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Gandhi was fond of saying that we all have the same 24 hours in our day; it’s all in how we use them (source). Especially within the last days I often thought about this meaningful comment. Why? Well, I think from time to time we all blunder into a time trap, don’t we? Mine snapped recently due to a lot of work for university – exams and assignments needed to be done. But it was not the university work that caused me headaches from time to time – I rather think it was the little time left for my Social Media activities.

Social Media: A time suck?

Social Media gives me the great opportunity to communicate and share my ideas online. But I am sure you will agree with me that it can be extremely time consuming, too. Social Media activities could easily take over your day if you try to create new content on your blog frequently, want to respond to everyone who leaves a comment on your blog or be up to date what is going on on Facebook or Twitter constantly. And these are only some examples of how Social Media could suck your time (Brian Solis’ Conversation Prism gives a very good overview where conversations take place online in addition to that). But as I had to put the last finishing touches to important university tasks last week I hardly had the time to dive into Web 2.0 too deeply.

Scaling Social Media

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I believe the magic word to get out of the ‘Social Media Time Dilemma’ is Social Media Time Management. Looking for ways of Social Media Time Management I came across a lot of helpful tips. I don’t want to keep it from you; maybe you are hard pressed for time, too, and can benefit from one or another tip. Matt Churchill published my favourite tips. That’s why I’d like to give you a brief overview about them here – if you want to read more about these tips please read his blog post on socialmediatoday.com

§  Find the blogs that are most relevant to you, and stick with them. Prioritize material that will be most beneficial to you, and read other blogs and websites at your leisure later.

§  Restrict Your Twittering in using an application like Tweetdeck and monitoring specific key words related to your field of expertise. This means you don’t need to follow every single conversation that takes place in the group of people you follow and it introduces you to new people who are talking about the same topic.

§  Have a clear out of RSS feeds you don’t read.

§  Manage Your Social Networks and cull the services you don’t use regularly – focus on the few networks that make a difference to your online experience and engage with them more, making contacts will all of a sudden be a heck of a lot easier!

Apart from Matt Churchill’s steps to manage Social Media time more effectively I really liked the simple but useful advice of Chris Brogan who suggests to use the divine tool of WordPress, for instance, to write some posts in advance and schedule them to launch when you are hard pressed for time. Brogan says: “This has proven very valuable on days when I’m too busy with other projects to get a post out, but when I know I’d rather you have something new to consider.”

Blogs about Social Media Time Management

If you like to read more about Social Media Time Management I found some other interesting blogs for you:

Time Management in the Age of Social Media

My Half Hour Social Networking Plan: The First Ten Minutes

The 10-Minute Daily Guide to Building Your Social Media Profile

Social Media Time Management

7 Ways to Own Social Media Before it Owns You

3 STEPS TO BETTER TIME MANAGEMENT OF YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Social media time management strategy

If you are generally interested in information about how to listen and in turn, participate transparently, sincerely, and effectively in social media and new media marketing I recommend reading Brian Solis’ eBook ‘The Essential Guide to Social Media’.

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At the end I almost missed one essential tip I found out: Set Social Media time and log off when that time is over. Well then, I log of for today

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“The Web has become our workplace, our water cooler, and our social mixer.” Doesn’t this quote of Chris Brogan hit the nail on the head? To my mind it definitely gets to the heart of Web 2.0. I came across this convincing quote in relation to personal branding – a topic that has been around for a while but that has become much more prevalent in recent years. In his ebook ‘Personal Branding for the Business Professional’ Brogan claims that the reason why personal branding has become more prevalent in recent years partly relates to how the web has become our workplace, our water cooler, and our social mixer. I agree with him. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is very difficult to convey as much information online as in person.

Shaping the personal brand

An interesting example of how to create a digital identity is Brisbane IT-worker Hailey Turner, 20. She was among the top 50 vying for Tourism Queensland’s ‘Best Job in the World’ (read my recent posts one, two and three to get more information about the context). Apart from the demanded application video she travelled to seven cities in 12 days including Tokyo, London, Copenhagen, New York and Los Angeles to promote her application and the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef. Besides, she raised funds and sponsors and created a website where she uploaded videos, photos and blogs (source one, two, three). Everything Hailey Turner contributed to the Social Web shaped and contributed her personal brand: the pictures and videos she uploaded, the profile she defined on social networks like Facebook, the blog posts she published and the comments she shared on other blogs or the tweets she sent on twitter.

