Posted by Pierre Khawand on Thu, May 06, 2010 @ 06:37 PM
The above blog entry was also posted on Twitter with a link to the original blog article. Soon after it was posted on Twitter, I got the following answer:
Which was posted by the Delicious.com team, an active member of the Twitter community as you see below:
Obviously, the Delicious.com team in this case didn't realize that my post was actually answering this question and therefore they proceeded with answering it. But that is not the point here. The point is that they are diligently watching out for their brand and addressing issues immediately as they come up.
Are you watching over your brand and your users like the Delicious.com team?
If not, here are 5 ways to get you started:
- Use Twitter.com search to keep any eye on what is being said about your brand
- Create a dedicated column in Tweetdeck to make this easy
- Setup Google Alerts for your brand name and related keywords
- Setup an RSS feed to relevant LinkedIn Answers topics that relate to your brand
- Join relevant Facebook and LinkedIn groups and discussions
What did I miss? How else are you watching for your brand in Social Media and the blogosphere? What else might you recommend?
Additional Resources
Recording of the
5 Social Media Tools by Jenny Blake lunch & learn webinar at the "Accomplishing more with less" group on Facebook
Posted by Pierre Khawand on Fri, Feb 19, 2010 @ 12:02 PM
A few days ago, I posted an article about the Old terminology, new terminology: "People connecting with other people." A related topic that I have been thinking about is the "old" inbox and the "new" inbox. However the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there is even a newer inbox: The Social Media Inbox. What do these inboxes mean and what are the implications of the advent of the Social Media Inbox? Keep on reading!
The old inbox
I still remember the days when the inbox meant internal e-mail only. I was in Southern California at a technology company with about 100 employees at the time and everyone had access to Microsoft Outlook and used it for internal e-mail and for scheduling internal meetings. The external world was not "visible" to internal employees. There was no Internet, if you can imagine. Only a few people had access to MCI and a few others to Compuserve. These privileged people were able to connect to the external world but still had to go through hoops to do it.
The new inbox
Then came the Internet and suddenly the "new" inbox was born. The new inbox is connected to the whole world. This brought amazing opportunities and also an unprecedented e-mail overload. Every person ended up with a handful of e-mail inboxes ranging from work, to personal, to "throw-away" ones just to keep unwanted messages out of the way. Soon after came the invasion of the mobile devices and e-mail on the go. Consolidating messages into one e-mail application and/or synchronizing between multiple applications and devices became necessities and many of us have done some degree of consolidation and synchronization along the way.
And now meet the "new new" inbox: The Social Media Inbox
Then Web 2.0 snuck upon us! Now we are all part of the creation process and part of the conversation. Like never before, we the people can share information, participate in conversations, and build our own social networks. We are in direct contact with the people who once were invisible. Suddenly we are no longer just in our e-mail inbox(es). We are now as often or even more often in our new and expanded inboxes: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, YouTube channels, del.icio.us bookmarks, StumbleUpon articles, and you name it, which all together I am calling the Social Media Inbox.
This inbox is emerging as a powerful force and even the most authoritative search engines are re-inventing their search approach to include the Social Media Inbox.
So what does it all mean? What are opportunities and the challenges?
The Social Media Inbox brings some unique opportunities and some rather unique challenges as well. On the opportunities side:
- We are connected with 100's of millions of people and are able to have real time conversations with them
- We are learning what they are like and how they think (market research)
- We are discussing our brand and the value that we bring to the table (marketing)
- We are influencing their buying decisions (sales)
- We are exchanging ideas and building on each other's ideas (innovation)
- And the list continues!
On the challenges side:
- We are faced with more information overload than ever before
- We are constantly interrupting our core activities to keep up with what is going on in the world
- We are not necessary leveraging this new inbox to the extent that we could
- And the list continues!
What does your Social Media Inbox (SMI) look like and how are you managing it?
If you haven't yet expanded your definition of the "inbox" and explored the Social Media world, this is the time to do so. Some exciting opportunities are awaiting you. If you have, this is the time to reflect further on the opportunities and challenges and how they can be managed to help us be more effective in the workplace and beyond.
As we continue to explore this topic and explore best practices to manage the SMI, we need your help! Please share your thoughts below or fill out this short Social Media Inbox survey (5 to 10 minutes) and we will share the survey results with you.
Take the Social Media Inbox survey and become part of the conversation!
Posted by Pierre Khawand on Tue, Nov 03, 2009 @ 12:24 PM
In the past, it used to be e-mail and meetings that consumed everyone's time, and now it is e-mail, meetings, and social media, and not necessarily in this order. For years, in our workshops, we talked about the e-mail overload, and taught ways to overcome the e-mail overload, and now we are broadening the scope to include social media.
So how do you reduce the social media overload?
Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Be Strategic: Don't just be there, but be there with a clear purpose.
- Follow the relevant people: Those that add value and not just chatter.
- Stay on brand: One of Jason Alba's advice that I keep re-iterating.
- Reuse: Create high value content and reuse it in all platforms, you know they now all link to each other, so you can more easily leverage your content in multiple platforms.
- Time yourself: Don't just be there indefinitely, make it 5, 15, or 40 minutes (again with a clear purpose)
- Don't treat it like a homework (especially twitter): You don't have to keep up with what happened when you were gone. What happened before is mostly old news by now.
- Remember that the time you spend on it needs to be proportional to the number of people you have in your network (otherwise, it is better investing time to growing your network).
Say "yes" to social media, "but" keep it well under control following the time management tips described above!
Posted by Pierre Khawand on Tue, Oct 27, 2009 @ 08:35 AM
If we are unsure what to do, or hesitant to take on the next important and challenging task, consciously or subconsciously, what do we end up slipping into?
Into our e-mail inbox!
E-mail is "great" (or not so great) that way! It gives us this immediate satisfaction of getting something done and feeling good. Does it sound like an addition? It is. And like any addition, the feeling good doesn't last too long, and we seek more of it to bring back that feeling, but what happens is that we get increasingly and chronically "e-mail fatigued."
So what can we do about it?
- How about becoming more purposeful and more intentional, and instead of resorting to e-mail (or Twitter-which is e-mail on steroid one might say), resorting to a few minutes of stopping and strategic thinking to really identify something meaningful to do.
- How about we take on the challenging task first instead of e-mail first. Let e-mail be the reward (if it can be called a reward) instead of being the pre-requisite. When we take on the challenging task first, we learn and develop. We also prompt the issues and bring ourselves to face the issues. As a result we feel more accomplished and we contribute more significantly to our team and organization!
- How about we disconnect for a bit (from e-mail, and even the web if applicable) and just focus on moving forward this important and strategic program or initiative. Adam. S. Christensen (our guest speaker, at the Gen X in Action webinar recently--recording available) said "I get the best work done when I am disconnected". Try it out and see for yourself!
Whatever it is for you (E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, or whatever else) what are you going to do about it? Put it on the side for a bit, maybe even "disconnect", and get engaged into something more purposeful!