time management

Don’t have the time to do marketing

November 2, 2011

I don’t have time to do marketing

If there’s a common theme in the conversations I have with business owners, it’s that they don’t have the time to consistently market their business.

We might be talking about  sending out a customer e-newsletter, participating in social media, attending an important trade show or updating their website.  The specifics don’t matter.  They just simply don’t have the time.

I get it.  The whole 24 hour in a day thing.

I ask them if they have time to serve their clients.  And they say, “of course… I have to do that to stay in business.”

I ask them if they have time to send out bills to their customers.  And they say, “of course… I have to do that to stay in business.”

You find time to do what’s necessary.  If it has to get done, it gets done.

Ahhh.  So it’s not that you don’t have time.  It’s that you don’t consider marketing a necessity to stay in business.  Now that’s a very different conversation.

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How to be creative on purpose

July 31, 2011

…Do you need to be creative on demand?

My job is to be creative on demand.

The demands come in all forms.  It might be a strategy session for a client’s marketing plan, writing a print ad that will generate action or keeping the content on my blog, newspaper column or enewsletter fresh and worthwhile.

I don’t have the luxury of waiting for a muse to strike.  I’m always on deadline for something.  Which is why I was eager to pick up Todd Henry’s The Accidental Creative* (click here to buy) and learn as he promises in his subtitle…how to be brilliant at a moment’s notice.

There’s this myth out there that suggests that creativity comes from total freedom.  Well, I don’t know about you but I don’t know any professional today who lives in a world of complete freedom.  Instead, we’re called upon to be creative within the many constraints of life, world and our own habits, fears and obligations.

Todd explains that we all need to adopt the goal of being prolific, brilliant, and healthy. He explains why you need all three succinctly:

• Prolific + Brilliant – Healthy = Burnout
• Brilliant + Healthy – Prolific = Unreliable
• Healthy + Prolific – Brilliant = Fired
• Prolific + Brilliant + Healthy = Producing great work consistently

According to Henry’s book (and my own life experiences) there exists a creative rhythm deep in the heart of every individual, that is, “independent of the pressures and expectations you face each day.”

Establishing this rhythm will unlock your creative potential, provide you with the stability and clarity to tackle challenges, create and let your best thinking flow.

Your creative rhythm is set by how you structure and manage five key elements, the acronym for which is “FRESH.”

1. Focus

Most waste comes not from not doing the right work, but from doing the right work inefficiently. Clarity around objectives, separating the urgent from the important, is the springboard to effective creativity.

2. Relationships

Engaging with others is a powerful source of creative inspiration. Intentionally forging the right relationships with others gets you focused outwardly and frees you up creatively.

3. Energy

Think energy management, not time management. According to Henry, “it does you no good to micromanage your time down to the last second if you don’t have the energy to remain fully engaged for that time…you need to establish practices around energy management.”

4. Stimuli

Like any process, the output of the creative process depends on the input. Consistent brilliance demands that you be purposeful about what you’re feeding your brain.

5. Hours

Time is the currency of productivity. You must ensure that the practices that make you a more effective creative are making in onto your calendar.

It’s dandy to discuss all of this in theory but Henry really won my confidence when he provided practical weekly, monthly, and quarterly checkpoints at the end of the book to help put the five elements into practice.

Here are a few other key takeaways from the book:

• How books should not be read as pure information but conversations like social media
• The concept of the “Big Three” to allow you to focus on your critical creative goals
• How to send messages to your brain to look for solutions

If you are involved in work that requires you to think and create for a living, The Accidental Creative will help you form and build your best ideas and manage the creative process and work that comes from it.

*Yup, it’s an Amazon Affiliate link.

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Essential Twitter Tools

June 10, 2011

Twitter is an important part of my daily communications and community.  I use it to:

• Share great resources
• Chat with friends and peers
• Share my own writing/posts
• Access resources, articles, and keep current
• Test ideas, vent, laugh and connect
• Give myself a mental floss — you never know what you’ll see, read or jump into

But…I have a day job so I can’t spend all day, glued to the Twitter screen, waiting for someone to say something relevant.  So, I rely on a handful of Twitter tools that make it much easier for me to accomplish my goals and cover my day job as well.

Let me preface my tool talk with this statement:  Twitter is not about automated conversations between your bot and mine.  It’s about real interactions between real people.  But that does not mean all automation is bad.  It’s about finding the balance.

Twitter Tool #1: HootSuite.

Re-arrange tweets into conversations

Much has been written about this software.  It allows you to manage your Twitter activity (follow the main stream, when someone directs an update to you or sends you a direct message) but what I appreciate the most about Hootsuite is that it allows me to schedule updates (on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) so I can be sharing resources, blog posts etc. throughout the day, even if I’m in a meeting or asleep.

It also lets me “re-arrange” tweets into conversations, as you can see in the screen shot to the right.

Twitter Tool #2: Boxcar

Keep me in live conversations 24/7

Boxcar is an app on my iPhone and iPad.  It streams any message sent directly to me (I have it set just for Facebook or Twitter but you could set up Google Voice, e-mail and much more) right to my device and pops up with a portion of the message so I can decide if I want to read it, respond to it etc.   It’s very elegant and simple and very easy to set up and use.

This allows to to respond in real time — no matter where I am or what I’m doing.

Pre-set a handful of blogs to autopost

 

 

 

 

Twitter tool #3: Twitterfeed

This is a tool I use very sparingly.  You create an account and then add URLs that post new content (typically blogs).  Then, anytime one of those sites has new content, it automatically tweets it out on your account.  (You can set it up to do Twitter, FB and others).

I would only add blogs that stick to their core content faithfully and consistently deliver A+ content.  In my Twitterfeed account, there are only about 10 blogs loaded up.  I can regulate how often it updates my status with someone’s new content and it tells me what my Twitter friends are clicking on.  I don’t want to bombard my Twitter followers, but I also don’t want to make them wait until I get to my feed reader to share the best stuff.

Manage your followers with a click!

 

 

 

 

Twitter Tool #4: ManageFlitter

Oh how I love this tool!  With a couple clicks, I can see what tweeps I follow that have gone dormant, who are the super talkers (might be bots) and who has stopped following me, etc.  Then, I can unfollow or add people very quickly.

This used to be one of my most laborious tasks… cleaning up my Twitter followers.  But now I can do it in minutes and it keeps me connected to the people I want to follow and disconnected from those who got bored and haven’t tweeted in 6 months.

What the set up screen looks like

Twitter tool #5: Tweet Old Post

This WordPress plugin allows me to tweet out some of my older posts from my blog.  I’ve been blogging for over 5 years, so in theory, there’s some good stuff in there.  This plugin randomly grabs an old post (I can identify categories I do/don’t want included) and tweets it out.  I can add a prefix like A golden oldie… or a hashtag like #GreatestHits so my followers will know what’s up.

This is a great way to breath new life into old but still relevant content.

So there you have it….these five tools (along with some RSS feeds for listening by topics and Twitter lists for listening to my favorite people) are how I manage my life on Twitter.  They let me connect in real time, share my favorite writers, schedule some of my tweets and manage my followers.

I hope that at least one of these tools is a new find for you and that a mix of them can make your Twitter experience even better!

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