A lot of what I write about here applies to individuals — individual blogs, personal branding and personal use of social media. But businesses, large and small, can also use blogs and social media to strengthen their brand, reach new customers and grow sales. And some kind of corporate or organizational blog is often an important part of the social media strategy.

So, let me suggest a few tips on ways to ensure your corporate blog is effective.

1. Get buy-in.

Make sure your executive leadership, including the corporate counsel and the CFO’s office. At large companies this process could require months. Nonetheless, getting buy-in on the benefits of having a corporate blog (and the risks, and a plan to manage the risks) is a lot easier to get ahead of the time then to ask for later.

Chances are blogging is actually not the riskiest thing your company does — far from it. But to many senior executives it may sound risky, so educating them is important.

2. Develop a strategy.

Identify your audience (investors, employees, current customers, potential customers or maybe all of these?) and get clear about what the goal of the blog is. What are you trying to achieve by having a corporate blog? Are you trying to drive leads to sales? Increase awareness? Foster conversation with key influencers (such as analysts and journalists)? Figure that out.

While you’re at it, develop some metrics to go along with your goals. Is it merely traffic, the level of interaction, or the profit from new customers?

3. Decide on the team.

Having a blog team makes it much more likely that your organizational blog will keep going, even during times when other stuff crops up and threatens to take your focus away from your blog (I speak from experience on this). Choose team members with the right skills, an interest in blogging and social media, and the ability to get the job done. Your team might include an editor/team leader, one or two contributing writers, someone from IT to help with the technical side of things and a designer to ensure the blog looks good.

4. Establish an approval process.

The quickest way to slow down posting on a blog is to have an unclear approval process. Or worse yet, no approval process at all. The first time some dumb error slips through the blog will also be the time when the CEO just happens to be reading it. You want an approval process — a system — in place, or else you run the risk of having one imposed on you.

Who on the team writes the draft of a blog post? Who edits it? Does anybody outside the blog team need to review it? If so, who sends it to that person? Do outside reviewers understand your blog deadlines?

5. Brainstorm blog post ideas.

Get your team, get your plan and go hole up in a conference room. Then come up with lots and lots of ideas for blog posts. If you want to prime the pump for this exercise, consider my post yesterday on 10 ways to generate ideas for blog posts.

You may only have to do this once, because often the act of writing a blog post results in more ideas for future posts. However, if you find your bank of blog post ideas getting a little thin, you may want to schedule a new brainstorming session periodically. Also consider the value of bringing others into these sessions — other employees, business partners and vendors, and perhaps even members of your target audience (for example, potential customers).

Once you’ve done your brainstorming session you’ll probably need to go back and winnow the list down, picking out the best, strongest ideas for blog posts. But brainstorm first; it’s easier to pull out strong ideas from a really long list produced by a good brainstorming session.

6. Create an editorial calendar.

Once you have a bunch of blog post topics, schedule them and assign them to members of your team (including yourself). Make sure everyone understands who’s writing what, who’s editing what, and when blog posts are scheduled to be published. Having a clear schedule with blog posts already plugged in ensures that you won’t be scrambling around for a post when you realize the entire blog team is going on vacation at the same time.

It’s OK to add things to the editorial calendar at the last minute, based on new announcements or developments in your company’s business. But in case you don’t have news to fuel the blog, an editorial calendar will help you keep it on track.

7. Train people on the software.

Whatever blogging software you use (I recommend WordPress, but Movable Type is also an option, and there are a host of other robust content management systems available), train your team on it. If there’s only one person on the team who knows how to actually post content, then you’re blog is going to grind to a halt whenever that person is away.

At their heart, blogs and social media are all about empowering people. So empower your team, even the blog virgins who have never used blogging software below and need some training.

8. Decide on a comments policy.

Decide on how you’ll handle comments. And in particular, decide on how you’ll handle negative comments. If your blog is at all successful, you will get negative comments. So will you publish those? If you publish them, will you respond to them? This is the hardest part for most traditional companies to figure out. Businesses are usually just not comfortable with the idea of responding to negative comments in a forum that’s visible to everyone.

