Last year, the New York Times published an article (login required) citing research finding that about 80 percent of people who make New Year’s resolutions break them by Valentine’s Day. A study from 2007 supports this, saying only twelve percent of people achieve their New Year’s goals.

Perhaps this means that before we list our goals for 2011, we should take a closer look at our own attitudes towards goal-setting. What misconceptions do we have, and what can we do to remedy them?

Myth #1: Tell everyone your goals so that you’re publicly accountable.

In theory, publicizing your goals with friends, or on your blog or Facebook profile, might force you to achieve them, so as not to be seen as someone who’s all talk and no action. But according to a 2009 study by goal-setting researcher Peter Gollwitzer (PDF), this isn’t always true. Most people state their behavioral goals in very general terms (“My goal is to eat healthier”) that gives the premature impression we’ve already done them.

Here’s what works instead: implementation intentions. Gollwitzer defines them (PDF) as a plan spelling out when, where, and how you intend to accomplish a goal. In fact, another study (PDF) shows that implementation intentions work so well that they can help you accomplish your goals despite the presence of distracting thoughts and emotions.

This doesn’t mean it’s easy after you establish a plan. You’ll need to check and update your plan often. It’s also important to start working on your goal as soon as possible. The more time your goal remains inactive after you’ve stated your intentions, the less likely you are to accomplish it.

Myth #2: Reward yourself for your progress.

Some people suggest that to keep yourself focused and motivated in your pursuit of a goal, you need to have rewards for accomplishments. For example, if you successfully stick to your schedule for a week, you’ll give yourself the license to go out with friends during the weekend. While there’s nothing wrong with rewards per se, you need to be careful about how you think of them.

Research shows that for large goals (e.g.. becoming healthier) that have many supporting subgoals (e.g.. sticking to a diet, exercising regularly), whenever you successfully achieve a subgoal, you should reward your personal commitment to the larger goal rather than to  your progress. Rewarding yourself for achieving one subgoal may lead you to ignore the other subgoals, because you’ll view them as substitutes. If you reward your commitment to the larger goal, the subgoals will seem interrelated, and you’ll be more driven to pursue each of them.

Myth #3: Focus on yearly goals.

By definition, New Year’s resolutions are goals that must be achieved within a year. While this tradition can work for some goals, it may not be effective to use such a long time-frame. First, even if we think we know ourselves well, we tend to be poor predictors of what we’ll need or feel in the future. Our perspectives, situations, and desires may differ greatly within a year. Second, most research (PDF) backs up the idea that setting short-term goals is more effective than looking at the big picture. This means that even if you have a list of yearly goals, it’s better to break them down into smaller monthly or weekly subgoals.

Given these goal-setting myths, we should be more attentive to how we set our goals, what works in practice, and what only seems effective in theory. By looking at our goal-setting behavior together with the goals themselves, we’ll be more likely to accomplish more this year.

Do you set goals during the New Year? Which tactics improve your success rate?

Photo by sxc.hu user lazydog

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Social Media in the Enterprise
• Are You Empowering Your Mobile Workforce?

Someone recently told my business partner that our social media marketing plans were very tactical. She took it as a potentially bad thing. I was hoping it was a good thing. We just weren’t sure either way.

In answer to my questions, McCormack shared some thoughtful insights, which I’ll paraphrase here:

• Strategy ultimately answers the “why” but overlays the “what” and “how.” Strategy is your purpose.
• Strategy doesn’t consider execution — which is a shortcoming.
• Strategy should not happen in a vacuum — it should lead to and be connected to tactics and execution.
• A social media marketing plan, then, should be tactical to achieve strategic goals.

At the Social Media Breakfast at SXSW, Tac Anderson presented briefly about social media strategy. He explained that in his MBA program, strategy was explained to him as:

“…creating operational alignment between all functions and activities of a business.”

Anderson went on to outline three ways that companies are currently handling their “social media strategy:”

1. Bolt-on strategy. Not a good strategy. Company gets blog. Company doesn’t do anything else differently, but has a blog. Company also gets Twitter account. Company is still business as usual internally.
2. Forced compliance. Also not a good strategy. Company forces social media to apply to existing processes. Adding social media to existing policies “sucks the life out of social media.”
3. Make your company optimized for social media. Small nimble companies can do this. What would your company look like if your company changed to maximize social media?

Part of Anderson’s presentation and this blog post was inspired by Shannon Paul’s article, “The Missing Ingredient in Most Social Media Strategies.” In her post, Paul summed up some main issues with the problem with social media strategy:

• Strategy is not a plan
• Strategy is not a timeline
• Strategy is not a goal
• Strategy is not what tactics you will use to achieve your goal

Conclusion

Pulling together the insights of the various folks outlines above and some of my own research, here are my guidelines for creating an effective social media strategy:

1. To be strategic, you must first understand what strategy means.
2. Know the difference between goals and objectives.
3. Do not let tactics lead your strategy.
4. Craft a social media marketing plan that starts with strategic goals, defines objectives, and elaborates on tactics.
5. Don’t forget to measure everything you can and analyze what you measure.

So is the fact that my company’s social media marketing plans are very tactical a problem, if we always start with strategy, articulate goals and objectives and then detail tactics per each objective? I’m starting to figure out that this isn’t a bad thing, per se — we are just over-delivering.

