbs and dropped 20% body fat. I want to keep that up in 2012 and make even more improvements. One way I’ll be doing this is through a project that I’m working on with a close friend that we’ll be sharing more about soon.

Balance

When you’re workshifting full-time and one of your hobbies and passions is also your career, it creates a double-whammy for throwing balance out of whack. It’s far too easy for the scales to tip too far one way or the other. And I’m not referring to simply a work/life balance between the time spent working at my laptop and the time spent doing anything else but work. There’s a balance of time that needs to happen between time spent writing or engaging on social channels for work versus personal. Sure, these lines are blurred and I accept that but it’s far too easy to work on projects and engage in social channels throughout the day for work and look up and realize it’s been a couple days since I checked in personally.

There are other areas of balance that need to be struck as well such as the balance between developing strategy and executing. If you spend all of your time coming up with new slide decks and preparing reports, it doesn’t leave much time to execute all of those ideas. Some of this throughout 2011 was also the learning curve that happens when you join a new company, especially a large, fast-growing company. There is increased time and energy spent just learning how to navigate the organization, so that has to be accounted for as well.

Ship

The list of projects I want to accomplish in 2012 is long. It’s easy to start all of these projects and mark them as “In Progress” on a spreadsheet. The harder part, and the part that has the most impact, is on shipping these projects. It’s easy to continually tweak and never push the project over the line. This year I will ship more projects, even if they’re not perfect because they never will be perfect.

The next step is go beyond just choosing my three words for 2012 and expand on these three words by turning them into an action plan. I’ve already done some of this through my 2012 planning at work. I know what my projects are, my next actions for those projects and my target delivery dates. That’s what these words were partially born out of. However, this doesn’t take into account the personal projects and goals that I have. So now it’s time to take these words and apply them against those projects and areas of my life that will help me to look back at the end of this year feeling accomplished.

What are your three words?

Photo Credit: paurian

Filed Under: Goals, Personal Tagged With: ,

Developing Routines and Finding Time

November 25, 2011 By 1 Comment

Making anything a routine is hard. This becomes harder as the demands on our time increase. And with increased demands on our time come increased stress to accomplish it all and it becomes easy for things to fall off of our plates, even when we have the best intentions.

It can feel like you’re in a never-ending struggle of trying to always make something in your life a routine. You may work hard at making getting back to the gym part of your daily routine and once you do that, you’re now working at trying to get more sleep or spend 20 minutes reading a book every day. In my case, it’s working on making writing part of my routine again.

When I look at my blogs and see that I haven’t written in several months I let out a deep sigh. It’s not that I haven’t had ideas to write about. It’s not that I’ve given up on writing. It’s that writing fell out of my routine, then eventually dropped off of my calendar and to-do list and I stopped making time to sit down and write, even if it’s just jotting down my thoughts for the day.

On the flip side, this year I have focused on living a healthier lifestyle. I’ve always been a health-nut having managed a GNC for several years during college and always interested in vitamins and supplements. But, I let the demands of work and travel get to me and over the past few years didn’t put a priority on sleep, eating as healthy as I could or getting to the gym as regularly as I should. Around the start of this year I made a commitment to myself that these would become part of my daily routine. I began eating healthier only having one cheat meal per week, sleeping a couple extra hours per night and working out 6 days per week. Because of that focus and commitment, over the past 10 months I have lost 50lbs and 20% bodyfat while making significant increases in strength and tone.

What’s important when adding something new to your routine is to try avoiding drastic changes.  When possible, make small changes.  For example, I’m going to focus on writing for 15-30 minutes a few times per week.  I’m not making a lofty goal of writing a new post every day for multiple blogs. That’s unreasonable and will result in failure.  Writing for 15-30 minutes a few times per week is achievable and it’s better than not writing at all so that’s where I will start as it becomes part of my routine again.

We’re always working on developing routines. Sometimes these tasks or projects will fall by the wayside to make room for something that’s a higher priority.  That’s ok.  It’s an ongoing process.  Don’t be hard on yourself.  Just work it back into your schedule with small, achievable victories along the way and before you know it that task or project will be part of your routine.

Photo Credit: Dalo_Pix2

Filed Under: Motivation, Productivity Tagged With: , ,

It’s Not About the Platform

June 5, 2011 By 4 Comments

A favorite hobby of many in this industry seems to be telling people that they’re doing “it” wrong, whatever “it” is in the given conversation. Now that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr are out ahead as the major social networks, it becomes harder to debate social platforms, though it definitely still occurs, especially with location-based platforms. One area that has never ceased to die down and has continued to be hotly debated is blogging platforms. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t read a conversation online debating WordPress, Tumblr and Posterous. Other blogging platforms such as SquareSpace, TypePad and MovableType enter the discussion too but the main focus has been between the big 3.