But, not allowing negative comments may make your blog appear less transparent and less credible. And not responding to negative comments may allow false perceptions to take hold in your audience. Nonetheless, this is tricky for businesses. As I said in step No. 1, getting buy-in from senior executives is the most important part of this process.

There’s a lot more corporate bloggers can and should do, of course. But if you’re just launching a blog, going through these steps will give you a strong foundation for a successful blog. What are your tips for launching a corporate blog? Please share them in the comments below.

Filed Under: Blogging, Content marketing, Marketing & public relations, Popular, Social media Tagged With: comment policy, corporate blogging

How bloggers are handling the new FTC affiliate disclosure rules

January 21, 2010 By Mark Tosczak 5 Comments

It’s been almost two months since the U.S. Federal Trade Commission implemented new rules about how affiliate links can be used (or not) in blogs and social media. The rules went into effect Dec. 1, and since then I’ve been seeing bloggers and online marketers use a variety of strategies for complying. At the same time, the FTC itself is still trying to figure out how it’s going to enforce these rules, especially for bloggers.

For those who may not be familiar with this issue, here’s the basics.

Affiliate links. Affiliate links are hyperlinks, often inserted into blog posts or other social media channels, that pay the writer a commission if someone clicks through that link and makes a purchase. These were originally pioneered by Amazon and other major online retailers, and have become a valuable marketing tool for all sorts of online merchants and publishers, and a major source of income for lots of bloggers.

The FTC rules. The FTC’s new rules [pdf] essentially say that if you are get a free sample, or if have some kind of link to a seller (for example, you’re an employee) or you have an affiliation that could bring you income, you have to disclose it you review, endorse or otherwise give a testimonial. The new rules also put new restrictions on the use of testimonials and endorsements in all kinds of advertisers, but I won’t go into that here — I’m focusing on how bloggers are handling the affiliate disclosure rule.

The reason this has become such a big issue is, to put it bluntly, that a lot of people were inserting affiliate links into reviews and not disclosing that they were getting paid when people purchased through those links. I think a lot of people using affiliate links to make money were concerned that once they began to disclose the relationship, people would stop clicking and they would make less money. It’s a reasonable fear. After all, if someone is being paid when you buy a product through them, aren’t you likely to take their endorsement more skeptically, and also less likely to make that purchase?

I’m not going to go into whether or not the FTC should be regulating this, and I’m not going to go into whether or not bloggers should disclose the relationships in the absence of regulations that force them to. However, suffice it to say that a lot of bloggers are now disclosing these relationships in a variety of ways.

Now, on to some examples.

Jonathan Fields – Awake @ the Wheel

Blogger Jonathan Fields, the original career renegade, is using a very short disclosure next to the affiliate link.

Jonathan Fields discloses an Amazon affiliate link

I like this approach because the minimal (aff link) doesn’t get in the way of the writing. I don’t know, however, if this is enough disclosure to satisfy the FTC’s requirements. Fields is a lawyer by training, so I assume his reading of the FTC guidelines is a bit more rigorous than mine. But, what one lawyer does isn’t legal advice per se.

World’s Strongest Librarian – Josh Hanagarne

Over at World’s Strongest Librarian (a wonderfully written blog, by the way) Josh Hanagarne inserted affiliate links into his review post, and then disclosed them near the end.

Affiliate disclosure near the end of the post

I like this disclosure because it fits in so well with Josh’s writing style and his flow. Does it meet the FTC’s legal requirements? I have no idea. He is clearly trying, though, so that should count for something.

Michael Hyatt

Christian publishing house executive Michael Hyatt has come up with a standard set of disclosures to insert at the end of blog posts (in small gray text), depending on what he needs to disclose (an affiliate link or having received a free review copy, for example).

Disclosure text - even when it's not needed

I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure there is no requirement that you disclose that you don’t have any kind of material disclosure. Hyatt does have others (click on the link above to read his post), so I’m not sure if I think the disclosure of no relationship is overkill, or if it’s clever. If readers get used to seeing that small block of gray disclaimer text at the bottom of every post – even when it’s not necessary — after a while they’re likely to start ignoring it. In effect, it becomes invisible — at least to regular readers.

I’m NOT, by the way, saying that’s Hyatt’s intention. His reading of the FTC guidelines (or his lawyer’s) may lead him to believe that’s required, or he may feel that it’s the best thing to do in the spirit of full disclosure for his readers. I don’t know. But I suspect that the effect over time is to cause a sort of “disclosure blindness.”

Other options

There are certainly lots of other disclosure options out there. If you haven’t seen them yet, start looking. I guarantee you’ll start to notice them all over the place. I included an affiliate disclosure in my review of Beyond Blogging last week. I think my disclosure meets the FTC’s guidelines, but I’ll say it again — I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t play one on this blog.

One web site that’s trying to create a standard set of disclosures anyone can use is Cmp.ly. The idea of short links to a compliance statement is tempting. But the badges the site offers to provide disclosure with the blog posts seem, well, ugly. I suppose that’s the point — to make an prominent disclosure, but it’s not very elegant or satisfying.

All of this raises a bunch of questions that, as far as I know, there aren’t really any good answers for. Including:

Are any or all of these affiliate disclosure methods adequate for the FTC? I guess we won’t know until the agency goes after someone for a perceived violation. In fairness, FTC officials have said it’s not their intention to be heavy handed with enforcement and go after a lot of individual bloggers.
Is just saying “affiliate link” enough? I know we (me and all of my charming, intelligent and well-informed readers) know what an affiliate link is. But does everybody? That’s basically the disclosure the myself and a lot of others are using right now, but I don’t know if those two words by themselves will meet this still-undefined FTC standard.
If there are old affiliate links on your blog that were published before the FTC’s rules took effect, do you have to go back and add disclosure to all of those? I am guessing that most lawyers would say yes — erring on the side of caution. But again, I really don’t know.

The bottom line is you should probably disclose something in some fashion. How much and how you disclose seems very much up in the air. There’s an attorney in Texas, Mike Young, who apparently provides legal services for Internet marketing businesses. He’s got some blog posts and some ebooks on his site that might be worth checking out. In full disclosure – I don’t know much about him so I can’t say if his advice is good or not.

Bonus tip: Businesses considering how to comply with these rules should take a look at these suggestions from my RLF Communications colleague Aleasha Vuncannon. These aren’t legal advice, but they are based on solid, ethical public relations principles.

Are you using affiliate links on your blog? How are you disclosing them? As a reader of blogs, what kinds of disclosures would you like to see? And would those make you more or less likely to trust what a blogger is saying, and click on the link? Please share your thoughts below.

Filed Under: Blogging, Marketing & public relations, Online marketing, Popular, Social media Tagged With: affiliate links, FTC

What my English teacher taught me about brands and branding

January 20, 2010 By Mark Tosczak Leave a Comment

What did your teachers teach you about brands and branding? (Image by harrykeely via stock.xchng: http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=view&id=1195959

Some time in elementary school or middle school – I don’t remember exactly when – my English teacher taught us a very basic way to analyze characters in stories. There are four ways we find out about characters, she said:

What they say about themselves.
What they do.
What others say about them.
What others do regarding those characters.

This isn’t university-level literary analysis. But this sort of approach works very well for understanding branding and brands, especially if you think of brands as characters, with personalities and reputations.

The first two ways deal with branding – how companies set out to establish their brand in the marketplace. They do this by talking about themselves (that’s everything from advertising to the way sales people are trained) and by acting.

How brands behave is important, because the old cliché is true – actions speak louder than words. The airline can say it cares about you, the customer, but if your plane is delayed and nobody will tell you why or when you might actually get off the ground, you’re not going to believe that message about caring no matter how many times or how creatively it’s delivered in an ad.

Numbers 3 and 4 deal with brand. The difference between brand and branding is simple: Branding is what companies do to create their brands. Brand is how people experience a company — how they understand and think of the company.

What people say about your brand tells you something about how it’s perceived. When Jeff Jarvis started blogging about his problems with Dell, and others joined him, Dell’s reputation for quality took a hit – because of what its customers were saying.

How people behave also tells you a lot about your brand. If you have the best quality widget, and everybody says it’s the best quality widget, but nobody is buying it, than you know that something else is going on. Maybe it turns out that quality isn’t that important to widget buyers. Or maybe your price is so high compared to the competitors that the quality isn’t enough to justify the extra cost. Your brand might be more than just quality — it might be quality that’s not really worth the price being charged. Understanding the distinction is essential for understanding how your brand affects your sales, or any other critical goals you might have.

What’s all this mean to you? Well, the bottom line is pretty simple. When these four elements are all in agreement, you’re in good shape. But when they’re in conflict, you’ve got a problem. Identifying the source of the conflict can take your brand from weak and ineffective to strong and vital.

Have something to add about brands and branding? Please share it in the comments below.

Filed Under: Marketing & public relations, Online marketing, Personal branding, Popular Tagged With: branding, brands

The secrets of finding and sharing great content online

January 19, 2010 By Mark Tosczak 3 Comments

What are you sharing? (Image by jzlomek via stock.xchng - http://www.sxc.hu/photo/254271)

One of the primary activities on social media sites is content sharing. Through Facebook, Twitter and other sites, people pass around content they find interesting, entertaining and useful. Content sharing is the fuel for a lot of social media activity. A shared video or blog post can often become the basis for a conversation about that content. If one of your goals online is to build a reputation for expertise in some subject, content sharing is a great way to do that. By sharing links to content about, for example, investing, you position yourself as someone who knows a lot about that topic.

I get a lot of positive comments about the quality and quantity of content I share online. I think it’s been a major factor in the reputation I (think) I’ve built online, as well as the number of followers I have on Twitter (though I am no A-lister — yet). And I think a lot of people are a baffled by how I’m able to consistently share a steady stream of useful, interesting content. So here’s a little tutorial on my “secrets” of effective content sharing.

1. Establish a steady incoming stream of material to review for possible sharing.

Subscribe to blogs and news sites in your niche using an RSS reader such as Google Reader. If you are having trouble finding these sites, check out Alltop. Chances are, it has a pretty good list in your niche.

Subscribe to email newsletters in your niche. Many of the sites you subscribed to will also have email newsletters. Subscribe to those. You may want to use a separate email account (such as a free Yahoo or Gmail account) if you’re worried about your main email inbox being overrun. Some sites will offer more original content via email than they do via RSS.

Blatant self promotion: I offer both an RSS feed and an email subscription — over there on the right side of the page. The email subscription gets you all the blog posts as they’re published, plus additional “bonus” content — extra articles and tips, resource links, free guides and special offers.

Establish Google searches for key terms in your niche. If you have a really broad niche (such as investing or social media or exercise), you may want to keep your search terms narrow and specific, otherwise you’ll get a lot of the same links that you have coming in via the blogs and news sites. If you have a Google account (which I recommend, to access Big G’s many useful and free services), you can get these alerts via email or via RSS feed; choose whichever you find easier to manage.

2. Filter the incoming material for possible sharing.

If you follow the steps above, you will have a lot more material than you’ll actually want to share. Sharing, let’s say, 3-10 useful links a day is good. Sharing 50 will just overwhelm people. Don’t share everything you find. Instead, filter. When you filter — choosing the best content to pass along to your community — you add value.

I recommend filtering in batches, once or twice a day. I usually do this in the morning. What you want to do is pick out the best stuff to share. Here’s my quick-and-dirty two-step algorithm for filtering material quickly.

Look at the headline or summary. Does it appeal to you? Does it seem interesting, entertaining or useful? Does it seem like it would be relevant to your community? Is it new and interesting? If so, click on the link and open that up in a separate tab in your browser.
Once you’ve gotten a bunch of tabs opened up, review the material. Again, apply the criteria form Step 1. Pick the best 3-10 (depending on what you think is the ideal daily number for you and your community). Close the tabs for the links you’re NOT going to share.

3. Automate your sharing.

I automate most of my sharing. I do this because I want to reserve my limited “live” time on social media sites for responding and conversation, not pushing out links. There are lots of tools that allow you to schedule social media updates ahead of time. The one I’m now using that I like best is Hootsuite.

Hootsuite is an online app, so it’s available on any computer I have a web browser open on. There’s also an iPhone app version, though I haven’t tried it yet. In addition to scheduling, Hootsuite will also push updates to Facebook and LinkedIn, two of my other primary social media sites. And Hootsuite will integrate with Ping.fm, which in turn can push updates out to dozens of different social sites an status updates. I also like Hootsuite because it has a built-in URL shortener and has click-through tracking built in — useful for measuring how valuable people are finding your updates.

I usually space out my content sharing updates throughout the day, rather than doing a lot at one time. So, for example, I might schedule one at 9 a.m., another at 10:30 a.m., another at noon, another at 2 p.m. and a final one at 4 p.m. I think this allows me more opportunities to get in front of more people in my community, as different people are checking out social sites at different times during the day. However, if you’ve done this and have had a better experience bunching a lot of updates together, I’d be interested in hearing about it.

4. Check in during the day.

Log in to your social sites periodically during the day to respond to and participate to any conversation or reaction that might spring up around your shared content. This could be as simple as thanking people who are retweeting one of your tweets, to weighing in on a conversation that breaks out on Facebook about a link you’ve shared.

5. Measure your results.

If you’re doing this for primarily personal reasons, this may be less important to you. But if you are using this for any kind of social media marketing activity, you’ll want to measure how effective your content sharing activities are. I would like at three primary measurements here:

How many people clicked through your link to actually look at the content? As I mentioned above, one of the reasons I like Hootsuite is that it has this functionality built in. However, other URL shorteners also offer this.
How many people shared the content you’re sharing? For example, on Twitter how many people retweeted it? This is a sign that people found your content engaging enough to share with their own communities.
How much of a conversation sprung up around your content sharing? How many people responded or made a comment about it? How long did those conversations last (how many back and forths).

Those are my “secrets” to effective content sharing online. What do you think? Do you have more tips on sharing content? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Filed Under: Microblogging, Personal branding, Popular, Social media Tagged With: content sharing, Google searches, RSS feeds, scheduling tweets

Review of Beyond Blogging

January 15, 2010 By Mark Tosczak 3 Comments

Beyond Blogging: The Secrets to Blogging Success is an ebook (actually two) that sells for $47. It was written by Nathan Hangen and Mike Cliffe Jones, and has been receiving quite a bit of attention in the blogosphere, in large part because it contains profiles of successful, well-known bloggers and online personalities. Their goal is help you understand what made those bloggers successful, and how you might be able to achieve similar results:

Blogging can help you get that book deal you’ve always wanted, and in this book we will show you how it can be done. You can create an empire of big or small money making websites so that you can help people and make money doing what you love. Turn it all on auto-pilot and you’ve figured out how to make a living while spending more time having fun. That’s really the dream, isn’t it? Most of us want to find a way to make money without having to sacrifice personal or family time. We want to be able to take trips, spoil our wife and children, and slow down and enjoy life. We’ll show you how to do that.

The book profiles 15 high profile bloggers, including video blogger and wine merchant Gary Vaynerchuk, world traveler Chris Guillebeau, new media expert Chris Garrett, social media superstar Chris Brogan, the breathtakingly candid career blogger Penelope Trunk, six-figure blogger David Risley, money-maker John Chow, Mashable founder Pete Cashmore, marketer Shama Kabani, young entrepreneur Michael Dunlop, career renegade Jonathan Fields, original problogger Darren Rowse, Internet video star iJustine, self-improvement guru Steve Pavlina and copywriter and master online businessman Brian Clark. I was already very familiar with many of these bloggers before I read the book, but a few of them (especially Kabani and Dunlop) I didn’t know at all. While I had heard of iJustine and Cashmore, I didn’t know the details behind their stories.

These are all people who, one way or another, make a lot of money (and usually their living) from their blogs. Many of these bloggers make money the conventional way — they run ads, have affiliate links and sell content. But some of them (most notably Penelope Trunk) use their blogs as platforms on which they have built non-blogging businesses. The profiles are fairly detailed and lay out how these individuals got started blogging, their successes and failures along the way, and how they ended up making money. The book also includes a series of key lessons derived from those bloggers. A second workbook has forms to help you work through key questions for your own blog.

So, the question is, does it live up to its promise of showing you how to make money and do what you love? Yes, and no. Some people will read this book and say to themselves “I already knew all that.” Others could benefit greatly from it (assuming, of course, that they applied what’s in the book). And many, including myself, fall somewhere in between those extremes.

**Who should not buy this book?**

It’s not for you if you:

Are already deeply familiar with the above-mentioned bloggers and their practices
Have already immersed yourself in blogging best practices and have extensively read the advice and tips on sites such as Problogger, Copyblogger and DavidRisley.com
Are looking for detailed technical information and step-by-step instructions
Are not interested in making your blog into a serious business platform

Who should buy the book?

It is for you if you if you:

Are not familiar with these A-lister bloggers and their stories
Are new to blogging and haven’t immersed yourself in best practices
Are committed to making an investment of time (and maybe some money) in your blog in return for building a real business of some sort
Are committed to an “authority blogging” approach — NOT a ‘make money quickly and easily by blogging’ approach

Is it worth buying?

If there’s one place the book falls short, it’s in the ‘here’s how to make money and still have lots of personal and family time.’ Though some probloggers may eventually achieve that goal, the profiles in Beyond Blogging make it clear that most of these folks have worked very, very hard for quite some time to achieve their success. Once they pass certain income levels, they may be able to hire others, set-up some things on autopilot and slow down a bit, but getting there required a lot of time and energy. However, let’s be honest: If this was easy, everyone would be doing it, and no one would be making hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars annually through these online platforms.

But if you are truly interested in building a real business (whether a blogging business or an offline business) using online media, Beyond Blogging is a great primer in the key practices involved in doing that.

If you want a fast-start on the authority-blogging practices — creating authoritative content, building a strong brand and leveraging that over time into an income-producing business — without having to slog through hundreds of individual blog posts and interviews, then this book is for you. There’s lots of good advice and tips that, if implemented seriously, will help you to earn back what you spent on the book, and a lot more.

If you’re interested, here’s my affiliate link: Buy Beyond Blogging. The authors do offer a money-back satisfaction guarantee, so your risk here is pretty low if you’re still not sure but you think it might be for you.

If you’ve read it, please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Filed Under: Blogging, Online marketing, Personal branding, Popular, Reviews, Social media Tagged With: Beyond Blogging, Mike Cliffe Jones, Nathan Hangen

Most useful online marketing posts of 2009

December 23, 2009 By Mark Tosczak Leave a Comment

I wish I could say I’d written a bunch of these, but I didn’t. Nonetheless, Who’s Blogging What, a newsletter that rounds up the best in online marketing, has a great list of online marketing posts. There are 25 posts in each of five categories – social media, search marketing, user experience, email marketing and web analytics.

Want “Tips to Get People to Join Your Facebook Fan Page?” It’s there.

How about “Nine Effective Tips for a Better Landing Page?” It’s there, too.

Or “15 Best Places for Designers to Get Free Stock Photos Online?” Yep, it’s there, also.

And much, much more. For what it’s worth, Who’s Blogging What counts as one of my best finds this year, even though it’s been around for years. It’s one of those ideas that makes me slap my forehead and say ‘why didn’t I think of that.’ I didn’t, but fortunately someone else did.

Check out the list of the most useful online marketing posts of 2009.

Filed Under: Blogging, Content marketing, Microblogging, Online marketing, Personal branding, Popular, SEO, Social media, Useful stuff

Five simple steps to using social media for personal branding

December 15, 2009 By Mark Tosczak 5 Comments

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.

Filed Under: Career, Personal branding, Popular, Social media

3 tips for turning Gmail Tasks into a simple GTD tool

December 11, 2008 By Mark Tosczak 5 Comments

This morning I woke up to find that Gmail had enabled Tasks on my account. A task list has probably been one the biggest hole in the suite of Google apps and tools, and this new Gmail add-on looks like a pretty good start on remedying that

This is still a very lightweight app, and it doesn’t have half the features of some of the more mature task management apps out there, such as Remember the Milk and Todoist. While not specificallly designed for David Allen’s Getting Things Done time management methodology, with a few simple tricks it looks like it can be turned into a serviceable tool for GTD. Here are three tips to help.

1. Create a Next Actions list as well as Someday/Maybe lists and any other lists you might need.

Gmail allows you to create a series of lists. So I’ve created a series of lists to serve my purposes – Next Actions for actual task management, Someday/maybe for those things I might want to do someday, To read for books I’d like to read, etc. You can create and edit these lists using Tasks’ pop-up lists menu, in the lower right hand side of the Tasks box.

2. Use indentation to create GTD contexts within your Next Actions list.

Within my Next Actions, I’ve created a series of Tasks called @calls, @work, @home, @errands and so forth for the contexts that I typically use. When I want to add a next action within a particular context, I just put my cursor at the end of that @context line, hit return to get a new task and then tab to indent it. This creates sub-tasks for each context.

Since I’m using ‘@waiting for’ as a context, I can easily drag and drop next actions from one context to another by using the mouse to grab the ‘handle’ on the left side of the screen for each task. I can also re-order my contexts by dragging and dropping those context lists; the actions underneath each go with them.

3. Use the notes line to classify individual tasks by project.

Finally, I like to be able to see my tasks as part of the various projects they belong in. That’s easy. I just add a project title, in all caps, to the notes field for an individual Task. That shows up on the Tasks list, giving me a quick overview of what individual project a particular task belongs to.

I admit these ideas are, at best, work-arounds. It would be great if Google would add features such as tags and the ability to move tasks between lists. But until that happens, these ideas help.

Have some more thoughts about how to make better use of Gmail Tasks? Please share them in the comments.

Filed Under: Popular, Productivity, Useful stuff Tagged With: Gmail Tasks, GTD

What I learned experimenting with automated tweets

December 4, 2008 By Mark Tosczak 16 Comments

Recently, I spent a few days experimenting with a Twitter automation service, TweetLater. If you’ve ever followed someone on Twitter and then immediately had them follow you back or gotten a message that said something like “Thanks for following me, check out my web site at ….”, chances are you’ve been on the receiving end of an automated tweet. (Although, people can and do send these sorts of messages manually.)

Some people are truly offended by these sorts of automated tweets, and some will even unfollow you if you use them. I have received them, and continue to receive them sometimes when I follow new people, and they don’t bother me. My goal with TweetLater was to see what impact it would have on the people following me and whether it would drive more traffic to this blog. Here’s what I found, after using it over a period of three days.

Effect on followers
Using TweetLater, I sent automatic welcome messages to almost 50 new followers over the course of about three days. Three people expressed some sort of discernible unhappiness with those messages, as far as I could tell. Usually that took the form of a reply, a direct message back to me or a tweet expressing their dislike with automatic welcome messages. One or two people unfollowed me. To their credit, when I engaged a couple of these people, they were willing to have a conversation about their decisions. I didn’t try to change any minds, I just wanted to know what was motivating them. Did they dislike the fact that it was an automatic tweet, without human involvement, and thus impersonal? Did they dislike the fact that my welcome message asked them to visit my blog? In general, they disliked both. This small group of people viewed automated tweets as a form of spam.

So there was some negative feedback, though it involved a relatively small percentage of the people who got automated messages from me.

Effect on traffic to blog
Did the automated tweets drive new traffic to my blog? Well, yes, but not as much as I would have expected. And it had no discernible affect on the number of subscribers to MarkTzk.com. According to my Google Analytics numbers, I got just four visits from Twitter during the period of my little experiment. That’s one-third the level of traffic I got from organic search via Google over those three days (yes, I know, my traffic numbers are very small; I am not an A-lister). There were a few direct visits during that time, some of which may be attributable to Twitter, as people may have seen my tweet on their mobile device or through a desktop Twitter app and come via that route, and Google may not have recorded the precise source of traffic. But even counting those visits, most of my automated direct messages did not seem to generate new visits to my site.

Arguably, in the “negative reaction vs. increased traffic” trade-off, I got more new traffic from this practice. But it was a very small margin, and I tend to think it’s probably not worth even the very limited negative reaction automated tweets can create. I should also note that several people responded to my automated tweets with positive thank you messages, and a few opened up short dialogues with me that were, very positive. So not everybody views automated tweets as spam.

