Archive for the ‘Mindfulness’ Category

Sep

2010

13

Category:

Mindfulness, Networks, Online Community

Tags:

9 Comments

Finding Balance: Our Relationship with Technology and Social Networks

Photo by Beth Kanter

I’m just back from a few days mostly offline in the Point Reyes National Seashore area to walk along the beach and appreciate the beautiful views and nature.  Taking an Internet or technology break is important, especially if you live a constantly connected lifestyle. (It isn’t easy at first)  Above all it helps you examine your relationship with technology and find balance.

We’re all struggling with balance of technology and a purposeful life.  We need to reflect inward and examine our motivations, patterns, and use of technology – understanding when we’re mindful and not.  Then we need to integrate ways of finding the right balance.  That balance is not a simple on and off switch – it is understanding how to integrate focused and receptive attentions into our online and offline lives.

There was spotty cell phone reception, so I got my news the old fashioned way – reading a newspaper!    Ironically, one of the shorts I read was a piece about how people are now spending more time on Facebook than Google.

Even though I was “offline,”  I couldn’t completely escape reminders of how social networks have become a part of our lives.   Browsing the local cheese shop in town, there was an invitation to join their Fan Club on Facebook!

Once over the Golden Gate Bridge and connectedness restored I noticed this post from Melissa Ford over at BlogHer in my Facebook feed – “Is RSS Dead?” about Bloglines closing as of October 1st.  Melissa admits that she clicks through on links from her friends on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere, but finds reading RSS her main way of keeping informed.   She wonders if she is out of synch with others?

I also noticed this link shared by my business partner, Geoff Livingston about the implications of consumers spending more time on Facebook than Google.     Geoff wrote a must-read follow up post talking about how communicators must not forget the importance of community building on social networks.

This left me some reflection questions:

  • How do you balance a connected lifestyle with being purposeful?  I’m particularly curious about those of us whose work involves spending a lot of time online.
  • How do you resist the urge to treat your networks like “consumers” or engage solely in transactional interactions versus building relationships?

Sep

2010

03

Category:

Mindfulness

Tags:

9 Comments

Chasing the Squirrels Out of Your Email Box: Gmail Priority Inbox

I like to joke about how using social networks like Twitter can give you “ADOLAS” (ADD, Oh, look at Squirrel!).    The reference is from the Disney/Pixar movie UP – the scenes where the talking dogs can’t finish a sentence because they get distracted by a squirrel.

I’ve tried to come up with some manual ways to avoid this on Twitter.  For example,  colleagues using the #squirrel hashtag and we remind each other to focus or suggest other techniques.   But to tell you the truth,   I’ve had a major squirrel problem with my email.

I’ve been using Gmail for many years.  I use labels, filters, and the stars to filter and prioritize emails.   I’ve been using the color coded labels to indicate work flow and use RED for one called !!!_Priority so it appears on the top of my filter list.    I’ve trained myself to go to that label first when I feel overwhelmed.

But, today, Google has released Priority In Box – what I like about it is that it automates and extends the manual processing of priority email.   It  gives you a little symbol for “important”  and “not important” so you can flag those priority messages and they appear on the top of your list.

Explore the Priority In Box tab in the settings and you’ll see that you can group your in box into different priority levels.  Incoming email gets separated into sections: important and unread, starred, and everything else.   These too can be customized.

I’ve been using the star to indicate an email that has a task that I need to do or come back to.    But I also use labels to indicate work flow like “reply,”  “read,” “schedule,” and  “waiting for.”    (I also so subject matter labels/filters as well).

Over time, you train gmail to automatically put the important emails at the top.  I’ll be curious to see how this works.

There are more suggestions and features that you can use to help you fine-tune your filtering of priority emails/tasks.

This feature has the potential to help me fix my email squirrel problem.   That is – when I open up my email box – I get distracted versus seeing a prioritized list.

Aug

2010

16

Category:

Content, Listening, Measurement, Mindfulness

Tags:

8 Comments

What Tools Do You Use for Making Your Nonprofit’s Social Media Use Efficient?

Flickr Photo by Roberto Ferrari - Creative Commons License Some Rights Reserved

Note from Beth: Social media is not a waste a time, but there are ways to waste your time.   On Saturday, I had the honor of presenting at Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp and one of the burning questions was about efficiency.   So, I’m going to explore this theme over the coming weeks.