Authenticity and passion matter

Although Hailey Turner did not succeed to get the job in the end her personal brand gave her the ability to stand out in a sea of similar ‘products’ – her competitors. I think she succeeded in marketing herself as something different than the rest of the applicants in any case. According to Chris Brogan in some ways the difference on brands is what you deliver: “Doing something new is a great way to get people to be interested in what you do. (…) In a world full of people doing somewhat similar stuff the person who innovates is definitely ahead of the game.” That’s what Hailey Turner did with her journey, the funds and sponsors and her website.

Apart from that, there is another factor that strengthened Hailey Turner’s personal brand: the mixture of authenticity and passion she delivered in the contents she shared online. In my opinion, passion and authenticity are the two sides of the same coin: Because passion is hard to fake authenticity matters in building your personal brand online and it is very important to be yourself. Branding isn’t playing a role. With reference to Chris Brogan “a strong personal brand is a mix of reputation, trust, attention and execution. (…) Brands are complex and not especially one dimensional.” To my mind, the ‘brand’ Hailey Turner was colourful and interesting.

If you wish to find out more about personal branding I recommend reading ‘Personal Branding for the Business Professional’ by Chris Brogan and Brian Solis’ blog posts ‘The Socialization of Your Personal Brand’ part one, part two and part three.

Old photos – horrific experiences or great fun? Whatever you think when you recognize yourself on an old photo I’m sure it evokes certain emotions. I think it’s a great fun to rummage in old photo albums with friends – sometimes wondering how different we looked when we where younger or just remembering good times we spent together. That is why I try to have my digital camera with me whenever possible to catch all the versatile chapters in life. Over the years my computer became my digital photo album which I can organize easily thanks to the technical development.

Welcome to the online photography world

If you not only want to share your photos with your family and friends at home Flickr gives you the easy opportunity to share them with the whole internet (klick here to read wikipedia’s description). To say it with Amy Shuen’s words: “Flickr essentially gives away the services that amateur photographers need and want most: Photo sharing; online storage; and indexing, tagging and photo inventory.”

But Flickr is not only to the amateur photographer’s advantage who can organize his photos, drops into a creative photo database or may even be discovered if talented – it is an interesting communication platform from the corporate perspective, too.

Flickr stream: “Michel Comte Retrospektive”

I’m sure you have heard of Michel Comte, one of the most sought-after fashion and magazine photographers in the world (he portrays numerous celebrities from the world of art, music and entertainment. In addition to portrait photography and fashion he moved towards photo-reportage and documentary). Currently, the exhibition “Michel Comte Retrospektive” can be visited in the ‚NRW-Forum Kultur und Wirtschaft’ in Duesseldorf, Germany.

Michel Comte – 360° from nrwforumduesseldorf on Vimeo.

To promote the exhibition a number of Web. 2.0 tools were used like communication via the website of the ‘NRW Forum’ and a blog which reflects the course of the exhibition. But the most noteworthy idea was to create a Flickr stream. Especially in this case it was a very good idea to put a photo show on Flickr – a platform where all the passionate photographer’s come together to share and exchange their experiences about photography. Doubtlessly, these people are the prospective visitors of the exhibition. To my mind a promising step in the communication concept of the exhibition.

Benefit from Flickr as a professional

To end up for today I’d like to point out two tips of Seth Godin how you can benefit from Flickr as a professional. You will find a full description of them in his blog post ‘Where to find great ideas and arresting images (for free)’:

1. If you need photos for a presentation or website or brochure, try Flickr.

2. When you are trying to brainstorm, Flickr is a great place to find connections between ideas that hadn’t occurred to you.

Why not try them out on the job floor?

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It’s amazing! Without great effort I’m already an integral part of the Web 2.0 business economy. Because of my blog? Far from it. Because of my facebook profile? Far from it. There’s a much more simple reason for it. Let’s check some of my web activities within the last week:

Monday: I sent an email via Windows
Life Messenger and bought some books at amazon.co.uk

Tuesday: I sold my old mobile phone on ebay and bought some DVDs there

Wednesday: I searched for information on Wikipedia and googled a journal article

Today: I called my friends in Germany via Skype

I could easily go on like this! To put it into a nutshell: There has been hardly any day within the last weeks… months…let’s say even the last year (maybe even years?) without network
effects caused through my usual web activities.

