Monday, November 2nd, 2009
Pat has a great post with the same title: how to be a social media junkie and keep your job over on Blankanvas and it inspired me to make a post of my own, though I certainly don’t mean to compare my fresh 3-month agency life with her career!
It took me awhile to figure out that I although my work and personal life crisscross in that the subject matter happens to be the same, there would be no way to manage this on a long term basis unless I turned it into a well-oiled machine, and I finally feel like I have that routine nailed down enough to get close to full productivity at the office.
First, a little bit of what I do. I work in a 100% digital ad agency so thankfully all my client work is online. While I have my fair share as billable hours, as the resident “social media guy” (not guru) in the team, I maintain all of BLUE’s social media presence from the BLUE blog to our twitter account to delicious, stumble upon, Facebook and the like. As with anything, maintaining these accounts and doing my billable work takes time, so this is how my typical day goes:
0745: get up, check my own Gmail for important mails I need to take note of, have a once-over my RSS feed and check in on Facebook.
0900 (ish): reach the office, clear my work email and work Gmail. This includes looking for comments on the BLUE blog, seeing who’s followed us on Twitter, approving friend requests on Facebook and anything else that might have come through those channels.
0945: check in on BLUE’s Twitter account to look for anything interesting, mentions, DMs or tweets worth re-tweeting. I make it a point to try to follow 3-5 new people daily just to expand our horizons. We deal in everything digital so everyone from design to mobile people to SEO/SEM to social media to even mainstream marketing people are all “fair game”.
1010: next I peer into my rss feed on Outlook (which is separate from my personal Google Reader feed) to look for stuff that’s relevant to the team and stuff that will help with thought leadership, case studies and the like. Where applicable I forward them to the team or bookmark them on delicious, stumble upon etc. I also make a quick scan of oursignal.com just to see what else people find interesting.
By the time all this is done it’s anywhere between 1030 to 11am and I move on to whatever tasks I have for the day. This is where it enters “anything goes” territory and things are a little flexible, but I always feel like I cleared an important part of my routine by now. And in fact given the line of work I’m in, that’s about all the routine I can expect. There was one week where I had more work than normal to do and I completely didn’t engage in this routine for a good four days. It took me a long while to dig myself out of that black hole.
As much as starting the day off is important, I like to end it with some structure too. There’s a great post on Webworker Daily called firewall your time and I try to dedicate half an hour starting at around 545 to do certain tasks:
- Achieve inbox zero (both work and Gmail) (I sometimes fail this step)
- Check ‘later’ email folder for actionable items
- Save sent emails worth saving
- Check outlook calendar and Google Calendar for appointments/events tomorrow that I might have to prepare for
- Write todo list for next day
- Review any stuff I wrote down on paper today
- Check check my tickler notes for today and tomorrow to see if there’s anything outstanding for today I need to do, or take note of for tomorrow
- Clear physical inbox (things that I have to process once goes in here: paper to recycle, trash to throw, stuff to bring home. So I don’t shuttle back and forth)
- Fill up my timesheet (daily is a must)
- Decide what to do when home, enter that into my tickler file
- Clear what I can from my Outlook RSS feeds
- Clear my desktop – limited to what I’m working on tomorrow and archiving the rest. (I usually fail this step)
After work, I clear stuff I’ve written down on my tickler file and generally do my own thing (game, catch a movie, have dinner etc) but more often than not stuff I read online is work related, so I email that to myself and make a note of what action I should take the next day.
So that’s what I do to keep myself same, get my social media ‘fix’ and keep my job (so far) all at the same time. How about you?
ps: Interestingly enough, almost exactly a year ago Pat and I did a similar ‘day in the life’ post talking about the brands we would come into contact with and use throughout the day. Read about her brand timeline and mine if you’re so inclined. (Caveat: I was in Canada at the time of that post, so Canadian brands will probably be overly represented)
Tags: agency life, blankanvas, facebook, gmail, inbox zero, outlook, patlaw, rss, social media junkie, timesheet, twitter
Posted in Gen Y, social media | 6 Comments »
Saturday, February 7th, 2009
Although I have a great love for Evernote, the loss of I Want Sandy is still fresh in my mind. Combine that with Wired’s report that Ma.gnolia suffered major data loss that was referred to as “catastrophic” and the closure of Google Notebook, one can’t help but wonder how safe it is to keep items in the “cloud”.
But… You didn’t pay for it!
This seems to be a recurring comment when such applications die. We didn’t pay for Sandy or Notebook, why should we be upset that they’re gone? Perhaps the internet has fundamentally changed the way we think of consumption. Just because we don’t contribute directly to Google or MSN or Facebook when we use Gmail or Live Messenger, doesn’t mean we’re not contributing at all. Without the network effect of many users congregating around a certain service, where would the ad dollars be?
On the flip side, just because you paid for a service, doesn’t mean it won’t go under. It happens in the physical world, the online world is no different.
Portability
When Google Notebook announced it would be discontinuing support for the service, Evernote quickly rose to the occasion to provide easy exporting of users’ Notebooks to Evernote. Perhaps the issue of service shuttering wouldn’t be as tragic if such movements were the norm, but what do you do when your data is lost, as in the case of Ma.gnolia? How often do you want to do a sync between Google Bookmarks, Delicious and Ma.gnolia? Especially considering their ways of tagging bookmarks are different? Is there a need for a common “standard”?
