I am paying a lot more attention to flow these days and my productivity is already improving.
One of the best things about working from home is more control of your work environment but in almost any work environment you do have some control.
A few lives ago I worked in a company with an unhealthy addiction to CC; every email went to everyone it seamed and it was easy to get hundreds of internal emails a day.
In reaction I turned of automatic email fetch and started to only hit send/receive 3 times a day. Some colleagues who sent emails like “can you come into my office” were thrown at first by my lack of immediate response but they got the hang of it and my productivity increased. Read the rest of this entry »
Objectively assessing the decisions we make and the benefit we get from them forces us to confront our prejudices. Family or work, Mac or Windows, AT&T or A good network.. even Time or Money. Going into these assessments we all have bias’s we consciously recognize and some we don’t.
A pile of books sits on my side table, physical books. Most of them best sellers and all of them recommended by people I trust.
But last night I sat next to this stack of authoritative, consumer endorsed, well-edited wisdom and read a stream of blogs and tweets. I even contributed to the mindless jetsam of tweets by sharing my thoughts on a movie I was watching! WHO CARES! Read the rest of this entry »
I try to keep my social networks small. LinkedIn is limited to people I have physically met for business. Facebook is limited to family and friends I have met in the real world and twitter.. actually I am still trying to work out how I want to use twitter, news source? Chat room? Friends? Work?
Anyway, as with all social networks there are some people who are more important to me than others and it is this fact above all else that is moving me to Gist.
In Gist I can rank my contacts. With about 700 people in my networks (I meet people for a living) plus about 100 company blogs/twitter accounts I track reading their combines social media output is like drinking from a fire hose, chronologically tackling the stack is just not efficient. Read the rest of this entry »
2 articles in my backlog over the weekend struck me as completely implementable first steps for any company wanting to be more open with its ecosystem.
Remember when Pizza Hut put out a job posting for a “Twintern,” a.k.a. someone who would Tweet for the company and assist with all things social media? Well, a lucky UNC-Chapel Hill student, Alexa Robinson, was brought on board to manage the @pizzahut Twitter account for the summer and did such a fantastic job that she’s been offered a full-time position as master of all things Twitter at Pizza Hut.
via TechCrunch
Even the most cash strapped company can afford an intern, find a smart one who as an interest in your industry and let them loose.
A more interesting but just as implementable idea comes from 37 Signals:
Jason Fried, CEO of 37 Signals recently implemented CEO office hours available to the public to ask him specific questions every Tuesday and Thursday from 3PM-5PM CST.
via The Strategic Incubator
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The TwitScoop tag cloud in TweetDeck is cool, but its a bit… global.
One of the columns you can select to view is called “Buzzin..”, powered by TwitScoop. TwitScoop tracks all Traffic on titter and allows you to see how much there is for each phrase or word that is “hot” NOW.
Click on a word and you can see a trend graph on the TweetDeck homepage showing when the word hit, how it spiked and how “hot” it is. It’s interesting how quick things spike and die on the twittersphere. You really don’t get 15 minutes any more.
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SPOILER: I am going to say good things about a company I get paid to say good things about!
I recently started consulting for a group of creative companies who are looking to step up their businesses and wanted to launch their long history of working together under a “virtual agency” type structure.
I have actually worked with or hired diferent members of the group on and off for 10 years now, they have helped put together marketing campaigns, product launches, websites, product videos, facebook campaigns, print campaigns, viral videos and PR campaigns for various companies I have worked for.
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