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?

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

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

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?

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Photo Credit: ladybeames

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?

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Photo Credit: m.eckelberg

What separates an elite military group such as the Navy Seals from others? They train non-stop. They train for every situation imaginable. They train for what happens when the plans fail. When they execute a mission they’re relying not just on their skills, they’re relying on their training. In business we need to think more like Navy Seals and train for situations that could endanger our community, our customers, our partners and our vendors.

Our ability to prepare and train for such situations is what will help us when everything hits the fan, the boss is calling, emails are flying in and you’re sitting there trying to figure out what to do. Darren Rowse tweeted out a quote from Bear Bryant that said: “It’s not the will to win, but the will to prepare to win that makes the difference.” It’s in the preparation that separates the good from the great.

With the 24/7 news cycle and the fire hose of information that is always coming at us, it is surprising the number of people that I speak with who don’t have a digital crisis communications plan. Over the past couple years as social media has continued it’s explosive growth, we have seen so many examples of companies who have experienced a crisis due to an accidental tweet, a campaign gone wrong, a misstatement by a spokesperson or the collapse of an industry. But for every major crisis that we hear about there are thousands of crises which will never bubble up to the surface that are the little situations that we deal with on a daily basis. If we’re able to mitigate or solve the issue then it doesn’t grow into a case-study level crisis.

These plans don’t have to be overly complex or difficult to understand. In fact, they need to be written in easy-to-understand language so that when it comes time to take the plan of the shelf and execute against it, everyone isn’t left scratching their heads at a weird acronym or section of legalese. Ever since last year when I read the Radian6 “Social Media Monitoring and Engagement Playbook” and since joining Citrix Online, I have been thinking about digital crisis communications and the basic steps to developing a plan.

Using bits from the Radian6 playbook and my own experiences, I have boiled it down into 11 steps to developing a digital crisis communications plan. Some of these steps may not apply for your company depending on the size of company, whether you have an international customer base and several other factors.

11 Steps to Developing a Digital Crisis Communications Plan

1. Choose and set up your monitoring platform(s)

Choose the platform that is right for your company. There are plenty of them out there and even if you’re not ready to move to a premium solution yet, you can still grow bigger ears for free.

2. Determine your monitoring schedule

After you have selected and set up your monitoring platform you need decide what your monitoring schedule will be. Who will be involved? What times will they be monitoring? Will it be active or passive monitoring? Do you need international support? All of these questions will need to be answered to determine what your monitoring schedule needs to be.

3. Ensure local language support teams

If you have an international customer, partner or vendor base then you need to ensure you have the capabilities to respond in local language to any crisis that may occur. In the U.S. we tend to be an ethnocentric society who believes that our way is the right way. That how and when we communicate is the same everywhere. However, that is far from the case. You need folks on your team that understand, can monitor and respond in local language.

4. Determine what constitutes a crisis

What constitutes a crisis for your company? Not everything will be a “run around the office with your hair on fire” type of crisis (well, hopefully not!) but you need to have an ability to rate or grade the situation to determine whether something is escalating to crisis-level. You may choose a numerical score or a letter grade. You can use a severity grid such as “xx number of comments in 24 hours” or make it situation-specific. Whatever it is, make sure you understand what a crisis is for YOUR company.

5. Determine what you WILL respond to

It is important to have listed what your company is willing to respond to. These may be general inquiries such as customer service/support issues, product inquiries or publicly available information.

6. Determine what you WILL NOT respond to

Equally, if not more important is having listed what your company WILL NOT respond to. These may be legal or financial inquiries that are not publicly available, potentially inflammatory comments or something that the company does not possess the ability to properly respond to.

7. Form your digital crisis communications team

You need to form a digital crisis communications team that is comprised of stakeholders from across the business. Depending on the severity of a crisis and who it involves, it will mean that different stakeholders will need to be activated. Therefore they need to be aware of and bought in to the plan because not only will you turn to them during the crisis for support, they’re the experts of their respective areas. For example, Legal may want to be involved in anything that involves an employee issue. HR may not want to be involved in customer support issues, even if escalated to a crisis-level. Another team may prefer to be notified after it has been resolved, just as a FYI. It is important to understand these dynamics and the level of involvement needed and wanted. Some members of your core digital crisis communications team should include:

• Internal Communications
• Marketing
• PR
• HR
• International Teams
• Customer Service
• Agency Support

You may also have an extended team that could include: Creative, Web Development, Customer Insights, SEO, Sales and any other relevant teams, depending on the size of your company.

