Mark Tosczak's Blog» Career

Six tips for getting more out of conferences

Mark Tosczak — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:41:25 +0000

Don't just sit there. Make sure you get the most out of attending a conference or seminar. (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/211097)

I recently attended Ragan’s Social Media for Communicators conference in Atlanta (which was excellent — the folks at Ragan did a great job finding speakers and putting on a great event). For 2½ days about 500 of us met at Coca-Cola headquarters and heard first-hand how some of the country’s best known companies are using social media.

In addition to getting a lot of good ideas about social media, I also came away with some thoughts — some new, some old — about ways to get more out of a conference or seminar.

1. If it is a social media event or if people will be tweeting about it, find out the hashtag (or designate one if no one else will) ahead of time. Bonus: start tweeting before the event to make yourself known to other attendees and meet them before you actually arrive.

2. Find other ways to organize attendees online. I started a Twitter list of conference attendees. After the Ragan conference, a fan page for conference attendees was started on Facebook and another attendee started a LinkedIn group.

3. Write your Twitter ID on your name badge. Even if it’s not a social media or marketing event and you’re the only Twitter user there, this still could be a great way to start conversations.

4. Camp out close to the walls and the power outlets in the conference room. It sucks to have your laptop battery die in the middle of a presentation as your taking notes or tweeting or whatever. Bonus: Bring a power strip with you to share the outlet with others — you’ll quickly be the most popular person there.

5. Decide which social events around the the conference you’ll attend. If you’re an introvert like me, you have to pace yourself a little bit, so decide what’s the most valuable to you and make plans to get the most out of that.

6. Bring back notes, copies of slide presentations and other materials to share with your colleagues. You can provide your employer and clients more value if you share what you learn after you return.

Everyone has their own tricks for getting more out of conferences. What are your tips? Please share them in the comments below.

Why you should stop trying new social media sites

Mark Tosczak — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:17:57 +0000

Google Wave. Google Buzz. Farmville. Foursquare. Gowalla. Yelp.

Don't get lost in the maze of choices social media offers. (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1093677)

The list goes on and on. There are more social media sites, social media apps and cool online things that people are talking about than I will ever have time to fully explore. Even though I make my living in part by helping companies use social media, I can’t commit enough time to explore every new thing to come along. Chances are, you don’t have the time either. And that’s OK.

It’s easy to get caught up in trying the latest and “greatest,” easy to worry that you’re going to miss out on the next Facebook or Twitter if you don’t jump on a new site right away. In other words, it’s easy to forget why we’re here in the first place.

We’re here to have conversations, to learn, to market and brand ourselves, our businesses and our causes. Actually doing those things requires work, attention and focus. But the siren song of Google’s latest project or the newest game that all your friends seem to be playing on Facebook can be all too alluring sometimes.

A better strategy might be to focus on just a handful of sites and activities, to spend real time building real relationships, creating real content and establishing a real presence. It’s OK to not be everywhere. Instead, pick your places and really BE there. For me, these days, that means I’m spending a lot of time focusing on this blog (my home base on the web), on Twitter and on Facebook. I spend less time on LinkedIn and a private forum or two.

I have dipped my toe into Google Buzz and Google Wave, am intrigued by FourSquare but not ready yet to focus on it, and I keep an eye on the news, apps and sites that keep social media enthusiasts talking. But that’s all. And that’s OK. It’s better to pick your places, focus and have an impact. Trying to be everywhere is probably a formula for being nowhere.

So I don’t really mean that you should never try a new social media site. It just means that you should do so carefully and with some consideration as to why you’re doing it and how it fits into your overall goals.

What say you? Where do you spend your time online and how do you figure out what’s valuable? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Why you (or others) should make time for social media

Mark Tosczak — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 11:11:39 +0000

Don't miss the train on social media. (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1106949)

Have you heard these lines?

“There’s so much noise and clutter out there, it seems as though social media hasn’t really matured enough to be a useful tool.”

“Social media’s fine for some industries, but not ours.”

“I just don’t have time for social media.”

Or perhaps the line is some variation on one these. There are still plenty of professionals out there who don’t think social media is that important. If you’re trying to convince someone who says these kinds of things, here are five arguments to help you.

