It’s no secret that social media can be one of the best ways to generate new business leads, especially for small business owners. I’m living proof of that; at Jester Creative, many of our clients have come from connections we’ve made through blogging, and via social networks like Twitter and LinkedIN. I am a huge proponent of small business owners participating in social networks, and I encourage it whenever I can.

Leveraging social media in small business is a very effective approach, but it’s not without its challenges. Lots of entrepreneurs jump into social media wholeheartedly – setting up blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages and more. Soon, they realize that, while starting these accounts is free, the work it takes to maintain them by regularly providing relevant, timely, compelling content can be pretty overwhelming. It’s a challenge to strike a balance between running a business and maintaining an active presence online.

I’ve been travelling the social road for about 5 years now, and I can tell you with certainty that it’s changed my business and my career for the better. I have some suggestions for how you can manage your online time in a more effective way.

Don’t be a lurker.

Here’s a hard truth. If you really want to make a go of leveraging social media for your small business, you can’t just spend 10 minutes a day checking your Twitter feed and be done with it. It takes work, and a good chunk of work at that. There’s a big difference between simply “spending time” on social media and being an active participant in the community.

I know a lot of businesspeople that consider themselves “lurkers” in the social space. They “Like” the Facebook pages of their prospects but never comment. They follow plenty of people on Twitter, but they rarely post themselves. They subscribe to all sorts of industry blogs but don’t contribute their expertise to the conversation by writing their own posts or commenting on others’.

This is the online equivalent of showing up to a networking event and hanging around at the bar complaining to your co-worker that you find it hard to meet new people.

If you’re going to make a go of this, you have to start talking. You have to introduce yourself to people. You have to contribute to the conversations that are going on. This takes more time than just lurking. It takes thought, and effort, and guts to reach out your hand and say hello. But I promise you, 99.9% of the people in the online world (at least the ones who are worth your time) are friendly. In fact, they are here for the same reason you are – to get to know people. To talk. To share.

So start using your online time more wisely. Don’t lurk. Participate. You’ll find that your online experience will immediately become richer, and you’ll reap far more rewards, because people will actually get to know you, and perhaps, want to do business with you too.

It’s about integration.

Self employed people like us don’t subscribe to the 9 to 5, Monday to Friday world. We work when there’s work to do. We put in the hours. So why is it that I hear about so many people who try to fit their online presence into the mold of the workaday world? Twitter doesn’t stop at 5pm (in fact, it often just gets going around that time). People comment on blogs 24 hours a day.

I’m not saying you need to be on social media 24/7. But in my experience, it’s the people for whom social channels are part of their every day lives who have gained the most from them.

I carry my smart phone everywhere I go. When I feel inclined to post something to Facebook, Twitter, my blog, or someone else’s blog, I post it. It might be 7am on a Tuesday or 9pm on a Saturday. I check in on my accounts on a regular basis – when I’m in line at the grocery store, when I’m in between tasks at work, or when the commercials come on TV. If it seems like I’m “always on” it’s because in some ways, I am.

You need to stop looking at your online world as something entirely separate from your offline world. It’s all integrated now. It’s all your real life. If you want to make a go of this, I mean really make a go of it, then you need to look at social media tools as a way to stay connected often. And that means you need to be connected. You need to integrate it into your life.

Yes, we all need to shut down once in a while, not just from technology but from everything. I encourage that as a healthy way to stay balanced in all aspects of your life. But if you look at social media as “only work” then you’re missing out on the opportunity to participate on a truly human level. And given the choice, I’d rather do business with a human being than a lurker that posts once a day at 4pm when his computer timer tells him to.

And in the end…

You need to ask yourself what you want to get out of your online presence. You need to ask yourself if you’re willing to make the commitment required to spend the time it takes, to stop lurking and start getting involved. You need to ask yourself if you’re willing to take some steps to integrate your online life into your offline life a little more.

Then you need to just try.

Thanks to @katgordon for the inspiration for this post. I’m not sure if it’s what she wanted to hear, but it’s what I believe to be true. Hope it helps!

[photo by borabora]

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The world is a noisy place, and it’s only getting noisier.

If you’re like me, you remember a time when there were only a couple of TV stations (in fact, when I lived in the Arctic as a kid, we only had ONE channel!). You remember a time when you had one telephone, and if it rang, and you weren’t home, it just kept ringing. The caller would just have to call back later. There were no answering machines. If you were on the phone, and someone tried to call you, it didn’t go to voicemail – the caller got a busy signal. Because you were…busy. The mail wasn’t just full of junk flyers and bills. There were letters and postcards too.

25 years ago, our incoming information was manageable. Most of us only had a few inputs – our work phone, our home phone, the mail, and in person. These days, the number of inputs has grown exponentially – we have voice mail at home and at work, multiple email accounts, text messages, Facebook messages, Twitter replies, Google+ conversations, blog comments….there’s seemingly no end to the amount of inputs we have.

For all the noise that our volume of inputs creates now, there’s a lot of good, too. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook enable us to keep in contact with many people at once (imagine having to send an email to 300 of your closest friends every time you wanted to tell them something!). Text messaging is a convenient and quick way to communicate to others. I wouldn’t give up any of our modern ways of communication for the world. It’s made me more productive, helped me grow my business and it’s a heck of a lot of fun!

So how do you manage the noise that all of these inputs create? Well, the truth is, it’s up to each of us to find the best ways to control the information we receive on a daily basis. Here are some things I’ve had success with.

1. Get control of your email. Today.
We are all overloaded with email. I used to be too, averaging 2-300 new messages in my inbox every day. But I sat down and took a good hard look at the email I was getting. Most of it was useless – notifications from Twitter and Facebook, and myriad other social tools. Email newsletters that I’d signed up for but never got around to reading. Blog post subscriptions. The number of important emails I was getting was actually pretty low.

So I went on an unsubscribe rampage. I went to every social tool and turned off ALL notifications. All of them! Now I check my @replies and Facebook messages when I want to. I unsubscribed from all email newsletters except one or two that I get REAL value from. I moved all of my blog subscriptions to Google Reader. I also give out my cell number to people who need to reach me on a regular basis, and ask them to send me a text if their message is short. Now, I average 20-30 mostly relevant emails per day. It’s made a huge difference.

2. Use Twitter more wisely.
I follow over 5000 people on Twitter. When people discover that, they wonder how I can possibly keep up. Well, first of all, I’m not trying to read everything – Twitter is about skimming for me. Second, I take advantage of Twitter lists. I have a private list of about 100 people and sources that I follow on a regular basis. I spend most of my time in that list. (Here’s how to create Twitter lists). I also use tools like HootSuite and Echofon, to help me manage my @replies and messages, and to follow #hashtag conversations. The secret to Twitter is to treat it like a pub or coffee shop – you pop in and only experience it while you’re there. When you’re not there, the conversation continues without you, and that’s okay. You can either catch up later or stop worrying you’re going to miss something (I do the latter most of the time).

3. Turn off ALL notifications.
This is a lesson I learned from Mitch Joel. Turning off email notifications is only part of the battle. You also need to shut off anything that blinks, flashes or beeps on your phone and computer screen. I even turn off my email badge indicators (so I don’t see the email piling up before my eyes – too stressful!). You don’t need to know every time someone replies to you on Twitter. You don’t need to hear a “beep” or see a red flashing light every time you get a text message or an email. The reason we are so exhausted and can never seem to catch up is because we’re continuously bombarded with new messages. YOU control who accesses you and when, not anyone else. Shut down those notifications. Do it today. Tell people if it’s really urgent, to phone you, or use a service like AwayFind. You’ll be so much happier, and get so much more of the important stuff done.

Finally – if you really need to reduce the noise so you can accomplish more, there’s one thing you can do, that I highly recommend. Just shut everything down. Close all applications on your computer and unplug the Internet. Put your phone away (and shut off the darn ringer!). Heck, turn the computer right off, and grab a piece of paper and a pen. Gain control of your information flow again, and you will find your productivity and your peace of mind go through the roof!

How do you manage the flow of information?

[photo by futureatlas.com]

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How busy are you? No really…how busy ARE you?

If you’re like most people, you’re so busy you barely have time to think. You feel like you’re always playing catch up, and you never quite get there. Yep. Me too.

I like to be busy more than just about anything – that’s probably why I have a full time business, a part time teaching job, two fairly big volunteer commitments, and a pretty active family and social life, offline and online. I usually have a pretty good handle on my time – in fact I pride myself on my time management skills. But this past Fall, my schedule spiralled a bit out of my control.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t meet my commitments – on the contrary. I was able to meet and exceed expectations (especially my own) with everything that was thrown my way. But the problem was, just about every waking moment, I was either working or doing something. I would get up in the morning, make a coffee and breakfast, and head right to the computer. Sometimes I was replying to emails in bed before I even got up. Every weekend I’d aspire to take a couple of days off, but inevitably work would almost always push into my Saturdays and Sundays, because I wasn’t accomplishing everything I needed to during the week.

Before I knew it, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d taken a real day off.

I finally decided enough was enough. My schedule was controlling me, and was time to get my schedule back under MY control.

Laying the ground rules.

There were a few bad habits that I’d developed that I needed to eliminate. Sometimes when working from home, it can be difficult to separate work and home time. It just gets all mish-mashed together. Hence, the bad habits like checking email in bed, and hopping on the computer and getting to work right when I got up.

I had to make some new rules for myself. I needed to make my health a priority. So I filled the fridge with healthy food, and changed my morning routine. It would no longer be wake up, check email, make breakfast, go to work. Now it’s wake up, meditate, exercise, eat breakfast, read, shower, get dressed, sit down at computer and work.

I simply don’t do any email and work stuff until I am ready for my day. I ease into the day now, starting each one off with time for me and my health. And laying that one simple ground rule has made all the difference to my mental state at work, as well as my pant size!

If it’s not in there, don’t do it.

The reason I was missing getting a bunch of stuff done every week was, it wasn’t actually scheduled. I would only really put things on my schedule when I had to BE somewhere…at a client meeting, at school, and so on. The rest of my work day was relegated to a to do list, and things like email and voicemail were just slid in willy-nilly throughout the day.

The result was, the to do list and the emails were controlling my work day. The volume of the average person’s incoming information – new tasks, emails, phone calls, and so on – is much higher Monday to Friday. So with those things bombarding me from all angles during the week, the work I was supposed to be doing wasn’t getting done. Instead, the important stuff got pushed and pushed until a quieter Saturday morning was the only time I could focus on it. Before I knew it, I hadn’t had a day off in six weeks.

All that has changed. At the end of each week, I open my calendar to the next week. I go down my to-do list, and I schedule the tasks on that list into my calendar. I block off time for all the work I need to do. I even have my morning routine scheduled. I schedule when I will check email throughout the day too. I leave blocks of free time for things that might come up (it’s not good to be over-scheduled either!).

Two interesting things have happened since I have started putting everything in my calendar.

First, I find that I am far more focused. I know exactly what I need to accomplish every day, because it’s right there in black and white (and red and purple and orange and blue). Second, and this surprised me…I worry less. Once my week is planned out, I can shut down my calendar and not have to think about it. I don’t have this constant nagging feeling of “Oh, I have to remember to do this or that”. Once it’s in my schedule, I can forget about it until it’s time.

Re-create your time.

We all get the same 24 hours in a day. Even though we all have obligations (you have kids, I have animals to care for), in general, and particularly when it comes to work, we still get to choose how we manage our time, and the things in our schedules we have control over, we can completely control.

Sit down and take a long hard look at your calendar. Instead of letting your time create your experience, you can re-create your time.

So what are you waiting for?

[Photo credit: ramyo]

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I see it at least 20 times a day. People asking for the “easy answer”, the “quick tip”. In this era of what my buddy Christopher Penn calls “snack sized” information, we’ve become conditioned to want to get all the juicy information in 140 characters or less. We think that one inspiring blog post is going to solve all our problems – if we just do that one easy step, we’ll be on the road to fame and fortune in no time. We want the easy answer. We want those who are more successful than us to tell us their secret to success, so we can go out and replicate it as quickly as possible.

So what is the easy answer? How can you get on the path to living your dreams RIGHT NOW?

You need to realize that there’s no easy answer. There’s no quick fix. There’s no top ten tips. There’s just doing the work. And then doing it some more. And more and more and more until you reach the next level. And once you get to that level, then you need to do more work. In fact, the higher the level you reach, the more work you need to do.

