I Commit to Practicing What I Preach

I have been invited to run a series of social media workshops throughout May at the Peabody Chamber of Commerce in Peabody MA.

The first session this past Friday was an information overview of social media marketing (SMM) for business, and the first 2 hour workshop will be about Twitter on May 1st. During that workshop we'll set up twitter accounts, customize the background and colors and discuss the finer points of communicating in 140 characters of less. At a future workshop we'll cover blogging using blogger.com/. Meanwhile, during each of the workshops, we'll also talk about linking all our SMM tools together: twitter with blogging, blogging with facebook, linkedin with blogging and twitter and so on.

So here's the thing: I can do all these SMM things, and I have participated occasionally for awhile for the benefit of my own business. However, I'm more likely to do this for my clients rather than for me. Since I believe that experience is the foundation for teaching, I believe I need to practice what I preach. Yes, it's good that I do blog for others, but blogging for my own business helps to put me back in my own shoes, my own world, and to speak from more personal experience. (e.g. It's time consuming!)

The commitment I must make (and I admit I have an SMM commitment issue) is to blog on a regular basis ... to practice what I preach ... to demonstrate how it works from my own experience.

One of main objectives of the work shop series is to help people choose a couple of SMM tools that will work best for them. Some people will have a blogging commitment challenge similar to mine. And if that's the case, then blogging may not be the right tool for them. Considering that blogging is very beneficial for search engine marketing (SEM), and that frequent blogging is required for that strategy to be successful, there's a pretty good chance that time-tapped business owners won't have enough time to add this to their overall marketing strategy. There are then two options: don't do it and participate in another way, or enlist/hire someone to do it for them.

These are the options we'll discuss for each workshop actually. Meanwhile, it's my job to do what I advise others to do. Today is the first day of my umpteenth commitment to blog on a regular basis.

Why such a problem with blogging you may ask? Good question, after all I do this for a living, right? Well that's just it ... I do this for a living and because I'm the primary producer in my company, wearing all the hats and doing most of the client work, I have little time for my own SMM. That's all about to change, for I've made this committment to start my day with my blog etc.

I usually start my day checking news and priming my brain for the work day well before the emails and phone calls start, so I'll just extend this to my blog ... the blog that will be followed by work shop participants. I now must hold myself accountable. I need to prove this commitment and then share the experience during the blogger.com workshop that's coming up in 3 weeks.

Let's see how I do.

Twittering - is it worth it?

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows you to post your up-to-the-minute updates – or “tweets” -- in real time. You can update others about your daily activities and keep track of what others are doing as well. It's like text messaging the world in 140 characters or less (spaces and punctuation included), or about a sentence and a half.

Most people I talk to are really, really busy and don’t see the value of this service, categorizing it as too much information (TMI). Others feel that those who “tweet” are all a twitter about nothing and don’t have a life.

I gave this a lot of thought – mostly because I too have thought of this as TMI. And it is, if people are talking about taking a coffee break, their shedding pet, a trip to the mail box, or other details that are, well, TMI even if you’re talking to the person. To me, that type of post is like someone talking out loud or thinking out loud – I block it out when they say it and I'll ignore it if they write it.

After getting past all the silly twitter status updates, I found some good ones that actually offered useful information. It was then that I realized maybe we marketers can make good use of this service.

I discovered that I actually know a few smart people who are using twitter as a social marketing tool. They write brief twitter updates with catchy titles and links that lead to more detailed information. Some name drop about famous authors and others. And that’s when I got to thinking about how I might be able to leverage this service in the same way for my business. Here's what I did for my first tweet:

I’m in the process of updating my Internet Marketing slide show that I’ll present on March 5th for Tech Month at The Enterprise Center in Salem MA in conjunction with the Massachusetts Small Business Development Center (MSBDC) and I want to write more about what that presentation includes for my blog and my Web site later, but I’m not ready yet to write that yet -- I’ve got to run out for a dog walk.

Now, according to what I’ve seen other people post on Twitter, another person might tweet about that dog walk. Instead, I chose to post an update that I’m working on the presentation for March 5th and included a link to The Enterprise Center where people can get a snap shot of what the program is about. Thus, my twitter post looks like this:

Preparing for internet mktg presentation 3/5 at Enterprise Center: http://www.enterprisectr.org/workshopschedule113.html

I’ve now told the world about it and anyone who is following me, or will be following me, can see that information.

Does it matter? Is it worth it? Hmmm … let me think…

At this time, not many people I know are using Twitter (because they think it falls into the TMI category - and I once agreed with them about that). And because not that many people I know are using Twitter, not that many people are going to see it. It might seem like a waste of time. But I’d like to think that if the 3 people following me find it interesting, they might tell someone else. Even if that doesn’t happen, it helped me think about what to write for this blog post. (I could write about so many things, choosing one and keeping it brief is another post.) It helped me focus on a topic that many, many people ask me about – a topic that leads to long discussions over coffee. So in the grand scheme of things, and at this time, the process of tweeting didn’t take much time, so I didn’t loose much time, so I guess it’s not exactly a waste of time …

I’m an early adopter. I signed up for it when it came out and did nothing with it other than follow others and learn how not to twitter. I’m going to take the wait and see approach and keep trying – but only as I come up with things I think might actually be interesting. For example, I am really going to go take that dog walk right now after I publish this blog post, but I’m not going to tweet about it.