1. Isn’t networking important to you? I would imagine there are very, very few professionals in any field who would say networking with others in their field isn’t important to them. Explain to them that social media sites are a tool to network online, and that you can network more efficiently and with more people through social media than you can with traditional methods. That doesn’t mean you should completely abandon phone calls, luncheon meetings and industry events, but social media can be a powerful tool for your professional advancement.

2. You can do business over these channels. It probably won’t happen the day you first set up your LinkedIn or Facebook account, but you can do business through these social media sites. Particularly as you expand your network, learn to use the tools skillfully and connect with relevant people, you’ll find yourself using these sites to exchange communications that are directly relevant to your professional life. I don’t hesitate to connect through Twitter, Facebook and other channels to set up meetings, develop new business prospects or deal with speaking opportunities.

3. Weak ties might be as valuable, or more so, than close connections. One of the things that social media newbies often struggle with is the idea of being linked to a lot of people you don’t know well, or don’t know at all. However, some experts believe “weak” ties may actually be as valuable or more valuable in accessing audiences and information (such as job opportunities). Most of my job opportunities over the years have not come from my closest friends and colleagues, but rather from people who I had (at least at the time) rather weak relationships with. Social media allows you to develop many more of these potentially valuable weak ties.

4. More and more people are doing it. I don’t mean to say that people should adopt social media tools just because others are doing it. But what reluctant social media users should understand is that a larger and larger percentage of the population (and probably nearly all subpopulations) are using these tools. That means you have more opportunities to interact online with people who are important to you. It’s probably not a good idea to be in a shrinking minority of people not using these sites.

5. Social media can help you improve and influence your Google search results. Frequently, the first place I go when I’m trying to find information out about someone is Google. A quick Google search can pull up profiles on social media sites, articles you’ve written and blogs you’ve authored. Social media, in other words, can help you influence what people find when they search for you online. If you Google yourself now (yeah, it’s egotistical, but go ahead and try it) and you don’t like the results that come up, or if none of the results have anything to do with you, you can change that with social media.

What about you, gentle reader? What do you say to people when they tell you that social media isn’t important for them? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

How to budget time for social media

Mark Tosczak — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:30:27 +0000

You have limited time - use it wisely when it comes to social media. (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1068015)

One of the challenges of social media is how to manage the amount of time that you could put into these activities. How much time, and how exactly you spend that time, will end up being a little different for everyone depending on your goals and strategy.

Here’s a framework to help you budget your time. This is especially helpful for personal branding and networking activities, where it’s harder (or seems harder) to just carve hours out of your workday for these activities.

Content creation

Do you blog? Do you write articles or white papers or create presentations that you share on Slideshare? What about podcasting? Creating original content can help you establish a brand and demonstrate your expertise and knowledge. It’s a very powerful strategy, and if you choose to use it you’ll want to set aside some time to focus on it.

How much content do you want to produce each week or month?
How much time do you need to devote to produce that content? How many hours is that each week and each day, on average?
When will you put in that time? During your lunch hour? In the early mornings or late at night? On the weekends? Decide when and put it on your calendar.

In my case I’m probably averaging about 10 hours a week on blogging right now. You don’t have to spend that much time, but consistency is important.

Listening and reading

It’s important to keep up with what’s going on in your industry — reading blogs, articles and books, listening to podcasts, and generally keeping up with new ideas and conversation. How much time you spend on this will vary depending on your industry and goals.

Accountants need to keep up with the latest tax law changes. Doctors have to try to plough through stacks of medical journals. I try to keep up with the flood of books on social media that are being published and the many, many blogs on the subject. Since it’s so easy to become overwhelmed by the amount of information available, it’s a good idea to decide how much time you want to spend on this.

What do you need to keep up with? Books, blogs, professional journals, other sources?
How many hours per week will you devote to this?
When will you keep up with these? At night before you go to sleep? Can you listen to podcasts and audiobooks on your iPod on the way to work?
Do you have a system to bring the most relevant content to your attention? Google alerts? RSS feeds? Some of the tips in this post on finding and sharing great content can help.