My takeaways
I do think services like TweetLater can be useful, but I think you’ve got to be pretty clear first why you’re on Twitter and what your goals are with your Twitter account. If you mean your tweets to represent you as a person and you want to build meaningful relationships, then automated tweets are probably not a good choice. If, on the other hand, you just want to automate your Twitter activity or drive traffic to a site, then this may be a good thing to do. If you choose that, though, you’ll have to accept that some people will respond very negatively, and often publicly, to your practice. (I’ll have another post about etiquette on Twitter and other social media sites in the future.)

To be really effective in driving traffic to your blog, I think you would have to spend some time experimenting with what exactly your auto-welcome message says and optimizing that. You would also have to optimize whatever landing page you send new followers to.

Some people send auto-welcome messages that don’t contain links. These thank people for following and may have a friendly message such as “I look forward to getting a chance to network with you. Please let me know if I can help you in any way.” Though that’s less pushy than sending a link, I’m not sure it really accomplishes much if there’s no human being behind it to start a dialogue.

The bottom line: If you use an automated Twitter service of some kind, be very clear about your goals with it and be prepared for at least some negative reaction.

(p.s. If you’re interested, I’m @marktzk on Twitter.)

Filed Under: Microblogging, Popular, Social media Tagged With: TweetLater, Twitter

How to use Circa for tracking tasks

July 18, 2008 By Mark Tosczak 4 Comments

In my review yesterday of Circa notebooks, I promised I would explain how I use a Circa notebook to keep track of all of my projects and tasks. This approach works for me, and if you’re struggling to keep track of a lot of tasks, projects and information, you might want to give this a try.

I have divided my Circa notebook with tabs into four sections: Work, household, personal and notes.

Work is for all of my projects and tasks that are related to my job. Household covers everything related to my family and home life — paying bills, cutting the grass, etc. Personal is for a handful of projects that don’t directly involve my family or my job, including this blog, my efforts at writing fiction and exercise plans. The notes section is for taking notes when I’m in meetings or wherever — it’s just a handy place to store that stuff until I file it.

Pretty much every task and project in my life can be put into the work, household or personal categories. Each section has a page that’s titled “Projects and Tasks: Work” (or Household, or Personal). That page, and most of the 8½ x 11 pages in my notebook are annotation quarter-inch sheets from Levenger, though I might occasionally put in other types of paper depending on my need.

On the first sheet of each section, I write a list of all of projects and all the individual tasks, usually one per line. Projects I highlight with a orange highlighter, tasks don’t get any highlighting. (By projects I just mean anything that’s going to take more than one action to complete.) I use a pencil for all of this, making it easier to go back and make changes. The annotation column makes it easy to add little notes later on, like a “waiting for” status. That gives me one sheet of paper in the “Work,” “Household,” and “Personal” categories that list all of the projects I’ve taken on, plus any individual tasks that don’t fall into a particular project.

Following that first page in each section, I have one page for each project. Individual tasks for that project are listed top to bottom. I include important details, like deadlines, here. Many of my projects don’t have enough tasks to require a full page, but with all that space I can make notes, do a little informal brainstorming and planning, and record reference information such as phone numbers or web sites.

As I complete projects and tasks I cross them off the summary sheet for each section. Individual project sheets can be recycled or filed away as projects are finished. Periodically I replace the cover sheet when it gets filled up, but this OK. Rewriting that list of projects and tasks forces me to re-assess them, and perhaps scratch off items that are no longer relevant.

Finally, in the front of the notebook, I have one of Levenger’s compact size Things to Do sheets. I put a new one in each day, write the date at the top, and list all of the tasks I want to get done that day. I’ll draw those tasks from my various project pages in the notebook, but also add emergent tasks as they arise during the day. At the end of the day I figure out where any undone tasks need to go — maybe on the next day’s list, maybe on a project page some place — and then recycle it.

The beauty of this system, I’m discovering, is that I can add more pages or extra reference information for individual projects. I could add more tabbed dividers if I found it useful to further subdivide the notebook. For instance, I’m considering adding a tab for MarkTzk.com to keep track of post ideas, design enhancements, the editorial calendar and so forth.

I’m sure I’ll continue to enhance and tweak this system. But I don’t see myself changing this anytime soon. Having everything written down in one place gives me considerable peace of mind.

What do you think, would this work for you? How do you organize your tasks and projects?

Filed Under: Popular, Productivity Tagged With: Circa, Levenger, project management

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