A  few weeks ago,  I started a thread on my blog’s Facebook Page,  “What are the best tips and tools for saving time managing your nonprofit’s Facebook Page?”   I summarized the tips shared in this earlier post. Managing your organization’s Facebook page, particularly tracking, content, and engagement can be a time suck, particularly as your network grows.     For example,  we know that identifying and engaging with super fans/influencers on our Facebook presence is important.   But keeping a spreadsheet of the names of people who “like” and comment on threads involves a lot of cut and paste.   Is there a tool that can automate this someone asked on my blog’s Facebook page?  (unfortunately, FB Insights doesn’t do this)

Or what about a tool that helps you plan out your content strategy for the week and even schedule posts on days when you can’t?  What if you want to aggregate and look at all the comments and responses to threads before responding?

There is an evolving category of tools (some free, some not) that can help make the tasks associated with content strategy, engagement, and tracking less onerous.   On the free side, Manny Hernandez mentioned NutShell Mail, software that aggregates comments and likes on your fan page and delivers it in one email.   James Young mentioned SpredFast (he works for them now) and he offered to write a post about how he manages him time.    And while this guest post is about one particular tool, remember when looking for a technology tool solution, think carefully about what pain point is it solving and whether it can truly work for your situation.   If you know of other tools (or tips) that make you more efficient managing content, engagement, and tracking on social media, please share them in the comments.

Guest Post by James Young,  SpredFast

And as a marketer like you, who has added social media to the mix, I struggled with the same issues you face with being efficient with my and showing the results.    Here’s how I use Spredfast to help me with these challenges.

So Many Social Networks, So Little Time

Doing social media right takes time. We engage in multiple social networks, some that you probably also use: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare, our own blog, and a few other networks.

Aggregating Conversations

Conversing with people in all of these places, and creating interesting, value-add content for each is a time consuming business.  It gets worse when you consider that you have to duplicate efforts across different social networks.  With Spredfast, I can do two things that make this so much more efficient.  First, I can pull in all of the conversation taking place across all of the networks into one place, read through it, and participate where I want to. Each and every day, I look for all of the people who have mentioned us or retweeted our tweets, and I thank them. I can do it easily right from my listening dashboard.

Planning Content on Weekly Basis

Second, I can plan out the content I want to publish, schedule it out for the next few weeks, create the content (or, one day when we grow, assign it to someone to create), choose the social network or networks I want each piece to go to, and save it.  Spredfast will publish it on the schedule I’ve set. Typically, I will get a week’s worth of content ready to go ahead of time, and then spend the majority of my remaining time just engaging with individuals.

Tracking for Insights and Value

Like all activity within a good company or organization, I have to create some value. To prove I’m doing that, I need data.  Some of the social networks provide a lot of good data, others not so much. Regardless, it used to take a lot of time to go into each network and gather the data I needed, pull it back into my master spreadsheet, and then do some crunching.

Spredfast makes that a lot easier for me, because it gathers two types of data into one dashboard. First, all of the content that I send out (both planned communication as well as off the cuff conversations I engage in) is tracked. For example, for each tweet I send, I can see how many times it was retweeted, by whom, what they said, how many people could have seen the retweet, and if I included a link I can see how many times the link was clicked. For every post to my Facebook Page, I can see when someone comments, who they are, what they said, how many times the post was liked and how many times the link in my post was clicked. The list goes on across a wide variety of social networks and kinds of interaction people can have.

Second, I can see data that relates to my social media account (as opposed to my content), like number of friends, fans and followers. I can also see the volume of the conversation about my brand, like mentions in Twitter, references in blogs, etc.

The big deal is that all of this data is in one dashboard, so I can jump straight to analysis, making my weekly report a whole lot easier to produce. I just create a graph or report in Spredfast, or I export the data and use Excel and PowerPoint.

It is important track conversions and Spredfast can be integrated with my  integrated my Google Analytics account, and I tag all the links I send out in conversations.  Spredfast does some cool stuff like creating unique shortened links for each content piece (including separate links for the same post sent into both Facebook and Twitter, for example), so when I look at my web funnel data, I can actually track a conversion all the way back to the individual tweet or post. Literally, I can tell my boss how many subscriptions came from social media activity, from each social network, from each account and from each individual content piece I published.

Now, I know that not all value is measured in conversions. So, all of those other things that are valuable, like engagement levels and reach, are available too, using the data in my dashboard. We have some internal, soft values we attach to that data, and ultimately arrive at a total value comprised of soft and hard (conversion) values for my activity this week, month, or quarter.

Scaling Engagement

I know many organizations are worried about giving a lot of staff and volunteers access to the organization Twitter or Facebook accounts. This has some serious consequences. First, it usually limits the number of people empowered to engage in social media. Consequently, it decreases the quality of the social media engagement that does happen. How? Let’s face it, we don’t all have an unlimited supply of time, patience and creativity.  Having more people involved raises the quantity of engagement, time to response and content variety.