Conversation

Of course, social media isn’t very social if you’re not talking. That could include sharing content you find, responding to others in a variety of social media channels (including commenting on blogs), and even reaching out to people via email to connect offline. It also is the tool that allows you to turn mere online connections into actual relationships (whether they’re weak or strong).

1. What social media channels are most important for you? Twitter, Facebook, a specialized social media network on Ning or a forum devoted to your industry?

2. How much time will you spend on these channels? An hour a day? Three hours a week?

3. When will you spend that time? In short 15-minute bursts throughout the day? In a longer, more concentrated period a few times each week?

More tips

All of us have a limited time and energy, but the vast world of social media can suck up an enormous amount of that if we’re not careful. So here are some tips to manage that.

Focus. You probably have limited time, at best a few hours a days, to devote to this. So concentrated on the 20 percent of tools/sites/strategies that are going to yield 80 percent of your results. For me, these days, that means Twitter, writing blog posts and reading blog posts and books get most of my attention.

Be realistic. Don’t sketch out a plan that calls for 30 hours a week (almost a full-time job) of work on this, and then find out a month into it that’s it’s just too much. It’s better to start out with very modest ambitions. As you become more fluent with the tools, you’ll be able to increase your productivity by becoming more efficient and integrating these tools into your life.

Consider the rest of your life. If you’re going through a really busy period at work, going on vacation or caring for a sick family member, some of these actvities may temporarily take a back seat. That’s OK. Don’t burn yourself out or disregard other priorities just for the sake of keeping up with some ideal social media time budget.

Got ideas or questions on how to budget your time for social media? Please share them in the comments below.

What's your purpose?

Mark Tosczak — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 09:33:07 +0000

What's your purpose? (Photo source - http://www.sxc.hu/photo/867083)

I recently listened to an interview with author Daniel Pink (via Elizabeth Marshall’s free Author Teleseminars) about his new book Drive. (Confession: I haven’t read it, so I’m basing this blog post on the author interview, which ran about an hour. If you want to learn more about this, you should read the book, which has exercises and, I’m sure, a lot more detail and insight. The book is going on my to-read list.)

Drive examines decades of research on what really motivates people. Pink says that there are two kinds of activities — algorithmic and heuristic. Algorithmic work is anything that can be broken down into a set of rules. Heuristic work is more complex, more nuanced, and requires judgment, creativity, intuition and analysis. Heuristic work is what many of us spend a lot of time doing.

Pink says that the overwhelming evidence from decades of research on motivation was that carrot vs. stick type approach to motivation (penalizing people for mistakes, rewarding them for successes) work well in motivating algorithmic work. But for heuristic work, penalties and prizes have the opposite effect. So long as people are being paid at a level they believe is fair, paying them a lot more in hopes of motivating them for heuristic activities doesn’t work.

What does work to motivate people to accomplish heuristic work? Three things: autonomy, mastery, purpose.

Autonomy, obviously, is the ability to make your own choices about when and how you do things.
Mastery is the desire to achieve a high skill level.
Purpose is the belief that you’re acting in service to something greater than yourself (not money).

It’s the last one I’m particularly interested in. If you have a purpose, it can bring fresh reserves of motivation into your daily life. And that’s a good thing. Worthwhile things are frequently difficult to achieve, and achieving the difficult requires motivation.

Which brings me to — What is your purpose? Have you ever thought about that question?

For that matter, what is the purpose of your company? Your brand? Your blog? Your social media activities? Your marketing?

Are you doing it just to make money? Or is there something else that motivates you?

Google, a company that has made lots of money, says its mission is to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” That is a grand purpose, and I wonder if it doesn’t play a role in motivating people at the company. A cynic would say that words like that are just clever PR, spin designed to pretty up Google’s real purpose, which they would claim is to make the founders and shareholders rich. Google has made its founders (and many shareholders) rich, but I don’t think that excludes the company having a purpose beyond that.

Most marketers (myself included) would urge the typical company (or product/brand/service/whatever) to clearly define its USP, its unique selling proposition. That’s the one thing that makes that product or brand different from everything else and desirable to some group of buyers.