Be sure to include contact information for every member and proxy/backups for each person.

8. Escalation ladder and flow

Who needs to be notified and when. It’s as simple as that. Have a simple grid that lists who is notified, when, how fast and the method of communication. For example, an email will be sent to the VP of Corporate Communications. If no response is received within 30 minutes, it will be escalated to the SVP of Marketing.

9. Who will respond on the company’s behalf

It’s important to determine who will respond on the company’s behalf. Who will be the online spokesperson for your company. Remember that it may not be the same person every time. You probably don’t want your CEO responding to every inquiry during a crisis. But, you may want to call them in for a high profile response, an influential website or an interview. List who is authorized to respond and under what circumstances.

10. What to report on and how frequently

During and following a crisis the executives and managers will want to understand what happened, how it was handled and what affect it had on the company. Determine what that frequency is that they want and what they’re interested in having reported. During the crisis you may report every hour then move to once per day, once per week and then a final report. Agree to this so there is no confusion on when and what will be reported.

11. Build support beams

You can’t do this alone and you shouldn’t attempt to. Make partnerships, build a team and develop internal support for your plan. It will be important during a crisis and you will be thankful for developing these partnerships ahead of time.

Below is a slide deck that I put together that’s part of a speech I give on digital crisis communications. If you can view it below, you can find it over on Slideshare.

 
 
Does your company have a digital crisis communications plan? Has your company had to execute against this plan yet? What were your experiences?

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Photo Credit: Will Scullin

When I speak to groups or am interviewed about Facebook, I am often asked to provide examples of companies that are “doing it right.” With well north of 500 million users who spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook, companies are increasingly interested in how Facebook can be leveraged as part of their marketing campaigns. It’s only natural. Many companies jump in and set up a Facebook Page but aren’t really sure where to go from there. There is no strategy. No goals. No content calendar. Nada. The Facebook Page has been created and viola, all is done. Throw the Facebook logo on your marketing materials and everyone will flock to the Page. While you and I know this isn’t true, this is a consistent issue and one that I’ve run into more times than I can count.

As with any aspect of your marketing, if not done with thoughtfulness and some planning, just setting up your Facebook Page could become disastrous, frustrating and lead to abandoning something that could be a powerful way to build and connect with your community. Over the past couple years of working with clients when I was at New Marketing Labs, researching and writing my book and being an active user on Facebook, I have put together the 9 deadly sins of Facebook Pages (and their administrators). There surely are many other “sins” and many, if not all of them, apply to other social networks as well.

9 Deadly Sins of Facebook Pages and Their Administrators

Not having any goals

One of these days we will be able to stop talking about the need for goals in social media but so many companies are still just jumping in without knowing why they are doing it and what success looks like for them. You need to have goals. Whatever they may be, whatever success looks like for you, you must have goals. It could be that you want to gain 25 “likes” so you can get your custom URL. You could want your Facebook Page to become a top 10 referrer of traffic to your website. It doesn’t matter what the goal is, it matters that you have goals and a timeline for achievement.

Thinking it’s about YOU

It’s never about you. It’s never been about you. Make it about your community and you’ll find that you will reap far more benefits. It’s really that simple.

Page abandonment

I’m just as guilty of this as the next person managing Facebook Pages. It’s very easy to set up a Page, get all excited about it and then not touch for week’s on end. Not only are you missing out on opportunities to engage with your community on a platform where they’re spending an average of 55 minutes per day, you’re also hurting yourself with increasing your chances of appearing in your fans newsfeeds. If you’ve never read about the EdgeRank algorithm and how Facebook decides what appears in the newsfeed, stop reading this and go read this excellent article by TheNextWeb.

Acting like a robot

This is another one of those face palm moments that I have when I see a brand automating their content to Facebook. Twitter and Facebook are two separate platforms. Treat them as such. Do not post your tweets automatically to Facebook as status updates. Take the time to actually engage on Facebook. Create custom content that’s specific for your Facebook community.

Lack of engagement

If your community is taking time out of their schedule to engage with the content that you’re creating on Facebook, you can take the time to engage with them. Sure, every single comment or like doesn’t have to be responded to and sometimes you will have people there just trying to pick an argument with you or your company. You also don’t need to run down a list of comments with “Great, thanks” type comments. Use your best judgment and take the time to be thoughtful in your responses.

