What Can You Do On Quora?

In simple terms, you can ask a question on Quora and include some details for your question; comment on a question; answer a question; add a followup question, or flag a question. You can also publish a post to Quora, but for now, let’s just focus on the Q&A portion of the site.

Using Quora can be very confusing at first. Finding a topic, for example, isn’t immediately obvious or intuitive. Your only option seems to be “Add Question” in the field that appears at the top of the page. If you start entering a question, the site begins looking for questions with similar words, presenting them in a drop-down menu.

To find a topic, you need to enter a keyword, rather than a question. This will cause keyword matches to appear in the drop-down menu. You can then select the closest match, without having to click on the “Add Question” button. You can find a person or reference in the same manner.

To “filter” information from Quora, you can follow a topic or question, then receive notifications on your Quora home page about these activities. You can also specify 40 different activities that will trigger emails to you. While the granularity of settings is commendable, it can be intimidating to a new user.

How to Get Your Quora Questions Noticed

I’ve had extremely low response to my questions so far. The most-answered question I’ve posted had to do with relating Twitter to current events; the question was more asking for opinion than factual information.

Here are a few things you can do to improve exposure for your question:

1. Ask compelling questions where others can showcase their knowledge and experience.
2. Add topics to your question to tie it in to relevant areas on the site. Once your question has been posted, click the link above it.
3. Share your question with your network, through the Twitter and Facebook buttons on the right side of your question’s page; via Quora’s inbox to share with someone specific; through your other social networks as updates; and even via email.
4. Answer other people’s questions thoughtfully to build your reputation and profile on the site.

Over time, it seems like your valuable contributions on Quora will bolster the chances of your own questions being seen and answered.

Will Quora Be Useful for Work?

At the moment, many people are probably participating in Quora because it’s been getting a lot of notice. Until recently, Quora relied on a small group to ask and answer questions. At that stage, there wasn’t as much noise, so it was easier to see new questions. There was probably even a bit of “peer pressure” or reputation-building. But since the new year, all heck has broken loose.

In actual use, getting your answer addressed — and in a quality, thoughtful manner — seems to require:

• the “right” people noticing it or being notified of it,
• being posted at the “right” time, and
• providing the “right” incentive for others with appropriate training or skills to respond quickly and thoughtfully.

Having a strong social network may help expand the reach of your question, but only if your network is paying attention, and all the other variables are in alignment.

In a recent post, Mathew Ingram asked if Quora can survive its growing popularity. Quora has features and algorithms that could help create the environment needed to generate quality responses. It would be a shame if Quora turned out to be based more on popularity than relevance or importance.

Like anything that relies on the serendipity of the right people, the right time, and the right question, Quora may not necessarily be “useful.”  Or it may be folly to rely too much on Quora, or such sites as Yahoo Answers, Mahalo Answers, ChaCha, LinkedIn Answers, and Aardvark, for any serious work. I’m skeptical that sites powered by the public can provide fast and reliable information, particularly for work-related needs.

What do you think of Quora? Has it helped you accomplish any actual work?

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

• Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?
• Social Media in the Enterprise
• Enabling the Web Work Revolution

The Search

My search was for my work: I’m doing some content strategy work for a client at the moment and I’d been wondering about the latest developments in the field.

First up, I entered “content strategy” into Google, without the quotes, and got over 45 million results. The top results were an A List Apart article from 2008, then Wikipedia, then a bunch of articles on the sites of people who sell content strategy services. Interesting results that Google turned up that I didn’t find elsewhere was a Google Knol on content strategy, as well as a link to a content strategy interest group from the Society for Technical Communication. This last result, in particular, was interesting from an academic and current discipline-based perspective.

Meanwhile, a search on Twitter turned up an similarly endless list of results. There was a lot of replication and retweeting, sure, but the first page of results presented an article published that day about an approach to setting content strategy. The retweeting gave the effect of reputation — multiple retweets of the same resource created the impression that the article was a good one, and worth looking at.

That first page of results also produced a more specific A List Apart article from March of this year on the usability and strategic purpose of FAQs. The results also informed me of a content strategy meetup that I didn’t know existed and provided anecdotal information on the importance of content strategy in product and service adoption. Of course, as I scrolled through the results, they kept being updated with further relevant tweets, in real time.

As you’d expect, Delicious provided a range of handy article-based results. Where both Google and Twitter had thrown up some articles designed merely to promote agencies and businesses in the content strategy arena, Delicious seemed to have more educationally focused results. Again, the number of bookmarks for each article implied a sort of “credibility meter” rating that I found helpful.

Some of the articles were classics going way back into the annals of content strategy history (2007!). Others were current articles published in the last couple of weeks, blogs focused on content strategy, and highly regarded “news” web sites devoted entirely to the topic of content.

My Facebook search predictably turned up more results for businesses and services than it did any other type of content. Although I’d expected to be unimpressed, some of these results lead to professional blogs, articles, and other content that was intriguing and informative.

The good news for those selling their wares through social networking is that Facebook associates a name or personality with the content with far more power than any of the other networks I’d tried until this point: it seemed as if the individuals I’d selected from the search results “owned” the topic of content strategy somehow.

Harnessing Social Media Search

My search as pretty broad, but when we don’t know much about the topic we’re searching on, broad searches are the kinds of searches we tend to use.

My little social media search experiment suggested to me that I’ve been wasting my time being frustrated by the major search engines. I’m always a little suspicious of the results they show, and the searches I performed on various social networks here showed me why: in the often impersonal digital realm, I appreciate personal recommendations. This is one of the reasons that more people are moving on social networks for their search needs; it’s a topic that Om discusses in more depth in “Why Google Should Fear the Social Web” (GigaOM Pro link, sub. req.)

The other benefit of social media is, of course, that I could ask my followers and contacts directly for their recommendations of content related to the topic I was interested in, and, if they had a similar interest, they might oblige me with good resources. That’s something that definitely can’t be said for a search engine.

I also enjoy the social network benefits of real-time results, and the ability to tap into content that isn’t necessarily so heavily optimized for search engines that it sits on the first page of results indefinitely. If someone has come up with an exciting new take on my topic in the last, say, week or so, I’d like to access that information quickly and effectively. I think this might be where social network search really wins out.

Accounting for Search Bias

Each of the services I searched on had some kind of bias — whether it was a business-related bias (like Google presenting Google Knol in its results) or a user-based bias (such as Facebook presenting people with content strategy businesses in its results). Ultimately, it’s important for us as searchers to understand the limitations of each service, and use the tool that best suits our searching needs at any time. Overall, though, I found some great material using social network search, and I’ll happily be using it from now on.

Do you use social networks for research? How?

Photo by stock.xchng user GlennPeb.

stock.xchng by bigevil600

While I don’t have a crystal ball, here are some developments that I think are worthy of our attention and will affect how we do things in the social mediasphere over the next few years. Many of the things on this list will not be news to the very well-informed social media consultant types who live and breathe this stuff. But for the rest of us, there are seeds of opportunity here that should not be missed.

1. MySpace: CEO Leaves; MySpace will die. Last year, I was telling my clients “We are cautiously optimistic that MySpace (GigaOM Pro company profile) will make a comeback because their new CEO is a Facebook co-founder.” Scratch that. I think MySpace is about to go the way of Friendster, although it is still a player in the entertainment space. Because Facebook doesn’t allow flexbility and customization, I’m going to miss MySpace. But now I wonder: Who is going to be the next MySpace? Virb? Bebo? (And don’t underestimate LinkedIn.)
2. Virtual Goods: Insane, but insanely popular. The creation and selling of virtual goods and gifts makes absolutely no sense to people who just use the Internet as a basic communications tool. Try telling someone who isn’t really into Facebook that they could buy a virtual bouquet of flowers for 99 cents and send them to a friend — they’d look at you like you were mad. But with virtual goods as an industry already raking in the billions of dollars worldwide and over a billion in the U.S. alone (source: “Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market, 2009 – 2010″), how can anyone ignore them? I’m not saying everyone needs to make and use virtual goods, but there is opportunity here for both marketing and revenue. Have you even thought about how you might be able to leverage virtual goods? Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): How the Next Zynga Could Reinvent Social Gaming
3. Gaming: Not just for kids anymore. I think the very fact that the largest player base of passive online games is women flies in the face of the typical view that games are for kids. According to Nielsen Entertainment in August 2009, of the 117 million active gamers in the U.S., 56 percent play games online and 64 percent of those online gamers are female. And the revenues generated from online games is enormous and growing. Do not underestimate the power of games and gaming — and not just the marketing and revenue opportunities, but also the learning opportunities as well in the form of fun quizzes and polls. Have you used gaming yet in a social media marketing campaign?
4. Twitter: Still transforming communications. Back in 2008, I wrote about Twitter’s impact on the fundamental ways we communicate and the way new tools and applications are being developed, but it continues to grow and evolve. How has Twitter helped you lately?
5. Niche networks: A marketer’s secret weapon. Whether you choose Ning.com or KickApps or any of the other “white label” customizable social network-building platforms, the concept of creating a “gated”online community that is narrow in focus is smart and potentially powerful. The concept isn’t really that far removed from hosting an online messaging board in the early days of the web. If you held the keys to the gate of a more private, closed or niche community, you had everything from an instant focus group to a band of passionate buzz agents on your hands — if you knew how to properly leverage the community participation. Fast forward to today and the tools ca now give your members integrated communications, networking, publishing and social tools — brilliant. What niche networks are you participating in or do you run?
6. Augmented reality. Sounds sci-fi, but it’s really here. I’m having a hard time describing Augmented Reality to people who haven’t seen it (if you haven’t seen it in action, these infographics from GigaOM might help). The reaction isn’t just “what in the world?” but “who cares about that stuff?” AR uses simply boggle the mind, and I plan to explore more of that in this column soon. I do wish we had a better term for it, though (like “data overlay” or “overscreen view”) so it didn’t have such a sci-fi feel to it. What potential uses for AR are getting you fired up? Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Augmented Reality: Lots of Promise, Lots of Hurdles.
7. Google Buzz: Pay attention, even if you don’t care. I am one of the gazillion people who currently do not care about Google Buzz, apart from the fact that just because Google did this it means something in terms of the tools we’ll be using in the coming years. Right now, I feel like Google has the means to just throw tech spaghetti on the virtual walls of our work and lives to see what sticks. Anything it does has major significance and impact, even if it fails. So pay attention as you scratch your head. How is Google Buzz changing the way you communicate, or is it? Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Google Buzz’s True Home Is in the Enterprise
8. Mobile: Be there. I don’t know about you, but I consider my iPhone to be a mini computer and Wi-Fi device first and phone a distant second. I’m never normally an early early adopter because I’m too busy to keep up most of the time, but I will be one of the first to buy the iPad, because it looks to me like a bigger iPhone, and I rely on my iPhone in ways I have never relied on my computer or my regular cell phone. My entire concept of connectivity and my access to everything has changed so dramatically since I got a smartphone that I know I can never go back to the old ways. What forays into mobile marketing are on your radar for 2010? Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Web Tablet Survey: Apple’s iPad Hits Right Notes

I could also add the concept of location to this list, but I’ll leave that for another column.

What developments in social media are knocking your socks off?

Photo by stock.xchng user bigevil600

My feelings about location-based social networks like Foursquare, Gowalla, BrightKite and the like have been mixed. I’ve avoided them to date because of that knee-jerk “it’s too creepy” reaction that one gets when thinking of letting others — especially strangers — know one’s exact location. Maybe it’s because, frankly, many women I know (myself included) have been stalked.

But lately, because of Fourquare, I’ve been looking at location-based social networks in a different way. I recently wrote about Foursquare on my personal blog and concluded that the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks.

Here’ s my take on the benefits of location-based social networks like Foursquare from a work standpoint:

1. Connecting. With business travel, particularly to conferences, I find that I often don’t even know some of my friends and colleagues are in the vicinity. Foursquare notices that appear from friends on the network allow serendipitous discovery and can lead to impromptu meet-ups that can prove fruitful for work.
2. Socializing. A few years ago, Twitter took SXSW by storm, with attendees utilizing the microblogging system to track people down. I’m wondering if Foursquare will be this year’s Twitter at SXSW, or maybe it is already over in those more techie circles and everyone has moved on to the next app. Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing when someone I know is at a nearby cafe or restaurant. I’m assuming it would then be socially acceptable to just show up and say “hi,” since they’ve publicly announced their location.
3. Discovering. Gone are the days of being on a business trip and having to rely on the concierge for restaurant suggestions or the wait staff for meal recommendations. I’m already enjoying the Foursquare tips that show up for establishments nearby. I’ve also used Around Me on recent trips, but Foursquare’s recommendations of friends popping up when I’m in a new area is far more compelling than simple listings.
4. Promoting. What is really interesting about an application like Foursquare is how local businesses can leverage it to attract more customers. The concept that Foursquare members can get discounts and perks from businesses by becoming “mayor” or frequenting a place often is genius.

In an age of marketing when consumers are digesting information in new ways, taking advantage of hybrid applications that combine online and offline elements is smart business. For example, Yelp’s Monocle mode augmented reality feature is dramatically changing the ways we think of “online,” “offline” and “location.”

While privacy and safety issues still exist with any GPS-enabled application that lets you broadcast your stats to your friends or the world, I think we are going to location-based apps continue to become more mainstream. And I, for one, am eager to see where else this can take us, and how it will affect the way we network and work.

How do you feel about location-based social networks, and how do you leverage them for your work?

Related GigaOM Pro Research: “Call it Real-Time, Squared, or NewNet, The Web Is Changing“

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• Call it Real-Time, Squared, or NewNet, The Web Is Changing
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Peeking into another person’s social media approach can give you ideas on how to adjust yours to get the biggest bang. So in this post, I’m going to share my social media process.
While social media is my primary marketing tool, plenty of others spend more hours social networking than I do and for different reasons. For me, social media keeps my name out there, so people remember I’m here and available for hire. Based on these two requirements, I do social networking activities at least a couple of hours a day five times a week, which comprises a mix of the following:

• Doing social networking at the same time every day. When I make something a habit, it becomes easier to stick with it and do it on a regular basis. I always start my mornings with social media and reviewing emails. I do another check around lunch and sometimes in the evenings. This schedule ensures I cover a variety of time zones. If all your clients are local or within the same country, you may only need to sign on once or twice a day.
• Posting tweets spread throughout the day with a scheduling application. There’s some controversy surrounding automated tweets. But there’s a difference between just saying something without mentioning anyone and replying. My scheduled tweets come from responding to other people’s tweets. It doesn’t have to be an instant reply because most of us watch for mentions of our names. Rather than having a whole bunch of live tweets at 7:00 am, noon and evening, I schedule them.
• Joining the right Twitter chats. I also join several Twitter chats every week, which run for an hour on average. Chats give me an opportunity to get to know people better and have some intelligent discussion. I select the chats to attend based on the topic and theme. Some chats have a different theme (announced in advance) every time. If a chat interferes with something else, I skip it. You can also multitask while chatting.
• Reviewing Facebook updates once a day. Unless you change the settings, most of us receive updates when we post new Facebook statuses and people reply. So responding immediately isn’t important unless it’s related to an event. Once or twice a day, I review the feed on my home page and reply as needed. Since Facebook is less noisy than Twitter, it’s easy to see a few hours’ worth of updates in one sitting. If I write a tweet that would also suit my Facebook audience, I send it to Facebook by adding the “#fb” hashtag using the Selective Tweets application. I don’t send every Twitter update to Facebook because it’s a different kind of audience and it annoys some people. I obviously like and use Twitter, but I don’t like reading constant tweets in Facebook.
• Updating my LinkedIn status a few times a week. Rather than checking LinkedIn daily, I just send tweets that contain the hashtag “#in” to update my LinkedIn status. You can turn on this feature in LinkedIn. I also visit LinkedIn about once a week to review updates and questions and answers.
• Writing at least two blog entries per week. This keeps my site fresh while sharing free information, expertise and personality. It’s my home on the Internet.
• Reading other people’s blogs. I browse blogs through links in Twitter or by checking people’s Twitter bios. This makes it easy to read a diversity of blogs. With many knowledgeable people out there, I like to mix it up and meet more people. I do this a few times a week. If my schedule is tight, I cut the blog hopping and commenting.

Before figuring out your process for social media, you might want to figure out how much time you should spend on social networking. Also, be aware of your clients’ preferences to make sure you go to the places where you’re likely to find them.

Notice I mentioned Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs while omitting video networks like YouTube. But this mix of tools might not always be the same. Social media isn’t going away soon, but the players might change. Besides, you might work in an industry or profession that has a social network worth joining, or video networking is a big thing with you.

How do you make the most of social networking?

Photo credit: Mario Alberto Magallanes Trejo

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

• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast
• Big Data, ARM and Legal Troubles Transformed Infrastructure in Q4

The Social Networking Time Factors

So what factors affect your decision in figuring out how much time to devote to social media? Ask yourself these questions.

1. Do you use social media for personal uses, business uses or both?
2. Do you work for yourself or someone else?
3. What is social networking’s role in your marketing activities?
4. What are your current paid activities?
5. Are you earning enough money?
6. Do you have enough work?
7. Where do you find your potential clients?
8. What is your business and personal schedule like?
9. Can you make social media pay?
10. How much free information can you give way?

I spend about two hours a weekday on average doing social networking, and it’s my number one marketing activity.

How to Determine the “Right” Amount of Time for You

You’ll need to record the amount of time you spend on a few things. Plenty of time tracking applications exist for phones, online and desktop use. If you don’t use one yet, do a little research to find one that fits your needs, or just rely on pen and paper.

Track:

1. Time spent on paid work.
2. Time spent on unpaid work-related activities (like social media), broken out by activity.
3. Personal time.

Do this for a week or two. Tracking your time spent on projects is important, but the point of this activity is to see where your time goes for paid, unpaid and personal activities. Don’t break out your time on spent on paid work for the purposes of this exercise. Your result could look like this:

The breakout of your unpaid work-related time could look like this:

What you do with the data depends on the answers to the time factor questions above. For example, if you answered “No” to “Are you earning enough money?” and “Do you have enough paid work?”, you either need to cut down on personal and unpaid time, or spend more time marketing to bring in more work.

Have you seen a pattern in where you find your clients? For me, most come from word-of-mouth recommendations. Social networking supports that by keeping my name out there, so if you find most of your clients this way and need more work you might consider increasing your social media time.

Obviously, the longer you track your time, the better understanding you have of your typical schedule. The more you know, the more you can tweak your schedule to devote your time to go where you need it most. You might consider doing a review of your time spent on a quarterly basis to verify that you have a good balance of all your activities and they’re related to your goals. Be flexible and let your schedule be your guide.

How do you figure out how much time to spend on social networking?

Photo credit: Patrick Nijhuis

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• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast
• Big Data, ARM and Legal Troubles Transformed Infrastructure in Q4

Last week, I discussed how you can be both personal and professional in social media:

You can actually be professional and personal at the same time in social media without too much effort. When we talk about “being personal” on social media web sites, I think that many people confuse “personal” with “private.” The reality is that you get to decide what to share and what not to share, so you can still keep most areas of your private life private.

Now, let’s talk about the private information. Sites like Facebook can change their policies at any time to make information that was once private become public. Ed Gubbins on GigaOM Pro (subscription required) points out that “to satisfy their privacy concerns, users will have to take a more sophisticated and hands-on approach to managing their accounts, and that means Facebooking is going to get more complicated.”

For those of us who work mainly online, this means that we need to be especially careful about what we share and how we share it. In general, I don’t share anything that would be devastating if a client, prospective employer or family member read it. In fact, my mom, my sister, other family members and clients all follow my Twitter feed and/or Facebook status, so they see much of what I say online. I’m not going to say anything that would damage those relationships even in areas that seem to be more “private.”

I consider everything that I share online, even in “private” areas,  to be public information. If I would be embarrassed to have a family member or client see it, I don’t post it. Keep those drunken ramblings, too much information (TMI) moments, and other sensitive data off of the social media sites if you need to also maintain your professionalism online.

How do you balance what information you keep private vs. what you post online?

Photo by Flickr user Ted Percival used under Creative Commons.

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There are approximately 90 Ning Apps already available in the directory. Everything will be managed by the Tab Manager, which will allow you to control the navigational structure of your Ning network as well as the layout of your shiny new Ning Apps.

These apps are also added to the My Apps area in the Profile View for your members. They can then organize the apps any way they want.

Here’s a peak at some of the Ning Apps (Napps?) available today:

It’s taken a while to get here but this is a smart move on Ning’s part. Facebook and Apple have clearly shown the value and popularity of proving easy access to ready-to-go apps for their platforms, so this news should inject a great deal of excitement throughout the Ning ecosystem.

Let us know what you think of Ning Apps in the comments.

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Whenever I use social media tools, I find myself communicating in two languages: English and Tagalog. I use the former to talk to international contacts, and the latter for local contacts. It’s not a strict rule, since I prefer to use English, but there are some cases where sending updates in Tagalog is preferable or unavoidable.

For bilingual web workers, social networking can be a juggling act. How can we interact in one language without alienating part of our audience?

Consider your readers. While most of my English-speaking contacts ignore my Tagalog updates, not all of them easily let it go. From time to time, I receive messages saying “Translation please!” when I write something in Tagalog. It doesn’t matter if I’m just referring to my breakfast or something my cat did — people who aren’t familiar with the language might be curious about your message.

I don’t seem to have that problem when writing in English, since most Filipinos are fluent in the language. But there are times when writing in English feels unnatural, so I go with my gut and write something the way I would say it.

The primary thing we should think about, then, is our audience. Who are your contacts and how intent are they on reading what you write? Who do you want to engage in conversation?

Keep in mind, though, that you can’t please everybody. Just do what feels right for you and your most valued contacts.

Use different accounts for personal and professional interaction. Since most of my Filipino contacts are friends and relatives, I usually make separate accounts — or use different social media tools entirely — to communicate with them. Having different accounts makes it easier to have complete separation of your work and your social contacts. The disadvantage of doing this is that you have more social media channels that you need to keep up with, but with a good aggregator you can keep everything in one interface.

Take advantage of groups and filtering. An alternative to the above technique is to group your contacts and filter your outgoing updates based on these groups. Still, not all social networks have robust filtering features for your outgoing messages. Facebook, for example, only allows you to filter based on content type. You can customize which groups can see your status updates in general, but you can’t do this for each specific status update. Twitter has even more basic filtering: you can only choose between public or private updates.

I found an interesting workaround to bilingual Twittering from MMMotion. Basically, the trick is to create a separate account for updates in your local language and take advantage of the reply feature. Read the blog post for more details.

I realized that it’s also useful to start each Tagalog update with a phrase like “For my Filipino clients” or “Question for Filipino Web Workers.” A technique like this lets everyone know who the update is for.

Translate your input. You can also translate non-English updates so that your international contacts feel included in some way. You can start with basic greetings like “Good morning!” and “Have a nice day!” Alternatively, you can type local aphorisms and their translations to give your international contacts a peek at your culture. It might not be practical to translate long posts or updates, but the effort to reach out in this way will always be appreciated.

While bilingual social networking has some challenges, it’s still possible to generate engaging discussions without making your profile page look like the Rosetta Stone.

Are you a bilingual web worker? How does this affect the way you use social networking tools?

Image by nookiez from sxc.hu

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Step 1: Alert the People You Trust

If you’re worried about the feasibility of your goals, bouncing them off of your closest friends and relatives is a sure way of getting some invaluable early feedback. You probably have some good friends who aren’t afraid to make you look foolish (and, in fact, might relish the opportunity), so you don’t have to worry that they’ll pull punches to spare your feelings. Conversely, if you have a good idea, they won’t summarily cut you down, like some of your more trollish online contacts might.

Your inner circle of real-life peers and confidants will also have a better idea of what you’re realistically capable of. In fact, they might be more aware of your own limitations than you yourself are. Most Internet connections, as familiar with your work as they might be, will likely judge based on the apparent difficulty of the goal in a general sense, without specific reflection on your level of talent, dedication or ability.

Step 2: Keep Your Twitter/Facebook Friends in the Loop

Once your plan has passed muster with those you trust, you can broaden the audience using Twitter and Facebook status updates. Don’t make a huge deal out of it, but do post things like “Starting work on my ABC certification today, wish me luck!” At the very least you should secure some words of encouragement.

Most likely, depending on the size and nature of your networks, there will be others among your friends and contacts who’ve tried to achieve the same or similar goals. They’ll be able to offer advice, helpful links, and possibly even prep materials or information sources, depending on what it is you want to accomplish.

Mining your social networks for support is great, but be prepared for challenges, too. Anything from doubt concerning the merits of your chosen goals, to flamebait and personal attacks is possible, but the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages, particularly if you’re thick-skinned. Hopefully, you’ve already applied the golden rule of the Internet: Never take anything personally, unless it makes you look good.

Step 3: Broadcast Beyond Your Network

While making the people you know and interact with on a regular basis aware of what you intend to do is the best way to get yourself to stick to your guns, it might not be the most effective method of garnering feedback.

Reaching out to strangers might give you a fresh perspective on what you’re doing, and how to go about doing it. It may also help when your goals are off the beaten track, and therefore less likely to be shared by other individuals in your social circles. To some degree, Twitter will broadcast your plans out to the ether if people are searching for keywords that occur in your tweets, but other alternatives are much more targeted.

MySomeday is a new web app in public beta that is designed specifically to help you share your goals with others in a community setting that will help you garner constructive criticism and words of encouragement. The concept is simple: You post a plan, and other members of the community comment on what you want to do and how you want to do it. You set up steps towards achieving your goal, and then you rate each step in terms of importance and check them off as they’re accomplished. Checking off tasks updates your progress bar, which displays the completion percentage of your overall goal.

Step 4: Stick to It

Just talking about your goals is a sure way to not accomplish what you want to do. Action is the only real solution, but sometimes the key to spurring yourself to act rests outside of yourself. Regardless of whether you draw your inspiration from yourself or others, though, the only way to achieve your goals is to persevere in your pursuit of them. Especially for web workers, using the Internet to garner encouragement might just be the extra push you need to keep your nose to the grindstone.

Does sharing your goals with your network spur you into action?

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