After catching his talk at the Inbound Marketing Summit 2009 on launching a product in social media, I was lucky enough to get Loic alone for a quick interview. Watch as he gives you 3 tips on launching in the new media age, and I mis-pronounce everything.

You can find Loic Le Meur at www.twitter.com/loic and his product at www.seesmic.com

It’s been a longstanding fact that I self-label myself a geek when it comes to social networking. I’m a big believer in the power of the internet and in the transparency of the individual: meaning that I believe the more the internet allows private lives to become public, the less one can hide the reality of who they are.

If you’re a jerk, now the whole world knows it.
If you’re a nice person with jerk tendencies, now the whole world knows it.

Some people are freaked out by this, the merging of public and private lives, and often one must find a new set of boundaries (ie. stop twittering after 9pm – DUH!)

And often as these tools creep in to further degrade the private/public boundaries.. tools like myspace and facebook crossing over to LinkedIN, email, etc. We come up with more ways to waste time and to share our OCD with the world – tools like twitter and digg and del.icio.us

The trick in all this is balance – and one of the easiest ways to balance is to be a slow-adopter. Don’t necessary jump on every bandwagon… give it 6 months or so for the bugs to get worked out and the syncing tools to catch up. Sure you may miss a freebie here and there, but you’ll save yourself hours of headaches.

Take Myspace for example. I thought that tool was great and jumped right on… only to become a target for spammers of the world to unitedly blast. Every time I make an update, I get hit with half a dozen spammers… not to mention the porn and the current dramas in the news about kids publicizing their cruelty.

LinkedIN is one of my success stories. I signed up for it a year ago, but waited 6 months to really get into it… now it’s a huge tool for my networking and KIT systems.

Plaxo‘s a 50/50 split… the plaxo pulse is a weak attempt to compete with other social networking tools, while the address book and calendar syncing tools remain unparalleled for those of us that have to sync home computer|cellphone|office|laptop and aren’t interested in thousands of duplicates.

So when in doubt – sign up but don’t email blast your address book immediately… sit around (aka “lurk) until you see a few friends in there, and then go forward. Always look for syncing ability to your existing technology tools, and never give up your right to wait.

Being the first one to adopt a new technology is very rarely worth being the first one to have a system crash.

Unless you’re in IT, of course.

Cheers,

Rebekah

I’m laughing at myself this morning, as I come into the office and immediately go to my administrative tasks: update calendar and empty inbox.

After trying out the GTD format, and then being a Franklin Covey convert for a while… and then the reality of working for someone else (ie. you use software designed to make your life easier that really -thanks to poor implementation- makes your life harder) have developed my own set of rules for the management of my day/time.

This might work for you, it might not…. but you can waste a couple of minutes of your life reading it if you want to!

1. Keep your calendar updated with REAL events… not those “maybe” appointments that you know never really happen… or those meetings that are scheduled for 30 minutes but always take 2 hours… get real!!

2. Review and update your calendar at the beginning and ending of every day. Keeping a calendar real takes real work, but it’s worth it. Schedule out your time to do admin, put your tasks time in, get your calendar to look like your reality. EVEN MORE go back to yesterday and update that calendar so it reflects what you really were doing.

3. Clean out your inbox. This comes from a long history of being an underling – I may have a msg in there that either gives me back an hour (someone finished the project so I don’t have to) or takes away an hour (last minute presentations). So going through my inbox gives me the piece of mind to know that I am actually working on what’s real as of this minute. If I don’t sort out the reading to my “reading” folder, and the non-work stuff to my non-work folders, I end up reading all that junk when I should be working, and even worse working when I should be goofing around with family/personal stuff.

I could go on and on, but that would tyrannical (and take me much more than the 10 minutes I have set aside to write this article), so I’m going to wrap it up here and wish you the best of luck. Whether you use my system, someone else’s, or mashup your own system… GET A SYSTEM and STICK TO IT. Your piece of mind will increase and your stress will decrease. I promise.

Cheers,

Rebekah

A question posted on one of my linkedin groups this week caught my eye, and I thought I’d pass along the conversation:

Fellow MLPF friends,

I have a simple, very simple question: how to manage such a huge amount
of information when doing networking?

How many hours do you spend per day doing business networking? And hot
to manage that with our normal work?

Thanks in advance for all the answers and comments.

I hear you! Take heart though, I think feeling just a few steps behind is a good sign that you are actively networking – it’s that sense of drowning that I often take as a reminder to update my networking maintenance systems.

I use plaxo sync’d w/ my computers (both home and office) to keep my address book and calendar’s lined up. I sync my office computer to my treo and then everything stays in line very well. I don’t participate much in the “connections” portion – I just use the tools to update contact information quickly and easily (if anyone you know is in plaxo, when they change their information it will automatically update in your address book).

I use LinkedIN as an online networking tool, and sync that to outlook quarterly. I don’t do the LinkedIN blast invites – I just invite people one-on-one & I let them know it helps me to refer them to my network.

I keep a rolodex sorted by industry (vs company name) that I keep cards in – this is a 2 1/2 inch binder at this point… I only keep cards of people I want to refer, or that I work with. Folks that I know well or refer often I ask for several cards so I can give one away and still have one in the binder. I’ll look through it periodically when I need a networking brainstorm.

I know it sounds like alot, but it’s actually a very simple workflow when you come back from an event: enter the contact info to your computer (which syncs everywhere), put away in rolodex, when done w/ all cards from that event, sync linkedin… ta-da!!

In Followup Mode: I set aside 2 hours a week to go through my new connections and see what we have in common or who they know that I’d like to know. If I took notes at the event that the person was interested in something I can pass along, I will do that within a week. Often there are folks that want to be updated on interesting articles or groups I am a member of, so I will forward an invitation to the group or the articles on a weekly basis – nothing to take more than my 2 hours a week.

I also go to 5 or so events a week, but only take away the business cards that are relevant to what I’m looking for at that event (always have an objective before you walk into an event). Staying active in several particular circles keeps me in touch with the membership.

Cheers,

Rebekah