Spredfast makes this easier too, because the many authors you may have are not logging into your Twitter account directly. They’re logging into Spredfast, creating content and then publishing it to that Twitter account. One trusted person has already come in and connected Spredfast to the Twitter account.  Spredfast also has “draft” function which is particularly useful is you’re working side-by-side a social media intern.

Best practices in social media is listening, engaging, identifying influences, and tracking.    Spredfast can help your nonprofit be efficient with these tasks.  

Questions from Beth:

What tools and techniques are you using to make your social media content, engagement, and tracking more efficient?  Spredfast is one, but are there others?   What has your experience been?   At what point does it make sense to move to a paid tool for content strategy, engagement, and tracking?

Jul

2010

04

Category:

Listening, Mindfulness, Organizational Culture

Tags:

1 Comment

Social Media Listening: You Don’t Have To Be Joey Chestnut on the 4th of July!

Wendy Harman from the Red Cross wished me a Happy Fourth of July with a Joey Chestnut reference which reminded of a post I wrote almost a year ago.  Let me explain.

Joey Chestnut won the Nathan’s hot dog eating contest in 2008.   His total for the day was 64 hot dogs.    In 2009, he won again, beating his own record by consuming 68 hot dogs. The thought of consuming 68 hot dogs makes me feel a little uncomfortable.  No downright sick in the stomach.  It’s the same sort of discomfort that some people feel about approaching the task of listening for learning using the social web.

Doesn’t listening require plowing through mountains and mountains of unstructured information?   Won’t it make you dizzy and uncomfortable?  Don’t you have to be Joey Chestnut to be successful?

No!

Networked Nonprofits understand this.  They know how to use social media to engage people inside and outside the organization to improve programs, services, or reach communications goals.  Everyone in the organization understands that social media is more than an external communications tool, and they use it adroitly for their professional learning and even their personal lives.   Networked Nonprofits spell this out in their organization’s social media  strategy handbook and policy guidelines and encourage personal exploration and learning.

It’s one thing to have it written in a social media policy.  It’s quite another to put it into practice.   It does require that someone inside of the organization can help with one-on-one coaching, answer questions, provide support, and do this without loosing their enthusiasm.

It is harder to convince people who aren’t already social media users to use it in their personal lives.   One strategy is to use it as a professional learning tool.  This can be put practice by using listening (and engaging techniques) for program development.

Three Tips for Getting Started

1.  Think of Professional Learning As A Gift To Yourself

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Professional learning is and should be a part of staff’s job and honored by the culture. That you feel it is okay to spend some of your work day investing in your knowledge and you gather wisdom from your professional networks via social media channels.

Jeremiah Owyang wrote a great post two years ago called “Pay Yourself First.”   In a nutshell: “Every morning, for about 2 hours, I pay myself first by researching, reading, and writing blog posts…before I dive into email hell.” Many of us in nonprofits can’t afford to spend two hours in professional learning through listening, but maybe we could spare 30 minutes during the day to get started?

I put a sticky note on my computer that reminds to “pay myself first.”   I try (when not traveling) to do my professional learning at the same time each day.    I spend 15-30 minutes reading RSS feeds or Tweets and 15 minutes thinking about something I learned.  Sometimes that happens by writing a blog post which take me 30 minutes.

2. Make It Part of Your Routine

Photo by Salon De Maria

You don’t need to necessarily carve out additional time for professional learning because you’re probably doing it already through other channels.  The challenge is adding it your routine. It is difficult because you have to shift gears from your Outlook calendar, answering emails, meetings, or getting tasks done.   It’s a shift from a getting things done sort of productivity to social productivity. Or rather it is finding your social productivity sweet spot.

Ask yourself how time you can allocate to listening for professional learning.   Is it a half-hour a day, an hour a day, or is an hour or two a week? The point is to get started, block out that time, and start paying yourself.

Think about your current routine.   When does it make sense to integrate something new?    I do my social media listening for professional learning before email and after I’ve created my 3 things I must do today list.  I do it in the morning.  I know other people who do it right after lunch.

3.  Cut Up The Salami Into Smaller Pieces

Cut Up The Salami Into Smaller Pieces (Photo by TalkoftheTomatoes)

It can be difficult to get started.  Some people think they are so far behind and there is so much to do – so they just stay with their current routine and habit.   They also need to get past the concern about information overload and too much unstructured information.  Attending to your professional learning using social media and networks requires making sense out of the leaves rather than being presented a knowledge tree.  The initial dip into the leaves can be overwhelming and unpleasant at first, but you will get past it if you keep calm and carry on for a couple of days.

Pick one small step and get started.  Just do that one thing everyday until it becomes comfortable.

Here are some steps to get started with listening for professional learning via social media.  The bigger questions is – are you ready make the shift?

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