We all know what not to do, but how do you know what TO do?

As we each reflect upon our lives, whether it be relationships, business, finances, exercise routines, eating habits and so on, we seem to always ask ourselves one question:

What could I have done better?

It’s common to want to improve areas where we noticed weak spots to strengthen our overall game, but what if we flipped this around and asked ourselves:

What did I do right?

So many people are still trying to figure out this ‘social media thing’.  It’s new, it’s overwhelming, and the rate at which things change is scary.  Examples of what not to do are abundant, but how do you know what you can do right?

1. Take a look at your existing business and identify your strengths, talents, and areas that are going well.
2. Spend some time analyzing these areas and why they are your strengths, talents, and areas that are going well.
3. Take what you’ve observed and apply them when you begin to engage in social media.
4. Tweak and adapt as necessary to meet your objectives.

Chances are if you’ve had success offline, you’ll have success online. There are always the basic dos and donts, but they’re nothing more than acting in a publicly socially acceptable manner.  The rest is up to you.  So take a moment to look at all the things you do right and then rinse and repeat with social media.

Is treating others like human beings really that much to ask?

Social tools provide me with insight into the people that use them.  Being able to connect with a musician I have been following for over a decade via his blog, Twitter, etc. is something most of us would never have experienced before.  I appreciate the added layer to the guy behind the music.  It’s an opportunity to gain some insight into how he thinks and what he cares about, which to me adds so much more depth and meaning to what he creates.  This is also the approach I take when reading blogs from those I follow in social media, and friends and acquaintances I keep up with along the way.  Having insight and being able to converse on their blogs, Facebook pages, through conversation on Twitter… it makes my experience with these people more meaningful.  But where I use it to create value in my own life, there are those that choose to be destructive in their interactions.

I just read this post from Matt Good’s blog called “Trying to Pull Chairs Out of the Floor.”

I’m disgusted (though not surprised) that anyone would use the opportunity and direct links to others that current communication technologies allow us so ridiculously.  This has been on my mind as of late with a myriad of conversations I’ve been seeing, the post above is just adding to a long list.  Why does the fact that we can now say whatever we want, to whoever we want, whenever we want  mean that we get to neglect the fact that the people we are talking to are people too?  The social web is becoming more human, and yet it’s making us less so.

Seriously people, there’s constructive feedback, there’s making quality connections and then there’s being dumb and insensitive.  A lot of which is coming out on these tools.  It’s easy to get sucked into this kind of behaviour, so this next bit is as much a reminder for me as it is for you:

Quit taking something good and turning it into your playground for petty games and grade school politics.  It’s your opportunity to impact somebody directly.  The impacts of what you put out there are hard to measure.  We don’t know how far our actions and words can reach, but the web today takes everything… EVERYTHING… and amplifies it by at least a thousand times..  So if your one of these berating fans, or engage in these petty childish games I keep seeing, do the rest of the world a favour… grow up and be accountable or just shut your mouth.

Oh no I Didn’t! (finger wag included)

Oh yes I did. I did, I did, I did. It’s unthinkable. It’s ludicrous. This time I’ve gone too far. What did I do? I cut off my Internet at home.

Say what now? You heard me. Internet. BAM! Gone. Finito.

I’ve been all about creating efficiencies and alignment with the things in my life and with my activities lately. I recently turned my attention to my landline and thought ‘what is this still doing here?’. Hardly anyone phones me on it anymore… They all call my cell phone. Coincidentally my Internet came with my phone… I could have kept it. I know it works without actually having a phone. But I’m still in the midst of ‘FREE’ by Chris Anderson, at the time I had gotten to a part where he was talking about how cheap it was for him to work… He had a $250 netbook and free wifi in coffee shops. There are 5 or so coffee shops within about a 5 block radius from where I live. So I’m giving this a try.

I’m not completely cut off, I still have my email, Twitter and Facebook.. You know… The essentials via my iPhone.

But I also have something less. A little more time. Because now my Internet usage is that much more conscious. Monday night I spent 2 hours playing around with my guitars relatively uninterrupted. I can’t remember the last time I did that… My auto pilot would have checked my computer for something interesting happening online at least every 20 minutes before. But there’s always something interesting to find online… There’s only so much time for me and my guitars…

Today is day 3 of my ‘no internet’ experiment. If I go completely nuts, it will be back. But if I have my way, my time, my focus and my efficiency will all benefit.

The number one rule on the internet is…

There are no rules.

If you think there are, break them.

Be disruptive.  Make people think.  Go against the grain.  Be creative.  Trust your gut.  And don’t ever listen to anyone who tells you it’s against the rules.  Because really… there are no rules.  It’s the internet.

Go be a free spirit.  Go spread your wings.   Go show me and the rest of the world what you are capable of.   If you fail, awesome.   At least you tried.   The internet takes away the excuse not to try.   It’s so EASY to at least try. And then when you’ve seen how easy it is to try the first time, it’s even easier to pick yourself up and try again.

Do you only have 5 minutes a day to spend on something?    Do it.   5 minutes once a week?  Do that too.   There aren’t any rules about that either.

Maybe you want to blog but don’t think your writing skills are up to snuff?   Or that you will run out of ideas of things to blog about?   There are no rules about quantity, topic, quality, etc.   You may want to think about what you put out there and how it will be perceived, but there’s nothing stopping you from publishing something.

Do you think you need a strategy?  It could be a good idea to help make the most effective use of your time (and if you have a brand to look after).  But if you’re a one person show… you may make things up as you go along anyway.  That in and of itself is a strategy.   A strategy is nothing more than a way of approaching something.

Think like the pirates… they live by The Code – but they’re more like guidelines anyway.

Switching RSS readers? Try an opml file

Someone recently told me about a cool blog aggregator called Feedly.  It puts your blog feeds from RSS into a magazine style format to read.  I only had one problem with this.  All of my RSS feeds were in my RSS reader on my desktop.  Feedly talks to Google Reader via Firefox to find out what blogs to draw from.  There are nearly 50 blogs (uploading to Google tells me now that I have 72 blogs in there…) that I keep up with on a weekly basis.  There’s no way I was going to add these one by one to Google Reader… but the allure of trying out Feedly was just to great.

If there is a way to do something without creating more work for myself, I am the first to go looking for it.  So, what did I find?  A way to export ALL of my RSS subscriptions, much like you would export your contacts from Outlook to import somewhere else.  It’s called an OPML file.  All I did was head to the ‘file’ tab in my reader, and click on ‘export subscriptions’.  It automatically bundled them up into a handy little opml file that I saved to my desktop.  Next stop – Google Reader.  Importing your feeds to Google Reader isn’t front and centre, but it’s easy to find.  At the bottom of your feeds list is a link that says ‘manage subscriptions’.  From there, there is a link to ‘import/export’.  All you have to do is then upload the opml file you created from your desktop reader, and Google Reader does the rest.  The same would go for installing your feeds on another desktop reader, or a different computer.  Export the feeds as the opml file, then import the same file into the reader.  The technology does the rest.