Inconsistency

This is the step prior to complete page abandonment. If you’re inconsistent with creating content and engaging in Facebook, then you can’t expect to have an active community. Not only will it hurt your EdgeRank from a technical perspective, your community won’t be used to the rate at which you produce content. You won’t be one of their “must check” Pages just like if you’re not active on your blog or other platforms, they will quickly move on there, as well.

Giving up too quickly

Just because there are 500 million people on Facebook doesn’t mean that within 3 days of launching your Facebook Page you will be reaching Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber levels. Success on Facebook is just like most other aspects of life: it takes hard and sustained work. You will not be cashing bonus checks a week after launching your Facebook Page just because you launched your Facebook Page.

Using too many tabs

Just because you can create multiple customized tabs doesn’t mean you should. Your Facebook Page is not your website, just on Facebook. If your Facebook Page strategy includes 18 custom tabs, slap yourself. Having a custom landing tab for your Facebook Page is an excellent way to carry brand consistency and to engage with your community as soon as they hit your Page. Having other content on another tab that may be relevant if they choose to “like” your Page can be useful to them. But, too many tabs and they will be confused, turned off and annoyed…the ninth deadly sin.

Annoying your fans

Just as you shouldn’t be inconsistent in your rate of posting content to your Facebook Page, you also shouldn’t post so much content that you annoy your fans. The fact that they clicked the “like” button doesn’t mean that they’re telling you “pummel me with updates and messages.” The fact that you can message your fans doesn’t mean that you should do it so much that it becomes annoying to you. Multiple times I have un-liked a Page or un-friended someone for too frequent of updates. This is your community and it can be a vibrant and successful community if you nurture them well. Always remember that.

There you have it, these are the 9 deadly sins of Facebook Pages. What are other “sins” that you see on the Facebook Pages that you visit?

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Photo Credit: Thomas Hawk

That last point is really important to me as a reader. As someone who consumes a lot of information and is consistently juggling multiple projects that demand my time, unfortunately even when I have the best intentions, I don’t ever get back to the book I highlighted, the magazine article I ripped out or the blog post that I starred in Google Reader. This is never the case with Seth’s books. I read them as soon as I get my hands on them, highlight or write all over them and continually look back at them. And Poke the Box followed that same pattern.

I downloaded it on Kindle as soon as it launched and on my flight down to Austin, TX for SXSW 2011 I was able to read the book in about an hour or so. At 83 pages with a lot of spacing on the pages, the book is a short, quick read. I think this is because the book then takes you another 2 hours to fully digest as you quickly scribble down thoughts, make plans and focus on shipping something. For me, after I was done reading and taking some notes from the book, I immediately opened up Evernote and wrote another 1,000 words for the next edition of Facebook Marketing, drafted the initial thoughts for my next newsletter (are you subscribed yet?) and began writing a couple blog posts.

The official book description explains it all:

If you’re stuck at the starting line, you don’t need more time or permission. You don’t need to wait for a boss’s okay or to be told to push the button; you just need to poke.

Poke the Box is a manifesto by bestselling author Seth Godin that just might make you uncomfortable. It’s a call to action about the initiative you’re taking-– in your job or in your life. Godin knows that one of our scarcest resources is the spark of initiative in most organizations (and most careers)-– the person with the guts to say, “I want to start stuff.”

Poke the Box just may be the kick in the pants you need to shake up your life.

I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of Seth’s new book.

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Photo Credit: Jeff Hester

How important is recharging to you?  No, I’m not talking about the importance of keeping your gadgets charged.  We already know that we should always be charging all of our digital leashes.  What I’m talking about is taking downtime away from the constantly connected worlds that we live in and allowing yourself to mentally and physically recharge.  Many of us work long hours, often times deep into nights and over weekends.  Even when we do get some downtime from the office, such as on the weekends, that time is usually filled with everything else in our lives that demand our attention whether they be household projects, cleaning, errand running, or a number of other to-dos.  All of this slowly wears us down, especially if you’re adding a lack of solid sleep, high stress environments, business travel, a lack of exercise or a sound diet to the mix.

Even when we do get an opportunity to take a vacation, we’re usually still very much plugged in and connected though albeit on a slower schedule.  When I take weekend getaways or domestic vacations I know I’m guilty of this.  I might not spend all day on email, Twitter, Facebook and RSS as I do during a regular workday but I’ll still check in a few times throughout the day.  Even if I don’t take action on the emails coming in, I still know what’s going on and therefore may be adding stress into the getaway because of knowing what’s awaiting me when I get home or feeling an urge to deal with the situation while away.