Some people want to debate the technical aspects of the platforms. Some want to debate the ease of use. Others want to debate which has the most active community. Debate is good. It’s healthy for the industry, especially as it continues to mature. However, telling people that they’re wrong for wanting to test new platforms and experiment isn’t healthy. It discourages the creation of content, which is where the focus should be.

I have public and private blogs on all three platforms and manage blogs that are based on other platforms as well. All of them have their pros and their cons. The one you choose is dependent on the type of content that you want to create and your preference for ease of use. There is plenty of fantastic blogs that run on each platform. Because they’re on one platform or another doesn’t make the content on them any different.

I have considered moving this blog off of WordPress and over to Tumblr to allow me to more easily share shorter form content such as quotes or post a quick video that I come across without feeling the need to elaborate at length about it. Whether or not I decide to experiment and transfer this blog will not be done because it is right or wrong, it will be done because of my desire to create content and deciding the type of content that I want to provide to the community at-large.

Whichever platform you choose to create content on, don’t be ashamed of it and don’t let anyone tell you it’s wrong. Do research on the pros, cons and how each compares, decide what you want for yourself and your community and then experiment for a while with each platform. Deal?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Photo Credit: ladybeames

Filed Under: Blog, Social Media Tagged With: , ,

Using Impressions as a Success Metric

June 3, 2011 By 4 Comments

Before getting into my thoughts on whether or not media impressions are a useless success metric, this post was inspired by Rob Clark’s post over on Dave Fleet’s blog on whether or not “share of voice” is a useless PR metric.

One thing that has struck me lately is the reliance on “media impressions” as a measure of success in PR campaigns.

For those that don’t know what media impressions are, they are the number of people who MAY have seen an article, heard something on the radio, saw it on TV or read it on a website or blog. The impressions are simply the media outlet’s circulation, viewership, listenership or readership number. That means that if your PR team reports that a specific article had 8.2 million impressions, that article MAY have been seen by 8.2 million people if 100% of all readers read that article on that day. It doesn’t take into account if someone doesn’t read the article for any variety of reasons. So, when you report that a launch was a success based on the media impressions, you’re basing your measure of success on a number that has a built in unknown error rate.

Additionally, what affect on the bottom line do media impressions have? Sure, we can agree that media impressions equal brand awareness because at least some portion of that readership will read the article about you and the more articles they read about you and the more that your brand is in front of them, the more likelihood your company is to remain top-of-mind in their time of need. Before you take out the daggers, I believe brand awareness is very much needed within companies. But, how are you measuring that brand awareness back into actual dollars?

Let’s translate this into a tangible example: If 2,000 cars drive by my restaurant on a daily basis and therefore I have a pretty sign with our logo and general information on it and not a single one of the people in those 2,000 cars ever comes into the restaurant, where does that leave me? I can’t go to the bank and tell them that I get approximately 2,000 impressions per day. That’s not going to pay back the loan. That’s not going to pay the servers. What pays this overhead are people sitting down and ordering a meal.

This debate is similar to the number of followers one has on Twitter. How many people actually read your tweets? Of that number how many actually take action from one of your tweets? How about on your Facebook Page. Facebook now reports the number of impressions per update on a Page. Does that mean anything? What does 8,589 impressions on a Facebook status update *really* mean? How does that track back to your sales pipeline?

You can see the trend here. We report success based on impressions, whether they’re media impressions, Twitter followers, RSS subscribers or Facebook likes. We rely on a number of people that MAY have seen our content as opposed to the actual number of people that did read it, the number of people who took action and the number of people that bought.

When I’ve brought this question up to colleagues and friends, they all agree that these may not be the best metrics but it’s better than nothing so we standardize our reporting to determine success on the number of impressions that we may receive. I do think it’s an important metric but it can’t be the end-all, be-all, let’s go grab beers and celebrate our success-type of metric. It should be ONE part of your reporting, not your whole report.

What are your thoughts? Maybe more seasoned PR professional will have a different view and I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic. Are media impressions a useless metric?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Photo Credit: m.eckelberg

Filed Under: Measurement, PR, Social Media Tagged With: , , ,
« Older Posts