But before you ask yourself what your USP is, maybe you should ask yourself what your purpose is. You with me? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Four easy tips for making your business card and email signature more social

Mark Tosczak — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:15:54 +0000

Is your business card social media savvy? (Photo by blary54 at stock.xchng - http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1022838)

So you’re a social media maven. You tweet, you blog, you have accounts on all the major social media sites, and a few of the minor ones, too. You know how Digg works, understand URL shorteners and subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds from social media rock stars like Chris Brogan and probloggers like Darren Rowse.

But, do your business card and email signature reflect these facts? Or are they mired in the ’90s, when a fax number was just as important as an email address?

Here are some ideas to bring these two common identity tools up to date:

1. Add the address for the social media service you use most commonly. For me, that’s Twitter (@marktzk, in case you want to follow me).

2. Instead of a company web address, how about a blog web address? This may not be feasible if you are part of a company and have a business card and email signature that follow a standard, prescribed format. But if you are self-employed, have personal business cards and use a personal email account, why not add the blog address to those?

Tip: You can get free business cards at VistaPrint and Bizcard.com.

3. You may be writing brilliant, useful content on your blog, but are you letting people know? How about adding the three most recent blog posts you’ve written under your email signature? If that seems strange or too narcissistic, it’s certainly not any worse than the quotes and song lyrics I see regularly in email sigs. Firefox add-on WiseStamp can help you do this for your free webmail (i.e. Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) accounts.

4. Are you promoting a free offer on your blog to get people to sign up for your email newsletter? For instance, perhaps your offering a free report or PDF when people join your email list. Consider putting this on the back of your business card or, again, in your email signature. (While we’re at it — is this information included in your major social media profiles? Some people who review these profiles will probbly be interested in your email list.)

I’m sure there are other things you could do with your business card and email signature to make them more social. What are your ideas? Please share them in the comments below.

Five ways to turn online relationships into offline connections

Mark Tosczak — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:35:35 +0000

Meeting for coffee is an easy, tried-and-true way to build offline relationships. (Photo by trublueboy @ stock.xchng - http://www.sxc.hu/photo/644967)

So let’s say, hypothetically, that you’ve been really successful in your social media efforts and you are building relationships online. That’s great. But sometimes, to take a business relationship to the next level, you need to take it offline. How do you do that? Here are some simple suggestions:

Professional Meetings and Conferences

Nearly every profession has professional conferences, trade shows and other events where people converge to learn and network together. Reach out to your online contacts in your industry and ask whether any of them of will be at the events that you’re attending. If so, ask to have lunch with them, meet them at breakfast or find some other way to connect.

Local Professional Society Events

Professional societies are also a great way to turn local online relationships into local offline relationships. If you’re a member of a professional group (such as the Public Relations Society of America for PR pros), there is very likely a local chapter that has regular meetings. Offer to meet at one of those events and make a point of connecting in person there.

Tip: If you’re a member of a professional group that doesn’t have a local chapter, consider forming one yourself. Do that and your local (and national) professional opportunities are likely to grow considerably. (This was something I had planned to do in 2009, but then the year got overwhelmingly busy for me. We’ll see if I’m able to carve out some time this year.)

Tweetups and Meetups

There may be informal groups meeting in your area that include people you know online. Check out Tweetups.org and Meetup.com to find local informal gatherings you might join. If there aren’t any already taking place, consider organizing one yourself. Organizing an event yourself is a true power-networker move. Here are some tips from Mashable on organizing successful Tweetups.

Coffee and Food

Beyond group events, the old standby of “let’s have coffee/lunch/drinks sometime” is an easy, low pressure way to turn an online connection into an offline relationship. This usually makes sense once you’ve had some mutually enriching back-and-forth communications with someone and you’ve reached the limits of what you can practically do online. Sometimes, a 30-minute mid-morning coffee can allow for a level and depth of communication that’s difficult online. You can discover professional opportunities (for collaboration, partnerships or even employment), build your Rolodex and simply enjoy meeting someone new.

