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 »
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
Daphne plurked today about leaving Plurk to concentrate on ping.sg as well as Twitter and because things were just getting too overwhelming for her to keep up with everything at once.
It got me thinking about whether this is a natural progression of sorts. People join an online community until the benefits of another (uptime for Plurk) far outweigh the previous benefits of another (Twitter), or the conversations on Plurk are more intense/genuine than those on the shoutbox on ping.sg. What do we do when that happens?
I know Pat Law has mentioned a very good point that people move on to better value propositions. That’s why we’re not on Friendster or ICQ anymore. If the community shifts to a new “tool”, should it matter? After all it’s people-centric rather than platform-centric isn’t it?
Of course, I’m not saying either ping.sg or Twitter are inferior, unworthy platforms. I think ping is still great for getting the latest buzz in the local blogosphere and log on at least thrice a day to check out the newest posts, Twitter runs in the background on Twhirl for stuff to pop up once in awhile. But when faced with a new, potentially better tool, what happens?
One reason also why the ping.sg shoutbox is less “vibrant” now is because many of the pingsters are on Plurk as well. This suggests that people see more value there, or are joining it because everyone is as well, or a combination of both, but that results in ping.sg being less lively. Natural evolution of online platforms? Innovate and keep your communities or die?
I pretty much understand where Daphne is coming from, so I ask the local community because I’m curious: If you’ve shifted to Plurk, do you feel like you should stick with your previous platforms just ‘cos? Or does the higher value proposition outweigh all? Very curious to know the various views behind this.
Tags: daphnemaia, facebook, friendster, icq, msn, patlaw, ping.sg, ping.sg shoutbox, Plurk, plurk vs twitter, singaporean blogosphere
Posted in Plurk, Singapore, Social Networks, community, social media, twitter | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
This very disturbing story came in my RSS feeds just before I left work. Remember the Plurk Badges made by PatLaw over at Blankanvas?
Well LiveCrunch was asking for some of them badges and was referred to Blankanvas. This is what followed. (click for the full screenshot)
So I headed over to LiveCrunch and posted a comment basically asking what gives. Now LiveCrunch moderates its comments, and used that moderation ability to basically not allow my comment to get through and hide this ugly behavior from the rest of the world.
How do I know? Because when I checked my site stats tonight, I saw one referrer:
So I infer from this that LiveCrunch saw my comment, went to the “edit comment” page on Wordpress, and then did not approve it. I think this is really bad practice. Moderation is not meant to keep negative comments out. I moderate mine to prevent crazy stuff from appearing, but people are free to disagree with me if they wish or call me out on certain statements, and they do.
Well, since LiveCrunch won’t reply to comments, I’d like to ask everyone who reads this to drop him a Tweet at @Livecrunch or Plurk him at http://www.plurk.com/user/LiveCrunch, ask him why he literally stole Pat’s creation and did not credit her, and then did not own up to the fact afterwards openly on his blog via the comments. The online community should speak up. What trust (or lack of) does this foster among our designers who are happy to create things for others for free, and don’t even get some credit in return? Especially when it’s explicitly offered?
As for me, I have two words for LiveCrunch with the very same Plurk badge that PatLaw made:
Tags: bad practices, bad to moderate comments, blankanvas, livecrunch steals, patlaw, plurk badges, why moderate comments
Posted in Blogs, Plurk, Uncategorized, community, social media | 2 Comments »
Monday, June 9th, 2008
I’m beginning to feel the load of reading a lot of blogs right now, so every month when I subscribe to new blogs, I put them on a “probation” list, look at them at the end of the month and then decide which are worth keeping. Here are those that I’ve added to my Google Reader permanently this month, as well as one post I loved recently that I would like to share with you.
1) Colin Walker
2) Deirdre Breakenridge – PR 2.0 Strategies
3) Hutch Carpenter – I’m not actually a geek
4) Jason Falls – Social Media Explorer
5) Jonathan Wong – Armchair Theorist
6) Corvida – Shegeeks
- What college students can’t get from blogging – A nice contrarian view from someone who’s also gotten an internship from blogging, but a good reality wake up call for students who may think blogging is the solution to everything.
7) Pat Law – Blankanvas
8 ) Meg Roberts – PR Interactive
- Building brand you – I try to read as many PR students/fresh grads as possible, Meg is one of them I really like. And she watches Lost!
9) Sherms – Design is ________
10) Ellie – The PinkC
11) Julian Baldwin – Notes, thoughts, ideas and responses
That’s it for May, if you have new blogs to recommend, feel free to plug it in the comment box. Let me know if you liked these recommendations as well.
Tags: armchair theorist, blankanvas, blogs worth reading, colin walker, deirdre breakenridge, google reader, hutch carpenter, jason falls, julian baldwin, meg roberts, patlaw, shegeeks, sherms, the pinkc
Posted in Blogs | 13 Comments »
Saturday, June 7th, 2008
Patlaw from Blankanvas delivered on her promise to make some Plurk badges over the weekend, and here are my favourites:
Mother Plurker!!
Plurk Me
And my very own customised badge, Plurk UniqueFrequency. Aww.
Want yours? Head over to Blankanvas to take them. FREE! Show your love for your newest addiction, Plurk!
Tags: blankanvas, patlaw, Plurk, plurk badges, plurk uniquefrequency
Posted in Fun, Plurk | 1 Comment »