That is why I’ve become an increasing fan of taking sailing vacations over the past few years.  Two years ago I went on my first sailing trip down to the British Virgin Islands.  Not only was it an amazing vacation but I was completely disconnected from the world for 10 days.  Not just from my connected world but from everything.  And guess what?  Everything was just fine.  It took about a week to get back into the saddle and caught up but it was well worth it.  When I came back I was incredibly productivie because I felt clear-headed and organized.  I had just come back from over a week of spending nights laying under the stars letting my mind wonder about anything and everything.

In between leaving New Marketing Labs and before starting at Citrix Online my family took another sailing trip, this time to St. Vincent and the Grenadines, along with a couple days on the way back in Barbados.  It was the perfect opportunity to disconnect from everything and spend quality time with my family.  It was one of the first times, if not the only time, so far in my career where I went away on a vacation without a corporate email account.  Granted, I do have my personal email accounts and my Caminito email account, all of which receive a lot of emails on a daily basis but still not anywhere on the level of NML or now, Citrix Online.  It was an absolutely incredible trip filled with laughter, swimming with turtles, hiking expeditions, exploration and everything that involved not being connected.

Since returning from vacation I have been thinking more about recharging and how important it needs to be in all of our lives.  Sure, recharging won’t always be taking a sailing trip around remote islands, but it doesn’t have to be.  Recharging could be taking a date night once per week with your spouse where you’re completely disconnected and ban the talk of bills, honey-do projects or any of the other stresses in your personal and professional lives.  No matter how you do it, we all need to take time to recharge.

How are you finding ways to recharge?

Oh and if you wanted to see photos from my sailing trip, check out the below slideshow:

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Photo Credit: killermonkeys

A little more than 2 years ago Chris Brogan and I were both attending the first Social Media Jungle event in New York so we decided to carpool down together. During those 5 hours or so of driving and over a dinner at a Chili’s in Middletown, CT later that night, we talked about a new project that he was launching. He was getting ready to unveil New Marketing Labs to the world and was close to signing the first contract which was going to be with Citrix Online (the folks who make GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, and other similar products). That night we talked about what we thought the future of business looked like, their use of social media and how NML could be helpful. After more conversations and brainstorming, often in the middle of the night over DM, we set sail, launched NML and I relocated to the Boston area. A couple days after the launch we found ourselves on an airplane headed out to CES to tell anyone who would listen that we were there to be helpful.

Since that trip 2 years ago we have had the opportunity to work with some great companies on amazing projects. In between launching new projects for our clients, we continued to grow the Inbound Marketing Summit, launched Red Pin Marketing and The Pulse Network. There are also some really exciting projects on the cusp of launching over the coming days and weeks that I can’t wait to see after working through them for the past several months with the team.

However, as they prepare to announce these launches, I will be cheering them on instead of on the front lines. I’m excited to announce that I’m joining the team at Citrix Online as part of the corporate communications team and will be overseeing social communications.

Over the past 2 years I’ve worked closely with the folks over at Citrix including Bernardo De Albergaria, David Baeza, Lisa Horner and many others. They are among one of the brightest and most forward thinking teams that I’ve met and had the opportunity to work with. I start with Citrix Online on January 17th, a mere few hours after I return from sailing around the Grenadines. I’m looking forward to the challenges that I know are awaiting me when I get there and am really excited for what 2011 holds in store.

It’s an interesting intersection of passions for me because it combines my experiences in social media, marketing and communications along with my interests and continued research into productivity, time management and workshifting, all things which the Citrix Online products assist with.  I’m looking forward to continuing to explore all of these areas, including my role leading up social communications, in more depth in the coming year.  Throughout the year I’ll be covering a lot of this in my free newsletter (have you signed up yet?).

With the new job comes a new place to explore. Within the next couple months Laura and I will be packing up the dog, cat, putting the car on a trailer and driving a moving truck across the country to our new home, San Francisco. We’ll trade our view of the Prudential Center for the Golden Gate Bridge and for a whole new set of experiences filled with exploration.

I can’t thank Chris and the entire team at NML enough for the past 2 years. I’ve grown professionally and personally because of the great people that comprise the NML team.  Now I’m going to use those experiences and growth to help me be achieve success as I start the next chapter of my career with Citrix Online.

And don’t worry, my allegiance to the Boston Celtics, Boston Red Sox and the New England Patriots will not change. Heh.

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Photo Credit: Amanda Breann