Chris Brogan on his Methodology for Work/Life Balance

Just a quick post to share Chris Brogan's "Time and Your Family" post.

The number one question I receive with regards to my own work structure is how I manage to do all that I’m doing and still show up as a member of my own family. It’s not easy, and it requires a lot of “ifs,” but I can share my methods, and maybe you can see what matters out of the list for your own pursuits. Fair?
My method, in a box, is this:

• Goals
• No’s
• Chunks
• Reviews
• Communication

Read it...

Dog Days of August

August is always a bit of a slow month...given that, I've had some time to catch up on the neverending firehose of news, media, content and social media interactions aimed at me. :)

Here are a couple of stories that caught my eye:

Chris Brogan has an interesting post about the tension of real world friendships and "ambient connectivity" in "Is a Social Crash Coming?"

Rohit Bhargava updates his famous 2006 post on social media optimization (SMO) with lessons learned over the past four years: "The 5 NEW Rules Of Social Media Optimization"

AdAge has a very interesting story about how the Steve Slater situation is causing JetBlue problems with their social media and branding efforts, and how they are dealing with it: "How Steve Slater Is Stifling JetBlue's Social-Media Strategy"

The Social Times showcases Pete Warden, the founder of OpenHeatMap. Pretty cool stuff...

Lastly, my agency, Strategic Communications Group, is having a busy summer as we've added two new clients so far: TerraGo Technologies and Whitney, Bradley and Brown.

Great List of Podcasting Resources

I'm not sure how many of you subscribe to Chris Brogan's RSS feed or his "traditional" email newsletter. I've always found Chris to be a common-sensical, well thought out source of information on social media trends, tools and tips. His latest newsletter was a valuable source of info, as always. Feel free to sign up for it here.

In his latest issue, he listed a bunch of podcasting tools, some of which I've used and some I have not. With Chris's permission, here is his list:

Again, sticking with my goal of making all podcasting content for this newsletter, let's give you five podcasting tools to check out.

1. Odeo. Want a simple way to record a podcast on your computer? This is about as simple as it gets.
2. Audacity. This is the opposite of easy, but it's very flexible, and a podcaster's best free multi-platform audio editing tool.
3. TubeMogul. You've recorded a video and you want to put it in more places than just YouTube? This is your tool.
4. Flip Video Camera. For cheap money, this is the tool of choice for SIMPLE video recording. Nearly indestructible, easy to use, and I would buy these for every field employee or remote sales person, if that was a need.
5. Blog Talk Radio. Want a simple way to record a live audio podcast with multiple guests, callers, etc? BlogTalkRadio is the reigning champion at present, followed closely by TalkShoe. Both are great.

There you have it. Five for the podcasters. (Sure, if you're already podcasting, you probably know about all these. What would an ADVANCED 5 tools be? You tell me!)

As some of you know, I started a quasi-podcasting series of interviews and events with marketers last year and conducted interviews into this year. You can search YouTube, GoogleVideo and BlogTalkRadio, or find them on my company's website. I'm starting up a new list of people to interview over the next few months, as I'm intrigued by the impact of social media on marketing budgets. Social media, as I'm sure most of you know, has shifted from a plaything of nerds to a seriously powerful tool for business communications.

Two questions:

1) are there other tools besides the ones Chris listed that you find valuable?

2) after listening/viewing my interviews, it occurred to me that a year ago all of them admitted to reviewing social media tools but none had funded any programs. What new questions do you think I should ask senior marketing executives? How many social media programs do you think have been funded...and at what budget level? Should PR and social media be integrated or kept separate? How about social media efforts and the sales team?

What Does A Community Manager Do?

Happy Monday Morning! There is a great post by Chris Brogan about the characteristics, requirements and expectations of a community manger. Please read it immediately to get a sense of what a successful social community manager both does and how it define and measure success.

Here is a flavor:

Measurements

I’d measure my community manager on the following:

• Responsiveness to communications (blog comments, emails, twitter messages and forum threads) less than 24 hours max.
• Number of QUALITY blog posts read and shared via Google Reader.
• Number of meaningful comments (more than a few words, on topic, pertinent to the space) on appropriate blogs, videos, and other media per month.
• Overall quality of her Twitter stream ( maybe a 60/30/10 mix of industry-related / personal @ comments / and off-topic).
• Engagement on our blog/community/network. (Number of subscribers, number of comments, number of links out to other blogs from our community site).
• Number of quality blog posts and linking posts (probably a 40/60 split between original and linked, though some would argue for 30/70).
• Eventually, number of links from other sites to our blogs and media.

Success of the Project

I’d feel our community manager was a success if she accomplished the following through her efforts:

• Empower the listening ability of our organization to our community’s needs and desires.
• Build an awareness of our organization through non-marketing efforts, measured by favorable or at least non-negative mentions on other blogs, forums, and in Twitter.
• Deliver a blog and/or media platform that’s useful to the community at large, and that grows in number of subscribers as well as engaged commenters.

Overall, I believe these efforts would be measured by an increase in attendance at our face-to-face and virtual events, an increase in subscriptions to our newsletter, and a larger blog commenting community. This would be a win to our organization, and would thus be worth the expense of another salaried employee.

Chris has outlined a strong, ROI focused definition of what a company should look for in an internal employee. Read the comments section to learn about how people are objecting- mostly about the issue of measurement.