Looking forward
I feel a little more comfortable with companies like Google and Evernote because unlike Sandy which was a one man team, they’re actual companies with a team or teams of people. But that doesn’t put my mind totally at ease that one day, a cloud service I rely heavily on will lose stuff of extreme value to me, and I would have no idea what to do next.
What are you doing to safeguard yourself from such an occurrence? What would you do if Gmail lost half your emails? If Remember The Milk lost all reminders more than a month into the future? What if your videos chronicling your life over the last six months disappeared on Vimeo or YouTube? Do you avoid such situations entirely by still relying on paper and/or a local hard disk?
Tags: catastrophic, data loss, delicious, evernote, facebook, gmail, google notebook, i want sandy, live messenger, magnolia, msn, portability, remember the milk, safety of keeping data in the cloud, vimeo, wired, youtube
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Monday, December 8th, 2008
Only four links this week:
Twitter/Brand Monitoring
Jesse Stay has an exclusive interview with the woman behind @BritneySpears on Twitter over on Louis Gray’s blog, and I found this to be a very, very interesting read. When you think about Twitter, you think about people in social media or tech people or people who live their lives online. Yet @BritneySpears has found some footing with an audience of more than 10,000 (maybe it isn’t even her audience, maybe it’s a wider audience than her usual), and the results look to be, for the most part, positive.
It just makes you think, if a female pop star with a tarnished image in the last few years can get on something like Twitter and begin to make small steps to getting back on the right track, what can your company do with it?
[I'm @uniquefrequency on Twitter, if you want to link up there]
Social Media In Businesses
More than 60% of companies are not ready to engage in social media – Surprise surprise? Not really, if you ask me.
if you have a “spying” culture you distrust your employees’ reading habits and how they spend their time. You will therefore distrust their ability to engage with customers on your behalf or you will put so many controls over it that it will sound 100% inauthentic. Think of people willing to speak in public in dicta rial countries – they have zero credibility, as most people assume that they are shills for the regime.
If your company is one of those that blocks Facebook, all it does is signal an extreme lack of trust in your employees. And most of Gen Y aren’t going to take it (Minus the bankers. They’ll do anything for money)
Generation Y/Millennials/Digital Natives
Read Write Web tells us that Millennials Will Route Around IT Departments – There are statistics in this research, but here’s the bottom line:
This report definitely makes it clear that IT departments can either choose to adopt some of these technologies, or they will risk that a large number of their young employees will simply go rogue.
I’ve had a little bit of experience with this in the past and I can say with some certainty that whatever organisations think they’re blocking, they’re not. Whether I want my email forward to Gmail and IT won’t do it for me, or running Firefox from my USB stick because I can’t download Firefox, there are ways to get it done. Blocking IM and/or Facebook? Pretty much useless with the 3G iPhone. (not that I have one).
Just let it go and find more meaningful work for the IT department to do (like improving web analytics, for one).
Blogging
Bryan Person of Social Media Breakfast asks whether blog sidebars are useful. I think they are and I feel I could definitely utilise mine more efficiently. How do you use yours? What are the must haves for your blog sidebar?
That’s it for this week, do share links with me on Delicious.com (I’m uniquefrequency) or just leave them in the comments below!
Tags: 3g iphone, @britneyspears, @therealbritney, blog sidebars, brand monitoring, britney, britney spears, bryan person, businesses not ready to engage in social media, delicious, digital natives, facebook, firefox, generation y, gmail, is your business ready for social media, it departments, louis gray, millennials, social media breakfast, social media in business, twitter, uniquefrequency, usb stick
Posted in Gen Y, Links | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
As the name suggests, reQall helps you recall the stuff you need to do all day long. Although I’m pretty happy with Remember The Milk as a little add-on to my Gmail and I Want Sandy for meeting reminders and the like, the big advantage that reQall has over them is an iPod Touch application.
reQall becomes most effective when you’re in an environment that is highly connected. For me being in a school where there is wireless everywhere, and a home that’s wifi enabled is more than enough. The Firefox extension allows you to enter “What popped into your head”, and it understands simple context like dates and times, which is exactly what I need. So I’d be surfing or chatting to someone and someone says “oh by the way the assignment is due next Monday”, I can type that immediately right from my Firefox browser.
One other thing I like about the interface of reQall, is that it’s separated into an actual to-do list that is time-sensitive, a shopping list and a notes list. There’s even an option to upload images to trigger your memory, if that works for you. I really like the shopping list and notes function now that I’m living pretty much on my own. Everytime something runs out I just enter it in from my iPod Touch and sync it up and when I head out to the store, it’s all in one place (you don’t need internet access to retrieve data from your iPod Touch).
If you’re like me and was thinking long and hard about updating your iPod Touch software to 2.0, I’d almost say that the reQall app alone would be reason enough for me to pay that $9.99, so consider giving it a try.
Tags: gmail, gtd, i want sandy, ipod touch apps, notes, online productivity apps, productivity, remember the milk, remembering things to do, reqall, shopping lists, to do lists, wifi, wireless coneections
Posted in Tools | No Comments »
