Mixing business with pleasure

Bringing a social context to your business life can grey a lot of lines (and hairs). How much of yourself do you invest in an online persona for business? How much of your business time do you spend investing in relationships that may or may not relate directly to your business?

It’s a tough line to walk, some people have chosen not to walk it at all and some have dived in head first not knowing when–or if–they’ll find the bottom. I’ve done a little bit of everything and I’ve landed on the following conclusion:

Online social tools rock, and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to using them, but if you’re going to use them, and use them sustainably, you’ve got to know where your boundaries are.

It’s easy to bring your entire world with you. It comes along in your pocket, all of your friends are at your finger tips. Literally, even the ones sitting right across from you that you met for a drink and aren’t talking to because you’re engulfed in all the “action” online, or you’re busy trying to solidify your plans for later on tonight… right in front of the person you’re supposed to be spending time with now (sorry, that’s a rant for another blog post). At any rate, the lines between business and social are getting fuzzier, not more concrete. It’s up to each of us to define our own boundaries.

Self imposed boundaries on social networks. What do those even look like? Networks like Facebook, where you’re forced to differentiate between a brand/company and a person, make it easy. You’ve got your personal connections in one place and your business ones in another. But what about something like Twitter? Do you go ahead with one account? Two? More?? Should you even have a personal account?

It depends. Let’s try some scenarios, shall we?

Scenario 1: You could give a hoot suite about social networking for personal reasons, but you’re the lone communications/pr/marketing person in your office and the task has fallen upon you to figure out all of this Twitter business and bring the company into this century. What do you do?

You make one account. You put your name on it somewhere (like saying this account is managed by: XXXX), and you put your own flavour to what you share, but you do it in such a way that the content isn’t so unique that the young buck you want to hire so you can have your evenings and weekends back can step in without too much disruption to your feed.

Scenario 2: You’re the young buck that was just hired to take over a social media role. You’ve got your own account, but you know the value of having a personal touch and being seen as the name and face of any certain account/company. Do you give up your personal account in lieu of promoting the business one?

No. You do both… especially if you’re a young buck! Keep your own online presence. If you’re the manager and you intend on being where you’re at for the next decade or so, you can get away with managing just the biz account. But if you’re out there movin’ and shakin’, you’d best keep a pretty solid line going between business and pleasure, you don’t need to be Calgary’s Phone Dog.

Scenario 3: You’ve been tweeting on behalf of a company, everyone knows you as that… you’ve gone and fused your own brand with theirs. Uh-oh. You didn’t really intend for it to happen.. it just did. Now what?

Take a deep breath. You’ll be fine. Go start a personal account. Right now. Then you can send all the flirty DMs you want to that really cute geek you met at the last tweetup without worrying whether or not you’re being unprofessional.

Bottom line… act on your own Twitter feed how you would act out in public. If it’s questionable, by all means, take precautions to protect it, to have an anonymous account or make damn sure you’re not the one on the biz account (and that nobody knows where you work!) Act on your work Twitter feed the same way you would act in the office or while out talking to clients. If there’s something you’re not sure about, avoid the situation altogether. It’s not worth the hassle of being one of the first people to help figure out what laws should apply where.

A Day In My Life: Tweets For Eats YYC

Scavenger hunts have always been an amusing way to spend a day (I even did one at my sixth birthday party). But with the advent of social media, they’re taking on an entirely new twist. Even Pearl Jam hopped on the hunt train. I’m not sure we hit 5.9 Million tweets globally, but we certainly took over Twitter today in Calgary as participants in Tweets For Eats YYC tweeted in photos, took good-natured jabs at one another online and raised the profile for a Calgary charity as we descended upon the city. It’s yet another avenue of online successfully meeting offline… and all participants and spectators having a blast in the mean time. Today was, without a doubt, the most fun I’ve had at a fundraising event in a long time.

Let me start out with a little run down of the day. I was on a team with Margot from The Costume Shoppe and her friend Karen. We met for a morning picker upper at Chiasso and then headed on over to Melrose to join the couple dozen people already stationed outside waiting for the doors to open and check-in to begin (not to mention the free breakfast sandwiches, yogurt and fruit Melrose had waiting to fuel us up). The hunt didn’t start until 11, but at 945 the doors opened wide and we rushed in to get our forms all filled in and wait for the much-anticipated hunt list.

We ride bareback on Team Silvester

At 11 on the nose, the list was handed out. There were over 200 items consisting of sponsored items recognizing the hunt sponsors, physical items (as in we had to bring these back with us), photograph items (send in a picture) and unique items (only one team could win each one!). Most teams were out the door lickety-split. Not us. We took our time and perused the entire list, sorting out what we wanted to find and splitting it up by neighbourhood or location. From there, we hopped in the car and off we went!

The hunt could take you from just a block or two from the start point all the way out to Elbow Falls. We concentrated on covering as many items as possible in as small an area as possible. This meant restraining ourselves to downtown, Inglewood and… where else but The Costume Shoppe!

I had no idea the day was going to go by so quickly! Part of that was thanks to my awesome teammates, I couldn’t have asked for two better ladies to spend the day with. We had a hoot and had a similar approach to the hunt! The other, well, there were just so many places to try to visit and items to get. We got a little creative with a couple of the clues, like having our team crawl underneath a truck bed instead of a real bed and finding a paper clip in place of a “trombone” (Hint: it’s the French word for paperclip). I was also introduced to a couple of places in the city I wouldn’t have known about otherwise, like this garage filled and decorated with bottle caps!

We didn't do it... I swear!

