Friday, February 05, 2010

The Key to Online Success: Tuesday is Pasta Night

There's plenty of advice for cooks who want to keep their meals interesting and manage to get all the cooking for the week done without going crazy. One common piece of advice is to schedule the week.

A big meal on Sunday will provide leftovers for nibbling. Chicken on Monday; Pasta on Tuesday (can be prepared on Sunday); crock pot on Wednesday AM gives you a meal for the PM; Hamburger or Steak on Thursday, depending on your budget; meal out Friday; and Saturday is bottom of the refrigerator soup.

The point is: organize your life. In this case, organize your meals.

Your online presence is the same way.

How do you manage to blog once a week, tweet once a day, and show up on video once a month? Schedule it. Create an excel worksheet and list all the things you want to do. A column headings might look like this:

Media:Blog PostClient NewsletterTwitterFacebookLinkedIn
Posts / Month4 x1 x20 x10 x10 x

Some people will dedicate an hour a day, but get carried away. Many people don't get into social media because they know their personality type and are afraid they'll hang out there all day. The way to handle this is to set a time - and a timer.

Social media are not going away. This is not a fad that will fade. It IS a phase that will evolve. Facebook just turned six years old. Of course it took a long time to "take off," but is now the hottest site on the Internet. Unbelievable. The future is going to be more like Facebook than not, so you better figure out what you're going to do about it.

As I troll Facebook I always keep an eye out for people who have friends in common and invite them to join me. From time to time I get a response along the lines of "I only use FB for personal communications." That's cool. But you should also have a separate account for business. There was a time when people didn't know why they needed a fax machine. Now some people make fun of companies that insist on communicating by fax. My sales guy just came a across a company that didn't have an email address. I quickly surmise that that company is not "technology dependent" and we took them off the list.

When I come across someone who's not on Facebook, I invite them. I want to get to know them in the semi-casual but very business-oriented discussion.

And when I get an email that asks me how I do it all, the answer is . . . I schedule my day. I make time for social media and it happens.


:-)



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