The same thing works when you’re traveling, too. If you have a trip coming up to another city, consider who you know online there that you might reach out to and meet in person. The worse someone can say is “I don’t have time.” A copywriter I only know online once offered to meet as he was passing through town. I accepted. We ended up canceling it due to an unavoidable conflict that came up on my end, but if he comes through town again I’d be happy to sit down and get to know him in person.

Note: Never put yourself in a situation that could be risky or dangerous with someone you don’t know well. Meet in a public place, pay your own way and arrange your own transportation. Exchange business cards, but not home addresses. ‘Nuff said.

Phone Calls

Finally, if you can’t arrange any of these in-person meetings, a phone call can sometimes work wonders for a relationship. If you’re an introvert (like me), this may strike you as unnatural and unnecessary. However, more often than not, this really works. After some online interaction where you find yourself thinking “what an interesting person” try sending this message: “Hey, I’d like to learn a bit more about you. Any chance you might have a few minutes for a phone call in the next week or two?”

What are your tips for taking networking and interaction from the Web to the offline world? Please share them in the comments below.

Have you done a personal social media audit lately?

Mark Tosczak — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:13:47 +0000

Have you done a social media audit of yourself lately? Maybe you should.

Do your social media profiles need to be cleaned up? (Image by lusi at stock.xchng)

By social media audit, I mean updating all those profiles you have on various social media sites. I started doing this recently, and was surprised to find how much information I had let become out of date — my job title, what town I lived in, etc. In addition to profiles on sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Plaxo, don’t forget your own bio on your blog, if you have one.

Here are five things to do during a social media audit:

1. Update all of your profile information. Have you moved, been promoted, changed employers or had any other changes since you last created that profile? Is there any information that’s out of date that should be deleted? In addition to the usual social networking sites (such as LinkedIn and Twitter), don’t forget to update your online profile in other groups you belong to — professional organizations, alumni associations, etc.

2. Update your profile picture, if you want. You may want to use different pictures on different sites, to highlight different aspects of your personality. Or you may want to use the same picture across all sites for personal branding consistency. It’s up to you, but ask yourself if you need to add or update pictures to any of your social media profiles.

Tip: Keep a profile picture or two in Flickr. That way you have it available to add to any social media profile no matter what computer you are working on (home, work, school or whatever).

3. Get active on sites that you’ve ignored for a while. I’m not suggesting you should be really active on every social media site — there are too many for that. However, if you’ve been neglecting your LinkedIn activity and that’s a part of your plan for personal branding via social media, it’s worth spending some time there. (And making a plan for being there more consistently.)

4. Record all those passwords somewhere. If you’re like me, you have profiles and passwords to lots of different sites. I have a couple of tricks for remembering them all, but too often I have to rely on the “forgot your password” link. Start recording these somewhere (safe). I’m using index cards that are filed alphabetically in a little box I keep on my desk at home. If you’re paranoid about security, you can lock this in a safe. There are many software solutions available for this (Clipperz is very secure, but if you forget your password to the site, you’re screwed).

5. Bookmark all your social media sites in a single folder in your favorites/bookmarks app. I use Google’s Bookmarks tool in the Google Toolbar, so I have access to my favorite web sites anywhere I have an Internet connection. This will give you quicker access to these sites and increase the odds that you keep them up-to-date and active in the future.

Are there other steps you would take to make sure your social media presence is current? Please share your ideas in the comments below.

Five simple steps to using social media for personal branding

Mark Tosczak — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:00:41 +0000

Everybody talks about using social media for personal branding, but do you know how to do it? Here are five simple steps for developing a social media plan for personal branding.

One caveat up front: You have to know what your personal brand is before you can execute it. In a nutshell, you’re personal brand is what makes you relevant to your target audience and superior to your competitors. This post is not about branding per se, so I’m going assume you know who your audience is, why you’re relevant to them and what makes you a better choice than your competitors.

1. Define your goals, and make them measurable. Do you want to bring more people to your web site or blog? Do you want to develop more relationships? Get more speaking opportunities? Develop a reputation as the go-to gal in your field of expertise? Whatever your goals, figure them out. Then figure out how to measure them. If you want more people coming to your blog, you can measure unique visitors month-to-month. If you want to develop more professional relationships you can measure how many people your connected to on LinkedIn and what percentage of them you’ve actually met in person or talked to over the phone. Maybe the measurement is how many new people you go to lunch with each month. Whatever it is, find a way to measure it and figure out where you are now.

