Social Media B2B

The first thing most people do when they get to work in the morning is open up their email and sort through messages that came in overnight. There are also messages from yesterday that need to be dealt with. Next we open our Twitter client, scan through mentions, DMs, keyword searches and take a quick breeze through new tweets from your network looking for interesting links. After that it is time for a journey through your RSS reader to see what else is happening. At this point you might even open your favorite news site for an update on the world. And how long does this take? 30 minutes? An hour? Can you really afford that much time out of your day before you get to work.

In our information overloaded society, many people feel like if they don’t start their day with this review of their major inputs of information, they will miss something. I’ve been thinking about ways to handle these inputs to be more productive and not cause continued distractions throughout the day. This is not a post about tools, of which there are plenty to choose from, but about needs and approaches to filtering information. The assumptions are that you have work and personal email, manage multiple twitter accounts, an out of date RSS reader and a full workload during your workday that would benefit from fewer distractions.

Here are some categories of job functions that require different strategies for filtering information:

Content Creator
Your job requires you to blog, tweet, post to social networks, create videos.
Information Approach: Your role in your organization requires you to remain the most connected. As a content creator, you need a constant stream of information for inspiration, content to share and things to comment on. Creativity and discipline are frequently at odds, but you need to compartmentalize your day and your processes. Your morning cruise through information should include bookmarking articles for later review. By using social bookmarking, this creates additional content, as well as making it easier to find things, instead of leaving all those distracting tabs open. Set some tweets of shared items to go out through the day so you keep a constant flow of outbound information that can be supplemented with regular tweets and posting of your content. This way you can focus on creating content in the morning when most people’s energy is highest. Heads down work requires turning off email, or at least not checking it every few minutes. And make sure your colleagues respect your morning creation time. You’ll take some ribbing, but everyone will benefit from a continuous flow of good content from your organization. After your block of time is over, go back over to email and twitter feeds to see what you missed. You will find that these boundaries will allow you to have some of the most productive time during your day.

Weekly Task: Spend 30 minutes adding new Twitter followers who will add value to your stream. Consider people who retweeted you and also retweeted the same things you did. Also search for others producing content similar to yours, but in another industry, as you are always looking for new ideas and inspiration

Trend Analyst
Your job requires you to understand what is going on in your industry, synthesize it and share with others internally and externally
Information Approach: Twitter, Google and other monitoring tools can be your best friend, but you need to establish keyword searches for your company, competitors, industry terms so the bulk of your information comes to you. As you use monitoring tools, most offer free trials and you can discover which ones provide the best results in your industry. If you are in a niche industry, there are probably a small number of blogs and sites that you need to follow. Update your RSS reader so these sites are in a folder that you can check once a day. You want as much information coming to you automatically, so you can spend more time analyzing what is going on, rather than waste time looking for data.

Weekly Task: Review one or two new social media monitoring tools from this list and set up free trials to make sure you are getting the information you need.

Meeting Sitter
Your job requires you to spend a big chunk of every day in meetings
Information Approach: Meetings, typing up notes from meetings and executing plans from meetings take up all your time already, and except for the occasional check of your email on your smartphone during the meetings, you are not distracted by incoming electronic information, but you still needs ways to know the major things going in your industry. Pick a couple of the best sites in your industry and subscribe to them via email. We offer that option in the sidebar, too. And if sites don’t offer it, request it, as it is easy to set up. This way you see the headlines as subject lines to give you the top level information, and can read any article that interests you for more detail. And here is a tool I found, even though I said I wasn’t going to talk about tools, called Nutshell. You can configure emails to update you with custom Twitter feeds and searches. Here are some reviews of the site from oneforty.com, a great resource for Twitter tools with reviews.

Weekly Task: Spend a little time getting lost in the rabbit hole of social networking and watch some funny videos to make up for all those meetings.

Work Shifter
Your job requires you to manage your own time, and sometimes lots of it.
Information Approach: This is one of the hardest approaches to information overload, because if you don’t go into an office, your work-life balance can get completely out of whack. The discipline required is monumental because with a full day ahead of you, and frequently time in the evening, it’s really easy to check email, check Twitter, hop over to Facebook and see what’s up. With multiple accounts everywhere, it becomes easy to cycle through everything once, and then go back and do it again. This is where your will power has to come in and the ability to divide your day into work chunks. Focus on the tasks at hand and reward completion with a dip into Twitter. Check email sparingly. If there is a crisis, they will call. Don’t let the social networking world take advantage of your extra time. It will suck it all up. I have actually heard of someone setting his own computer to block social sites during his heads down work time to combat this. Depending on what you do, and what kinds of information you need, review the strategies above for suggestions of getting information to come to you. Even with extra time, you still need to manage the inflow of information to make you more efficient.

Weekly Task: Turn of your computer and spend time with family and friends

If this post sparked even one idea to help you manage your work flow of information, I have succeeded. Please provide more suggestions below for things that you have done to get through it all. Be right back. I need to check Twitter.

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