Curse and blessing of ‘traffic’

I really like the following quote of Amy
Shuen in her book ‘Web
2.0: A Strategy Guide – Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web
2.0 implementations.’ (by the way: as this is already my second quote of Shuen’s book you see I’m really satisfied reading it. It’s a great, very well written book I really like to recommend to every PR student who deals with Web 2.0) “FOR MOST OF US IN THE REAL (OFFLINE) WORLD, TRAFFIC IS A BAD THING. More cars on the highway at rush hour create negative network effects. Each driver reduces the quality of the experience by congesting and overloading the highway network past its limit. But in the online world, traffic is a powerfully good thing.” Just try to picture it! Her figure of speech is great.

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What Shuen refers to: There’s no doubt that positive network effects increase the value of a good or service the more people use it (To get an idea of it: A well known theory illustrating this is Metcalfe’s
law stating about the value of communication). Positive network effects created the Web 2.0 network platforms and contributed the online hypergrowth of networks such as Google, Yahoo!, ebay, Skype, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Flickr and other.

Apropos: Why not watch Amy
Shuen talking about network effects herself? For me it was very interesting to see this famous lecturer in person – but be aware that it’s more an informative video than an animating film! Suen has
got a blog, too. Unfortunately, it has not been updated for a longer period of time.

What comes to your mind first?

Let’s go back to where I started: I just followed this train of thought about my web activities within the last week because it seems to me as if many people think they aren’t a part of the Web 2.0 business economy at first glance. In fact, they are! Just to give you an idea about two of the web services I used last week: ebay counts 86 million active and Skype 400 million registered users (see
source).

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Not bad! Nevertheless, I cannot help feeling that people first notice all these social networks like Facebook or MySpace when thinking about Web 2.0. activities. I sometimes even catch me thinking the same although I know it better!

Everybody’s doing it – blogging! Finally, even I set foot into the ‘blogosphere’. It seems to be nothing special at all but I must admit: I was a bit unsure to push the button on my first post. I’ve never written a blog before. It’s inspiring and strange at the same time to know that from now on anyone can read what I put on my blog – everywhere in the world!

But what’s the big deal?

I’m sure I’m not the only one who was a bit frightened putting the first post on his blog. Actually, I recently read in David Meerman Scott’s famous book ‘The New Rules of Marketing & PR – How to use news releases, blogs, podcasting, viral marketing & online media to reach buyers directly’: “Everybody I’ve spoken with about starting a blog has said the same thing (but in slightly different ways). They all were a bit uncomfortable when they started a blog. They felt a little dorky because they didn’t know all the unwritten rules. They were even a little scared to push the button on this first post. We’ve all been there.”

Web 2.0: A great opportunity for PR – and the individual

I’m looking forward to discover all these unwritten rules and Web 2.0 in general. So far I’ve been more or less passive using all its versatile opportunities (I will tell you more about my current experiences within my next posts). Perhaps because I was a bit unsure where to start? The offer is incredible! Nevertheless, I’m highly interested to get an insight into it. On the one – professional – hand, because Web 2.0 opens enormous opportunities for PR. Just think about all the new communication channels such as blogs, wikis or RSS, for example. On the other – personal – hand, it’s exciting to check it’s assets for everyday life. What comes to my mind first, for instance: Networks sharing the same leisure time interests as you do.

Let’s just start

In the end, the term Web 2.0 is present in everybody’s mind and useful books have been written on it. For example, I recently started reading ‘Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide – Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations.’ by Amy Shuen. In her book she demonstrates how a Web 2.0 strategy can make your business more competitive. Out of interest I googled the question “What
is Web 2.0?” today as Amy Shuen did in her book published in 2008. The result: 347 million web pages returned (Suen mentions 65 million returned web pages in her book). Like in Amy Shuen’s results, the first-ranked entry is still the Wikipedia
entry followed by Tim
O’Reilly’s article ‘What is web 2.0?’ and two YouTube videos (The
Maschine is Us/ing Us and What
is Web 2.0?). You see, not only the opportunities within Web 2.0 are incredible but the loads of post about it as well and they increase every day.

To my mind, the best starting point to understand Web 2.0 in general and the ‘blogosphere’ in particular is discovering it myself.

I only stand to gain from it, I can’t lose!