Good Works Grapevine

I’m using my Friday this week, to admit that I’m terrible at time management and vow, publicly, to a plan for next week. Maybe this will help you as well.

“How much time do you spend building your social media brand?” This question came up as part of the Social Media Primer I participated in on Wednesday. And it’s a totally valid question. When you start talking about all of the cool tools available and the engagement required - it seems like an incredible time suck…and it can be. Just yesterday, I planned to catch up on business reading. Instead it turned into a day of tweets, Facebook and blogging. And it happened quickly. So to put some perspective on the time that I spend vs. the time required…I’ll map it out.

• I run Twhirl all day in the background to keep up with tweets on Twitter. This is probably a bad idea and I think I’m going to stop doing it. It is distracting and cuts into time that I should be doing other things. So, to guess, I probably spend a total of an hour checking Twitter alone.
• I check Facebook every time I see an update via email, so that probably turns into .5 hours per day. And most of the time, the update has nothing to do with business.
• I usually check LinkedIn once in the AM, so I’m OK there.
• I blog for several different blogs and I do this throughout the day. So, let’s say 1 hour for blogging on any given day.
• I follow-up on any updates on the GoodDogz.org NING community when needed.

So, as you can see, although I think I’m great at time management -I’m not. In fact, this is pretty bad.

Here’s my goal for next week - we’ll see how it goes and I’ll report again on Friday.

• 8:30AM to 10AM - Check Facebook, LinkedIn Groups/Q&A, AM Twitter, Email, 1 Blog Post and HARO (I’m not an early riser so 8:30AM is about the earliest you’re going to get out of me.)
• 10AM to Noon - Work on proposals, prospecting or client work
• Noon to 1PM - Lunch
• 1PM to 2PM - Business Reading (this is something that I cannot seem to make happen so I’m going to schedule it into my day)
• 2PM to 4PM - Client work
• 4PM to 5PM - COB Followup on Email, Outstanding Issues

Next week I don’t have any meetings written in stone so barring anything unforseen, I can make this work. So according to my plan, I’m going to spend 1.5 hours on social media building next week. We’ll see.

A wonderful colleague gave me the book Social Media Marketing: An Hour A Day by Dave Evans. I can’t wait to dig in just to see how much unproductive time I’m spending my brand. Probably a lot I suspect.