So what’s the easy answer for doing all this work? Thomas Edison said “Success is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration.”. I believe that having actual skills makes up a very small part of one’s success (and I’m a teacher, for Pete’s sake!). I have had students come into my class who have not got a clue about using computers, and within 6 weeks are editing magnificent videos. It’s not because they have magically developed mad computer skillz in a short amount of time. It’s not because they found some guru’s secret to learning computers super fast. It’s because they worked their asses off. It’s because they screwed up a lot and had to start over a bunch of times, and sweated it out at 3am the night before the assignment was due to make it the best it could be.

I do things all the time that I don’t know how to do. In 1998, my new boss had nobody else to teach a class on a certain day. So, I learned HTML and Dreamweaver in 3 weeks and then stood up in front of a class of 40 graphic designers for two days to teach it. I’d never taught a class before. Heck, I barely new how to use the stupid software. Did I screw up? You bet I did – to the point where some of the students actually walked out of the class. Did I sweat it out and stay up all night after the first class, and learn all the answers to the things I didn’t know, so I could show up the next day and get it sorted out? You bet I did. I sweated. There were tears. Textbooks got thrown across my office at 2am. But the next day I walked in calm and composed, and I nailed it. 10 out of 10, said my course evaluation. 10. Out of 10.

Success.

The reason we want the easy answers is not because we are lazy (well, most of us aren’t). The reason we want the easy answers is because we’re afraid. We are afraid that we’re going to put in all this hard work and effort and at the end of it all, we still won’t be successful. So why waste our time, when we can just ask that really successful person over there what their secret is, and hope for an easy answer? We’ll just keep buying all those “become a millionaire in 2 weeks!” self-help books and dream about what it will be like when success just lands in our lap. We can sit around and compare ourselves to others and say things like, “must be nice”.

Or we can get off our butts and get to work. We can mess things up and start over. We can decide that really, the easy answer is only one thing.

Doing the work.

[image credit: hale_popoki]

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I was looking at my calendar the other day. It’s really full. I’m totally okay with it being that way. After all, it’s my own fault. Last year I decided to ramp up on a few things – more teaching, more speaking gigs. We went full throttle on producing another season of our TV series. We took on new client projects. I got back into performing music, and took a bigger interest in fitness.

It’s no wonder there aren’t very many blank spots on my calendar.

At first I was a bit overwhelmed by the look of my calendar. My anxiety level rose as I realized that, for the next month, I had something on my calendar pretty well every single day. Not all work – but there was going to be something commanding my time and attention at some point, every single day. I felt exhausted just looking at it.

But then I noticed something.

In between all of those calendar entries was space. Sometimes an inch of space. Sometimes two. Sometimes, if I was lucky, there were 3 or 4 inches.

Inches of time.

These inches of time were empty. That meant they were mine, to do with as I please. Watch a movie. Call my Mom. Cook. Eat a meal with my husband. Sleep. Veg out.

Every day, I had things on my calendar that I had committed to do. But every day, I also had inches of time.

We live in a society where time is often dictated for us. We’re supposed to work 8 hours a day, have 8 hours a day to spend doing leisure activities, and sleep 8 hours a night. On the weekends we get 16 hours a day for leisure and 8 hours a night for sleep.

That model has never really worked for me. Usually it starts to fall apart at the sleep part. I try for 8 hours a night and succeed most nights. Sometimes I get 6. Other times I get 10 or 11, if my body decides it needs it.

I don’t work 8 hours a day. Sometimes I work 4. Sometimes 17. Rarely 8.

I enjoy the flexibility that my career choice affords me. I am not inclined to give it up. But along with that choice comes the knowledge that I will be putting in more hours at times than the prescribed 8 a day. And that sometimes I’ll get more sleep, and sometimes I’ll get less. And that sometimes I’ll have lots of time for family and friends, and other times I may not.

But I will always have inches of time.

Yesterday I had no inches. I jumped from one task to the next until I literally fell into bed at 10pm. Today, I have enough inches that I can sit here in this coffee shop and write some blog posts. I can sip my tea and look out the window. I can chat on the phone. Later, I have to work. But after that, I have another inch or two of time before I go to bed.

We are all so busy, so swamped, that we forget, that even as much as we have to do in a day, month, year, that we will always have those inches of time in our schedule.

How are you going to use your inches?

[photo credit: Johnny Boy on Flickr]

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