The day ended at 400pm back at Melrose to tally points, have some much-needed food and drink, listen to some tunes and await the winner of the grand prize of 4 iPads! Three recounts later, we had our winners. The Four Pink Ladies!

Check out the #t4e stream to read all the Twitter updates and photos from the day.

Congrats John S, Mike B, Mike and Ally S on a hunt well done. Can’t wait for next year!

Twitter… it’s where the influencers are

If you’ve had any contact with social media, any at all, you should know that one of the main reasons for being online is to find your influencers. Those people who care about you, your brand and everything you stand for. Finding them in the past hasn’t been easy, and it’s definitely been time-consuming. Almost to the point that it may not have seemed worthwhile to put that much time and effort into it. But now… now! My goodness, now, finding your influencers is as easy as spending a few minutes a day participating in conversations, spreading information and just all-round caring about what your friends and followers are up to.

As of July, 2010, Master Maq reported that there were 10,501 local Twitter users in Calgary. I’m not sure what the number is a year later (that was the last report I found on his blog). I’d be surprised if it had more than doubled. Even less than that amount of Twitter users are real information contributors. Many of you folks sit out there lurking, just waiting for the rest of us to entertain you. But that’s not to say you aren’t watching.

Awhile back, waaaaay back to November, 2010 (if you can remember that far) there was a panel at Third Tuesday about last year’s civic election. One of the panel members (forgive for not remembering his name) asked the audience members how many of them were on Twitter. Once those in the room with accounts raised their hands, he proceeded to call them (us) all weird. But it’s true. We are a weird bunch. Not weird like you’d expect to encounter at a sci-fi conference, but weird in the fact that we’re so plugged in, so hyper-engaged. It’s this characteristic that makes Twitter a hotbed of influencers. People who want to be in the know right now.

Last month, I sent a question out into the Twittersphere asking how many people shared information with their offline networks that they heard about through one of their social networks. Nearly everyone who responded (granted, this was only a dozen or so) said they shared information with offline friends frequently. All respondents I knew to also have relatively large offline networks. In other words, they are just as plugged into the “real world” as they are to the online one.

Have you ever heard of the 1/9/90 rule? The gist is that for every 1 person that posts content online, there are 9 people interacting with that post and 90 people watching and reading what’s going on. There’s no timeframe for those eyeballs mind you. So in a real-time environment like Twitter, we can’t count on followers alone for an exact measure of reach. In fact, we can’t count impressions at all, merely the potential reach. That number would be astronomically large, so even predicting a reach of 10% of that number is impressive. If you’re repeating the message, well, compounded tweets will make it around eventually. And remember, it’s not a passive medium, like reading a newspaper or magazine. It’s an active one where people are having dialogues and conversing about everything from where they’re going for lunch to local and international themes and events.

I’ve said many times before that Twitter is the most valuable social networking tool I’ve found to date. For those of you who balk at its use (whether for B2C or B2B business use, promotional or personal), it’s a sure tell you don’t understand the medium, nor do you seem to want to. On this point, please accept my condolences on all of your missed opportunities. We shall continue to reap the benefits of our active little circle without you. But for any of you still curious about what the Twittersphere may hold for you, jump on in! The water’s fine.

Who are you at the Twitter cocktail party?

Here’s a second-hand stat I heard today:

“95% of your tweets should be about product or promotion.”

To which I respond:

“Would you rather be an interesting person someone met at the party? Or the annoying announcer nobody wants to listen to?”

Social media isn’t hard people. Quit trying so hard to make it hard. Be yourself. The organic (and way more lucrative) opportunities for your product or promotion will come. Just quit trying so goddamned hard. Or if you must, put that energy into being the life of the party instead.

Just look at what we’ve gone and done

Do you remember when everyone was all excited that the internet, and subsequently social media, gave them a voice? It was novel to publish something that anyone else could read without having to go through a publisher. Anyone could find you. So many people were rushing online that it was a little overwhelming. It was almost like a million stock brokers all shouting on the exchange floor. Buy me! Sell me! Ah heck, somebody just listen to me! And like the good little minions we’ve been trained to be, we stuck our fingers in our ears and hummed as loudly as we could. “I’m not listening. I can’t hear you!”

The land of Twitter, at least the land of Twitter that I knew, went through a phase where it was all just a bit too chaotic. There were people everywhere, yet only a handful who seemed to know what they were doing. Some of them became annoyed with the massive amount of newbs flooding the little world they had worked so hard to create. In the Calgary scene, I caught wind of a rather grumpy undertone starting to take seed. Resentment? Exhaustion? Having to watch and experience yet another wave of people “discovering” social networking and how fast their message can travel, watching them stumble a bit when to us it’s so natural and so easy after years playing with these tools. I could see how that could get old real fast.

But do you know what’s gone and happened? Why, we all stuck it out. Surely, if you were that fed up with everything, you could have simply given up, closed your account and moved on. And some of you have, but the rest of us… we’ve stuck it out. Our little community was experiencing a rather massive growing pain. But much like our awkward adolescent years, we’ll grow up and block it out.

We’ve created something pretty special. We’ve created a place where individuals come along to a group full of people they’ve never met before and announce “Hello, I’m here!” Do we turn away with a cold shoulder? No, we turn towards them, give them a big a smile and say “Welcome!” And with that, we’ll turn to the rest of the group and say “Hey group! Have you met so and so? They’re new here. Why don’t you help me make them feel at home?” Then the group swarms around, and the newcomer is welcome. All it took was for them to let us know they’re here.

This feels good. I’m proud we’ve managed to cultivate a little sense of community in this online world. Those of you in amidst the crowd, helping others figure it all out, you stand out to me. You’re my kind of people. I can’t wait to see this perpetuate.