Share your struggles with social media strategy in the comments.

It’s easy to lose track of time and get confused about when you signed that new client and how many jobs you’ve had this month or this year.

Tracking key metrics for your business can help you see exactly how well your business is doing. It can help you make improvements, forecast income and set goals for your future.

But what should you track? The answer really depends on your business. What’s important to one won’t be important for another. In most cases, though, it’s best to keep it simple and not overthink it.

Track Your Income

The most important thing you must know at all times is if you’re making money. Time can pass more quickly or slowly than you believe, making you think you’ve made more or less than you actually have, so it’s important to have regular check-ins to see where you are financially. A good rule of thumb is to check in weekly to see how much you’ve made and where you are in relation to your monthly goal.

Track Your Pending Income

It may seem like you’re coming up a bit short one week, but money in the pipeline may put you back on track. Always keep an eye on the horizon so that you have a better idea of what’s to come for your business.

Track Your Clients, Customers, Jobs or Projects

You need to be able to average your income by client or project so that you can make projections and adjustments for your business and know roughly how many clients or projects you need to meet your income goals. This is also a helpful performance metric. You might see that it took you twelve projects to make the same amount of money as eight projects this time last year.

Track the Sources of Your Business

Are clients finding you through your web site, or are they being referred to you by past clients? Knowing the source of your customers and clients can help you fine-tune your marketing and lead generation plans to make the most of your resources.

Of course, there are a variety of metrics that can be tracked aside from those mentioned here, including your website traffic and subscriber counts, so you’ll need to figure out what’s most important to your business.

Keep it simple, or you’ll be less likely to keep up the tracking. Pay attention to the numbers driving your business, and then figure out how to improve or maintain them.

How do you make metric-tracking easy and painless? What have you found to be the most important things to track for your business?

Flickr image by net_efekt

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Sometimes, however, we don’t meet all of the goals we set. I’m guilty of this. Every month there’s at least one goal I don’t accomplish. In fact, if I miss just one goal, I count myself lucky. These mistakes were the hard way for me to learn about goal-setting. But is there any other way to learn?

I believe there is. You can learn from how I’ve handled my own mistakes. Perhaps you can learn something that will keep you working on those New Year’s resolutions and goals you’ve set, and deal with the ones you were unable to meet.

Focus on your success. It’s easy to sink into disappointment, or even depression, if you don’t accomplish your goals. The more important your goal was, the more disappointed you’ll feel.  But sometimes, if you look at the list of things you’ve accomplished, you’ll discover that you’ve achieved some things that weren’t in your list of daily, weekly, or monthly goals.

For example, you might not have met the deadline of the application for the freelance gig of your dreams, but you did finish an outline for a book idea you suddenly had. You might have been slow in one of your big projects, but you were able to finish ten minor projects earlier than expected. Don’t let your mistakes occupy your mind so much that you prevent yourself from finding long-term solutions for them.

Find out what went wrong. The inability to accomplish a goal means that something went wrong. The mistake might be found in the process you set, the time available to you, or the other people you’re working with.  Here are some of the common mistakes I’ve made when setting goals:

• Vague phrasing. “Become a better writer” or “Learn more about social media” is not a goal.  Your goals must be concrete and specific enough that it’ll be easy for you to identify whether you’ve accomplished it or not.  Instead, set something like “Write at least three blog posts that don’t get modified by the editor” or “Finish reading the free social media ebook I downloaded”.
• Lack of time. It’s also possible that you underestimated the time it would take to accomplish your goal.  I’ve learned to double or triple my expected time of completion for some projects, because I know that I’ll be underestimating it if I don’t.
• Lack of communication. If you’re working with a team on a specific goal, examine why you weren’t able to deliver the results you wanted. Was the schedule of deliverables clear from the beginning? Is there a proper venue for group discussions?
• Too ambitious. The problem with ambitious goals is that they tend to be large in scope.  Break down the project into smaller milestones and next actions. Schedule these appropriately. You might take 30 minutes or more to do this for large projects, but you’ll be saving time in the long run.
• Too simple. The opposite of ambitious goals are the ones that seem too simple – they’ll take only two to five minutes of your time. Sounds easy, right? But sometimes, the fact that they’re too simple makes them easy to avoid. “Oh that’s easy, I can do that later.” Until later becomes tomorrow, then next week, then next month. David Allen has a solution for this known as “the two-minute rule”. If there’s an item on your to-do list that takes less than two minutes to do, then just do it the second you think of it.

Know why you want to set this goal in the first place. Did you just set this goal because it’s on a list you made six months ago and it’s embarrassing to erase it? Or did you set it because you think it’s a goal you should have, but not necessarily a goal you want? By knowing why you set certain goals, especially personal ones, you can find the initial motivation you had and use it as your continuing inspiration.

Let’s face it – even if I wrote all of this down and you spent fifteen precious minutes reading it, goal setting will still be a trial-and-error experience for everyone.  But with a little warning and by learning through another person’s mistakes, we’ll be more aware of what we’re doing the next time we sit down and write our goals.

Do you always accomplish the goals on your list?  If not, how do you deal with missed goals?  If you always manage to accomplish your goals, what contributes to your success?

Image by ilker from sxc.hu

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks