What’s that? Is that really the point of social networking?

Not for everyone. A study from earlier this year highlighted the importance of contact hubs — well-connected, influential individuals — over contact volume on social networking sites. And even though the pundits might advocate “authenticity” and “holistic personal branding”, many of us still simply want to use particular social network tools for specific purposes or agendas. Most of the web workers I know are selective about the people they connect with via social networks, and take different approaches to accepting contacts on different networks.

Let’s look a little more closely at the factors that can influence whether you accept a connection on any given social network.

Security

Each social network reveals something different about us as users. It’s not just a question of the information we post; it’s also a question of the network’s expectation of exposure, as evinced by their profile forms and service culture. Compare the type — and level — of detail invited by Facebook with the limited profile possibilities available at Twitter, and you’ll see what I mean.

Default security restrictions can have a big influence on who we’re willing to accept as a contact.

Self-Expression

The opportunities for self-expression, and the ways in which you want to express yourself on different social networks will likely influence the people you accept as contacts on each. I don’t accept business contacts on certain networks that I treat as strictly personal social networking opportunities.

Audience Expectation

The flip side of self-expression is your audience’s expectation of the information you’ll publish on a given network — or through a given account. A number of people I follow on Twitter have secondary, topic-specific Twitter accounts that attract a different following than their primary accounts. You may prefer to accept followers who have certain expectations of you on particular networks.

Your Social Strategy

Your social strategy — whether it’s formalized in a written document or based purely on gut instinct — will also affect who you accept as a follower or friend, and who you won’t. You probably wouldn’t accept as a contact a person you didn’t like, but you may well accept  a person you don’t know — depending on the network.

It’s true: for many of us, social networks are tools, and different rules apply than in the real world. So what’s your contact management strategy?

Defining Your Contact Management Strategy

What’s your social network contact management strategy?

This week I found myself pondering this question as a bunch of updates appeared in my feed from one social network for which I had no strong policy: LinkedIn.

Don’t get me wrong: the updates were inoffensive enough. But the thing was, I just didn’t care for them. I didn’t care about this person, primarily because I didn’t know them. It seemed that my contact strategy for this social network needed refining.

I spoke to a couple of friends about their experiences — and approaches to contact management — on LinkedIn. They both cited as their deciding factor  in accepting a contact whether or not they knew that person. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t accept their contact.

This raises important questions about the potential for social networks to expose us to new people and information. But it also reflects the security settings, and the nature of LinkedIn. It’s a professional network, so it’s conceivable that you’d want to accept contacts from people you hadn’t met, and I’d had good experiences doing just that. But , LinkedIn also contains a fair amount of my personal information.

For the moment, I was just uninterested in personal updates, but this raised the larger question: Should I be accepting as contacts people I didn’t know? I started taking a closer look at the information I’d published to the site. I also tried to identify specifically what I wanted to get out of this social network.

Balancing these two considerations — exposure and objectives — is important if we’re to arrive at an acceptable, satisfying contact management strategy.

In fact, those two points reflect the tug-of-war that each social network — online and offline — faces. In any human relationship we have to give in order to receive. The question is: how much do you want to give, and from whom do you want to receive?

How do you work out who to accept — and decline — as contacts in your social networking efforts?

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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.

That’s not all I get from the experience, though. Dedicated gym-goers use some tried and tested methods to make their workouts more efficient and effective. As usual, what’s good for the goose is also good for the gander, and a lot of these same strategies can apply quite well to professional workflows, too. What is work, after all, besides a prolonged workout of your professional muscles?

Super-sets

It’s understood that after a set of one type of exercise, you’ll take a short break before doing another. But that’s time-consuming, and it’s almost always possible to do another kind of exercise that emphasizes different muscles in between sets in order to be more efficient with your workout. This also has the benefit of keeping your heart rate up, which will help your weight training provide some cardio advantages, too.

Applying the super-set principle to your web working routine will help you make the most out of your working hours, minimize downtime, and open up larger chunks of usable free time for you to really enjoy yourself. To do it, break up your work into smaller, more manageable chunks. Work out small units of tasks and plan ahead, interspersing different types of work together. Block tasks you dislike back-to-back with those you do enjoy in order to keep your motivation level high, and try to ensure that things that are placed next to each other are different enough that you won’t become bored by repetition.

Plan Your Pace

People who are very used to doing extended cardio workouts know what their limits are, and are very good at planning how to pace themselves to make it to their time or distance goal. Marathon runners are a perfect example of this kind of energy conservation. Likewise, if you have 30 minutes to do a weights session, you’ll probably do it differently than if you had a whole hour.

Work is the same. If you don’t take the time to accurately anticipate how long a project or project component will take to complete, you’ll be much more likely to burn yourself out early by working too hard and then becoming frustrated when it takes longer than you’d imagined. Get a better idea of how long things take by monitoring your experiences as you go and logging them, and then do comparisons with your past projects when you take on new ones so that you can then pace yourself accordingly.

Journaling

Many workout addicts are also obsessive record-keepers. They track their progress with every visit to the gym, carrying around notebooks or clipboards for the purpose, or just using an iPhone app to log things. It helps you make sure you’re moving forward instead of back, and you won’t be doing the same work on the same muscles over again by accident.

Keeping a detailed record of the work you do will have the same effect with your online professional activity. It’ll help you make sure you don’t ever redo any work you’ve already done, and it’ll make sure you learn from your mistakes and grow and improve as a web worker over time.

Just like working out your body will help you live a longer, happier life, so too will working out your professional side allow you to enjoy a much more fulfilling and long-lasting working life.

What tips from the gym can you apply to your professional life?

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Building conversations anywhere in the world of social media develops relationships, grows brand recognition and expands expertise. The formula for starting and building a community around your topic calls for a heap of passion, a large scoop of planning and a big bowl of promotion – the three P’s.

Passion

In “Man v. Food,” a Travel Channel TV show, Adam Richman ends every episode by taking on an eating challenge. It could be eating the fieriest food or a ginormous dish that can feed five people. In one episode, he faced an ice cream tower known as the Kitchen Sink Sundae, a two-gallon sundae with eight giant scoops of ice cream. He had to eat the whole thing within an hour.

You could almost feel Richman’s pain past the halfway point with his droopy eyes, slumped body and bowed head. The taste became too much for him that he ordered French fries to cut the sweetness. In the end, the man with passion for food won the challenge. Of course, he has lost a few battles with food, but that doesn’t stop him from trying again and again.

The groups and chats that flourish online have leaders behind them who show similar passion for their topic. Picking a topic to discuss, just because you think that’s what people want or because it’s a moneymaker will lead to burnout and boredom. Working with a topic means constantly staying on top of it, talking about it, researching it and living with it for hours, days and months. Without passion, the fire will never truly catch, but with it you can develop a thriving conversation. For example, Wine Library TV’s Gary Vaynerchuck oozes passion; people see it right away on his show, in his talks and in his book, “Crush It!“

Planning

The creators of the Kitchen Sink Sundae thought ahead by creating the sundae and setting boundaries with two rules: The challenger must eat everything within one hour. Without those boundaries, challengers could easily win by slowly eating the whole thing throughout the day.

The restaurant behind the sundae most likely added this to their menu to challenge people, promote the restaurant and to be a “purple cow.” “Hey, have you heard about the bottomless sundae at San Francisco Creamery?” makes for great word-of-mouth promotion.

You need similar planning in order to build successful conversations in social media. How does the topic fit in with your business goals? How will you benefit from the topic? Setting boundaries keeps the discussion tight and on track. Discussions without boundaries lose control and interest.

Promotion

San Francisco Creamery extended the life of the Kitchen Sink Sundae promotion with a new contest. It gives you a chance to win free ice cream for a year if you finish the sundae within 30 minutes. Unless challengers can finish the sundae, they’ll have pay for the $39.95 ice cream.

Conversations allow you to share your passion with others. But without promotion, no one will show up to share that passion with you. Hard selling makes many people uncomfortable, so focus on their needs. If they stop by your community, what will they get out of it? Use that to promote your topic. Promote it in the right places such as on social media profiles, in your email signature and via any colleagues who are willing to help spread it through their networks.

These three steps can work for many areas of social media. You can apply the three P’s to a blog, a Twitter chat, a Facebook page, a LinkedIn group, or wherever your community waits for you and your passion.

What ingredients make up your conversations around your passion?

Photo credit: Swamibu

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Web work can be an unstable ride. Since we are all independent, we have varying ways of dealing with challenges and opportunities that arise in our work. I don’t think there’s one strategy that fits us all, but there are four aspects of our careers  —I think of them as pillars — that need to be established to create a sense of security. If you’re lacking any of these pillars, any unexpected event can be damaging.

So what are my four pillars of web working?

Productivity

The first thing we often have to grasp as web workers is the ability to manage our time and tasks well. Having the freedom to schedule your workday sounds like a dream to most people, but it’s actually a big responsibility. We need to find our time sinks and make them more manageable. Idle distractions are OK, but not when you spend five hours a day on them.

Conversely, be aware of “too much” productivity. While there are many of us web workers who truly love and enjoy our jobs, there might be some more important things that we sacrifice for it. These may include our health, relationships — even the necessary time to relax. Yes, it’s good to be productive, but the things we do are only as good as how we are when we do them.

Finance

One of the common impressions that people have about web working is that it’s financially unstable. This is often true. We all know that income from freelancing or contractual work fluctuates. Even if you’re a regular employee working from home, there are still those supervisors who judge employees on the basis of their presence rather than their performance. That’s why it’s essential for all web workers to keep their finances straight.

Another financial issue that many web workers face is the lack of separation between personal and professional expenses. While the line is more blurry with freelancers, even telecommuting employees may need to consider it, especially if there’s an overlap in their personal and work resources (such as equipment, subscriptions, etc.).

Also, do you have a web working expansion fund? This is meant to pay for any work related emergencies such as equipment repair and replacement. You could also use it to purchase books and tools that will help boost your career.

While you’re at it, set up ways to protect your income as well, in case you won’t be able to work. You can do this by saving up for an emergency fund that covers a few months of your living expenses. Don’t forget to make sure that you have adequate insurance coverage for medical emergencies as well. That type of emergency tends to eat up any savings you have tucked away.

Job Security

A pillar that is somewhat related to your finances is your job security. Apart from being a source of income, job security is also essential since it’s your track record. You need to be able to explain any large gaps in your resume to future prospects. Plus, if you’re passionate about your work you probably want to keep doing it.

For employees, do you feel like your company is stable enough to keep you for as long as you want to work there? According to Jonathan Fields, author of Career Renegade, you need to be a creator-operator to be indispensable at work. You need to have the ability to create new solutions and innovations, as well as have the stamina to execute them.

For freelancers, how can you ensure that you’ll have regular work? You can use some ideas from this long list from Freelance Switch. It might also make sense to review what promotion or sales techniques have worked for you in the past and try to replicate or refine them.

Passion and Purpose

Apart from the pragmatic side of things, there are other aspects of our work that need to be there even if they aren’t as measurable. We need to feel a sense of fulfillment to keep the engine running. This doesn’t necessarily have to come from every task you do. Even side projects and hobbies can be a good source. Without it, everything else will seem empty.

How are you doing with each of these pillars? Are you satisfied with what you’ve achieved in this areas or is there room for improvement?

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1. Plan for a successful New Year. Do a review of your work and see how you can make the next year a better one.
2. Clean your email box. Challenge yourself to reach inbox zero, or if you have thousands of messages, shoot for half. Delete newsletters, unsubscribe to newsletters you never read, file emails that require no further action on your part and address those that do. Don’t put it off. Make it a goal to complete the to-do emails by December 31.
3. File papers. Not all of us have every bill, invoice and paperwork in electronic format. It’s easier to file paperwork on an as-you-go basis rather than let them pile up. I have folders for bank statements, credit card statements, business contracts and printed pay stubs. If you receive any other paperwork on a regular basis, create a folder. You may need folders for items related to health benefits, stocks and retirement.
4. Update your resume and bio. It helps to update these on a regular basis as you take on more challenging projects or work with new clients. It’s easy to let these slip that when someone asks for a resume or bio, we scramble to provide an updated one. Do it now while you’re not rushed. It also helps to have a short, medium and long version of your bio. While you’re at it, review your LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other social media profiles to ensure they’re up to date.
5. Organize your workstation. Take a look at your work area and see if there are improvements you can make. You may already have a great office set up, but it never hurts to make sure it’s optimal.
6. Clean your computer(s). Cleaning includes both the inside and outside of your computer. Thursday gave some tips on how to clean the outside of your laptop and Simon addressed the cleaning the inside.
7. Take care of administrative tasks. The tasks depend on whether you have your own business or work for someone else. For those who do the invoicing, take a look at your accounts receivables to make sure all of your invoices have been paid and take care of those that have not. You may also need to collect 1099s and W-2 forms.
8. Review your address book. Consolidate your contacts, back them up and archive old contactd. Verify you have contact information that you need and put those business cards into your address book.
9. Review your social media strategy. Whether you blog, tweet or update your statuses in Facebook and LinkedIn, having a plan in place ensures you remember to provide value to others rather than focus on you. Your plan doesn’t have to be formal; just one that gives you direction to keep you on track. Also, think about how much time you spend in social media, which is more about return on relationships than direct ROI. This might be a good time to review Aliza’s 10 Golden Rules of Social Media.
10. Assess your marketing strategy. What’s working? What’s not working? How do you land new business or projects? You may need to up your marketing activities in one area and drop them in another.

Think about how great you’ll feel when you return to work after the New Year more organized and ready to take charge.

What are you doing to prepare for the New Year?

Photo credit: Jeff Hire

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I often give advice to people who are interested in starting online businesses. One of my “pupils” (so to speak) is new to social media, but after the recent media Twitter craze, he decided that he was going to use it to promote his site because, “that’s where everyone is.” A couple of days later, he emailed me and said that he wasn’t satisfied with his results, so he decided to follow the advice he read on a blog and try Facebook instead. Again, after only a minimal increase in his traffic, he wrote to me asking, “Have you ever tried StumbleUpon?” My immediate reaction was, “Social media marketing: you’re doing it wrong.”

This problem of constantly flipping tools doesn’t just happen with social media. I’ve had several clients who’ve spent weeks obsessing about Movable Type vs. Blogger vs. Joomla, for example.

So what should you be doing instead of obsessing about the choice of tools?

Define your goals. Goals give you direction, and without them you have no measurement of success. Do you want a one-time spike in your pageviews, or do you want to slowly build your subscriber base? In the end, your tool of choice (and how you’d use it) would depend on the goals you want to accomplish.

As much as possible, choose quantifiable goals so it will be easy to determine whether they’ve been achieved or not.

Find your audience. Who do you want to reach or help with these tools? Where can you find them? Answering these questions in detail will prove to be more helpful than telling all your email contacts to Stumble your latest blog post.

Keep it simple. You shouldn’t pick a tool just because it has 500 features while the others have five. Know your needs and look for a tool with features that support those needs; nothing more, nothing less.

Stay authentic. This is especially true if you plan to use  social media tools for marketing. It’s not enough just to have a Twitter account. What’s more important is whether your tweets reflect a consistent, authentic message. It’s easy for people to detect “spammy” self-serving promotion; if you don’t have an authentic message your marketing will be ineffective.

Know when to stop. If it’s obvious that a particular tool or platform doesn’t work, no amount of force or prayer will make it work. When the results fall short of your defined goals, it’s time to either pick a new tool or rethink your strategy. What will you do if your tools don’t work out? Will you ditch them altogether or find another way to make them work?

If you have clients or colleagues who are experiencing “analysis paralysis” when it comes to tool selection, remind them that without a proper strategy, the tool won’t function as well as they expect. After all, what use is a good quality wrench in the hands of a poor mechanic?

How did you choose your tools when you were starting out as a web worker? Were you overwhelmed with the number of choices out there?

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