2. Develop a strategy. Are you going to write insightful blog posts? Record funny podcasts? Shoot short videos and post them to YouTube? Maybe you’ll hang out on LinkedIn and answer questions that people post. Whatever it is, make it something that works for you. Your strategy is how you’re going to communicate your personal brand (which means your expertise, your personality and, I hope, why you’re trustworthy). I encourage you to go with whatever seems natural to you. Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV says in his excellent, inspiring book “Crush It” that he chose to post videos because writing doesn’t come naturally to him (even his book was dictated, not written). Video allows his personality to shine through. Figure out what works for you.

3. Write a plan. OK, you’ve got some goals. You know what your approach is going to be to achieving those goals – your strategy. (And you’ve written all this down, right?) Now put down on paper what you need to do each day, each week, each month to carry out that strategy. Here’s one example of a very simple plan that would probably be fairly typical:

Write two new blog posts each week. Share these blog posts via Twitter and on LinkedIn.
Tweet daily, sharing at least three new links.
Once a week answer a question on LinkedIn.

Your plan might have more or less detail than this, but this would be a pretty good start. And it gives you some specific steps to take to get started. Also, if you’re new to social media, I’m a big fan of starting modestly. It will take you time to develop some of these skills, learn the tricks for doing this quickly and efficiently, and figure out how to manage your time to fit this in with everything else in your life.

4. Execute the plan. Step 4 is simple, but it’s probably the one where most people fail. You’ve got to take action. ‘Nuff said.

5. Evaluate your progress and adjust course as necessary. After a while – a month, three months, six months, whatever – evaluate how far you’ve come and whether or not you’ve accomplished your goals. How many new professional contacts have you made? How many people are visiting your blog each month? If you’ve achieved your goals – great! It’s time to set new, more ambitious goals and work through steps 1 to 5 again. If you didn’t achieve your goals, one of these three things is probably the reason why:

Problem: You didn’t execute your plan, or you only executed it half-heartedly. For example, you planned to blog twice a week but you only blogged twice a month.

Solution: Get off your butt and execute the plan. Take action!!

Problem: You executed your plan, you’re making steady progress, but you haven’t achieved your goals yet.

Solution: Keep working it. The more ambitious your goals, the longer it will take you to achieve them. Most people give up too soon.

Problem: You executed your plan, but you’ve made little or no progress toward your goals. In this case, your strategy is probably wrong. (I’m assuming here that you’ve executed your plan reasonably well and you’ve made a good faith effort to learn and improve at the key skills involved in your strategy, whether it’s writing or shooting photos or whatever.)

Solution: Rewrite your strategy. You may need to spend some time reading case studies and other blogs, figuring out what other people did that worked or figuring out what you’ve been doing that is holding you back. Whatever the case, it’s time for a new approach.

Have more tips or ideas on developing a personal brand with social media? Have questions? Please leave a comment and share.

Quick tip: How to use Google's Sidewiki for personal branding

Mark Tosczak — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 11:00:06 +0000

So Google recently launched Sidewiki, a service that basically allows anyone to add comments to any web site. If you have the Google toolbar with Sidewiki installed in your browser, you can both leave comments and also read comments that others have left at that site. All comments are public. (Although this might seem like Google has created a service that allows people to alter or vandalize web sites that don’t belong to them, technically the comments all reside on Google’s servers and you have to use Google’s tools to see them.)

It remains to be seen whether Sidewiki will take off or not. Similar services in the past from other companies have not been adopted by a lot of users. Still, Google is arguably the most important company on the Internet so it has at least the potential for this tool to be widely adopted.

What does all this have to do with personal branding? Well, you can use Google’s toolbar to leave extra information about yourself at various sites where you might have an online identity, such as your blog, your Twitter home page, your Facebook and LinkedIn pages.

I would suggest leaving something short and simple and friendly. Others may or may not leave other comments, but at least for other Google Sidewiki users you’ll be putting out a welcome mat.