I was catching up on my RSS reading this afternoon and read a post on @chrisbrogan (Chris Brogan's) blog that started me down an interesting thought path. Chis had read a post by @ducttape (John Jantsch) about his social media strategy and then posted his strategy as well. I've gotten a lot more active in social media over the last year and have worked out a fairly extensive personal branding strategy but I realized I hadn't really captured, evaluated and understood all of the things that I was currently doing. So with that in mind I decided to capture what I'm doing and share that with you. So here's an analyst take on a social media strategy:
Tools:
- Mozilla Firefox
- NetNewsWire RSS
- Ecto (offline blogging)
- MacBook Pro
- iPhone
- Tweetdeck
- Skype
- Yammer client
- Evernote
- Scrivener (all my writing except blogs happen first here)
- Google Alerts (I have a name search that runs every day and emails the results)
- an assortment of other productivity tools including iWork, iCal, iMail
What's always open in tabs on Firefox:
- IDC Web Mail
- My Blog
- Typepad
- Yammer (I like the threaded view, I leave the client running too so I get pop up notifications of posts but I usually read the post in more detail on the web)
- Google Docs (I've started using this to collaborate with other analyst on presentations and other projects so there are always a few docs in progress)
- Optional: LinkedIn, Myspace, Technorati, Backtype, Digg, Addictomatic (I love this search for research)
So how does it fit together?
Daily:
- Constantly monitor phone, SMS, Twitter stream, Yammer stream and preview email (high priority email I answer immediately but everything else I deal with twice a day, well, I try to anyway. About twice a week I do a complete email cleanup.)
- Morning and evening review RSS feeds, Tweet anything useful, try to comment on at least 1 post
- Early morning - review To Do list (in Evernote), update, check calendar and lay out my day, update Facebook status
- Evening - review To Do, check calendar for next day, update Facebook status and answer any Facebook correspondence, check Myspace
- Research 20-30% of my time, vendor briefings, talking to end users, on line research
- Check blog stats on Typepad a few times a day (obsessive but I can't help it)
- at least 3 times a day I do a deeper dive into Twitter on Tweetdeck, run searches on vendors I follow, AR people I follow, other analyst, etc. Post a few links, answer questions, RT a few good tweets and jump in on any conversations
- Yammer - at least twice a day I do a deep dive into the threaded view to see what's up, post a few links, answer questions
- Google Alert
- check speaker leads and tips once a day for opportunities
- Blogging - I try for 3+ posts a week (I'm constantly tracking ideas in Evernote)
- IDC Writing, working on projects and developing presentations: 35%
- My new book proposal: 10%, need to spend more time on this one
- 1-2 times a week I spend time editing photos in Gimp, posting them on my website or Facebook when I have some time to work on it
- Deal with administrative responsibilities at IDC, 10%, sometimes more
Less often:
- Try for at least 1 speaking engagement every 2 weeks (I'd like to take this up to once a week this year)
- There are two vendor end user conference seasons so for Feb, March, April and May in the spring and Sept, Oct, Nov I average 2-3 user conferences a month
- Attend and / or speak at other conferences. I'm currently mostly focusing on Enterprise 2.0, social media, Open Source and SaaS.
- Trying new social tools (I don't really want another social network, Facebook and Myspace are fine for that and LinkedIn is fine for business networking). I try to take a couple of hours a week to try new things I run across, especially research tools.
- Run SEO analysis of my blog once or twice a month, check Twinfluence to see if I can improve my twitter use
- At least once a week look for new people to follow, check MrTweet once a month
- A few times a week I take an hour or so to look at the markets I cover and make sure I'm not missing something, try to think of new approaches, models, etc.
- I'm currently investigating adding some video to my blog and trying to work out a strategy to get more TV exposure.
Ok, that's a pretty busy list. I suppose it helps that I'm ADD and multi-task pretty often. What do you do and what tools do you find useful?
