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5 Tips For Managing The Email Deluge

11.02.17

Ever find yourself thinking, “I need more email”? Ever feel disappointed because you don’t get enough in your inbox?

I didn’t think so. Personally, I get between 200-300 emails a day, as many of you likely also do. That’s enough email to completely paralyze you if you can’t deal with the volume effectively. You could spend your entire day working through your inbox, at the expense of the action items you actually have to do.

I’m continuing to work through the issue myself, but here are five pointers I’ve learned for managing the email deluge.

1. Read once

Ever find yourself reading an email, realizing you’re not sure what to do with it or that you don’t have time to deal with it, and just moving on to the next thing in your inbox? I know I have. Unfortunately, that leads to your inbox becoming a repository for difficult email, not a true inbox.

Try to force yourself to only read emails once. Once I’ve read an email, I take a leaf out of Getting Things Done (affiliate link) by David Allen and take one of several actions:

  1. Deal with it – if it’s going to take less than two minutes to handle, just do it
  2. Schedule it – file it in an “action” category and book time in my calendar to deal with it
  3. Delegate it – assign it to someone on the team to handle
  4. File it “to read” – lots of items are sent as “FYI.” I file these in an “information” category for review when I have time. This is a recent addition for me, as I was finding my “action” category was getting clogged with dozens and dozens of action items (thanks to the book Workarounds That Work (affiliate link) by Russell Bishop)
  5. Archive it – file it in an archive folder for future reference
  6. Delete it – get it out of the inbox to keep things manageable

2. Pay attention to the “To:” line

The body of the email isn’t the only part that sends a message – the address fields also send a message.

If I see that I’m in the “To:” line of an email, I pay attention and look for action items. If I see that I’m in the “cc:” field on an email, I treat the email as an FYI and review when I have time. (In some workplaces, this may require a little expectation-setting with colleagues)

3. Ensure the subject line is relevant

This is an are where I know I need to improve – ensuring that the title of an email remains relevant to the conversation. In the past I’ve sent far too many emails with “FYI” as a title. It could be worse (at least the recipient knows it’s not urgent) but it would be better if it read “FYI – media coverage of XYZ”, “Deadline: Need feedback by Feb 18″ or the like.

In cases where the topic of the email changes during the email chain, change the title!

Keeping the subject relevant lets recipients know what the email is about, and whether they need to pay attention to it.

4. Avoid “reply all”

Does everyone in the email chain need to be on it? If you don’t need to include everyone on a reply, do them a favour and remove the unnecessary people from the chain. No-one sits there waiting for the next group discussion to erupt; you’ll also find that you get fewer emails as a result, as there are fewer other people to hit “reply all” at their end.

5. Default to other media

Many of us co-locate in offices for a reason. Other forms of communication are richer and offer more cues than email. If you have the option, walk over and talk to someone, or pick up the phone and call them. Not only will you cut down on email, you’ll get things done quicker.

This is especially important when something is urgent. Email is an asynchronous medium – it can be read later. In fact, it’s intended for that. I spend a large proportion of my time in meetings and not checking email. In that situation, an urgent request is likely to go unheard. If you need to reach someone urgently, pick up the phone or walk over to them. Don’t rely on them checking email constantly.

What else?

I know my system isn’t perfect, and I still struggle with the email deluge on a daily basis. You likely have your own way of managing the volume. What tips would you add to the list?

(Image: jon|k)

Posted in: how to, miscellaneous

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25 Suggestions For How To Use Twitter

11.02.02

Twitter sent an email around to users yesterday, giving four suggestions for getting the most out of Twitter in 2011:

  1. Follow your interests: Follow the people who share your passions
  2. Get specific: Follow your favourite leagues, teams, players, writers etc
  3. Don’t panic: Search for hashtags and relevant accounts during emergencies to stay informed
  4. Return to Twitter: A call for lapsed users to return to  a service that apparently now has over 200 million user accounts

Four suggestions seems a little thin to me. I often get asked why people should use Twitter; here are 25 ideas for ways you can get value out of Twitter, with a mix of business and personal focus:

  1. Stay in touch – Find your friends and use Twitter to post and read micro-updates on what’s going on in your lives
  2. Meet new people – Get to know friends of your friends and widen your circle
  3. Network professionally – Follow and get to know other people working in your industry
  4. Find local events – Watch for interesting events that your connections are attending. Take advantage of the opportunity to take online connections offline
  5. Research destinations – Travelling somewhere? Search for what people are saying, and poll your network for pointers on your destination
  6. Get recommendations – Looking for a vendor, at home or at work? Ask your Twitter friends for recommendations on who to go with
  7. Grow professionally – Identify the leaders in your industry. Read what they post; follow who they follow; learn from their activity
  8. Fuel your passion – Find people who share the same interests as you, and geek it up! Let other peoples’ passion for your interests fuel your own
  9. Influence the influencers – Get to know the people with influence in your field, before you need to ask them for anything
  10. Stay on top of news – Follow news-related accounts, both traditional and non-traditional – to stay up-to-date with news in your area and your industry
  11. Get to know journalists – Whether you post or you just lurk, follow the journalists in your field, learn what they read and what they like, and get to know what will be helpful for them
  12. Research competitors – Follow your competitors. See what they post; see who they engage. Learn from their successes and their mistakes
  13. Gain insights – Solicit feedback from your connections on ideas, products and services
  14. Filter your reading –  Rather than fearing drinkin from the Twitter firehose, create a list of people who consistently post things that interest you and let them generate your reading list. Bonus: you’ll find stories from sites you don’t normally check
  15. Generate ideas – Whether it’s through case studies other people post, ideas sparked from conversations or reactions to your posts, let your connections help you to generate new ideas
  16. Organize meetups – Found yourself with some time on your hands? See who else is around. Planning to be somewhere at a certain time? See if anyone wants to meet up with you
  17. Boost your reputation – Post your own content or curate others’ to build your own reputation in your chosen area
  18. Inbound job hunting - Network with peers in your industry, build relationships with hiring managers, develop your own reputation and watch the number of job offers you receive rocket
  19. Outbound job hunting – Follow executives at the companies you want to work for and keep your eyes open for job openings
  20. Stay on top of trends – Identify the thought leaders in your industry and stay on top of trends by listening to what they’re saying
  21. Drive conversions – As a business user, point people towards your points of conversion… but don’t do it too often, and make sure it’s something people will find valuable
  22. Engage with your community – Don’t focus all of your company’s posts on pushing content; try to make a majority of your posts more conversational
  23. Solve problems – Monitor for problems with your company’s customers, and solve them
  24. Re-purpose content – Have something interesting on one of your other online properties? Let people know where to find it
  25. New business generation – Get to know people at companies you want to work with; watch for requests for help from people looking for your services; post/curate content that generates inbound demand

I’m sure you can think of a tonne more. Let me know what you’d add in the comments below!

Posted in: how to, Twitter

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6 Tips For Engaging Online

08.12.05

Online outreachIf you’re new to the social media "scene," it can be scary (just ask the folks at Motrin). For a company used to "controlling the message" through carefully crafted news releases and press conferences, engaging in it can be even scarier.

Here are six tips to help that engagement go a little more smoothly:

Disclose who you are

If you’re engaging on behalf of your employer, be up-front with that fact. That can be in your comment, in your bio (if it’s visible), in your username; whatever. Just make sure it’s clear.

I suggest this from an ethical perspective (and yes, Keith, also because of the potential backlash) – I think pretending to be something you’re not is a bad idea.

Choose your words carefully

You can make your life considerably easier by researching the questions that people are likely to have  and the issues they’re likely to raise (ask the support/customer service team!) and proposing some very rough "messages" that you can use in those cases.

I’m not talking about "messages" in the old-school communications sense. Don’t regurgitate the same thing each time someone asks a certain question. Your pre-approved set of generic points gives you a base to riff-off and helps you to avoid upsetting your boss, while still allowing you the freedom to speak directly to the other person rather than in their general direction.

Avoid bureaubabble

This relates to the "messages" I mentioned above.

Don’t become a mindless message machine.

If someone’s post just calls for a quick "thank you" then just say that! Don’t be a machine – speak like a person, because that’s what you are and that’s the expectation in these forums. While remembering that you do represent a company, be as conversational as you can.

Avoid corporate speak" wherever possible.

Ask

You’re unlikely to have the authority to make decisions for your company. If you’re not sure about something then ask.

Set parameters

Sometimes your overlords will be comfortable in trusting you to just go out and engage on the company’s behalf. If so, fantastic.

Other times, management may want a little more input into what you say.

In that cases, I have two recommendations:

  • Start to gently educate people about the nature of social media, the cultural changes they may need and the increased effectiveness that results from empowering you to engage on your own;
  • Set some parameters for your engagement.

What parameters? For starters:

  • What you’ll do
  • The options you may recommend (consider triaging posts)
  • The timelines in which your boss needs to respond (you might have better luck in not getting fired if you position this as a way to increase effectiveness rather than just setting deadlines for your boss)

Establish an engagement policy

Set an engagement policy. Lay out, in clear terms, where you’ll engage with people but more importantly, where you won’t. For example, you may want to avoid conversations involving personal attacks, offensive language or obvious trolls. State that up-front (perhaps in the ‘policies’ section of your website) so you can point to it when people ask why you didn’t engage in a particular discussion.

What other recommendations would you add for companies getting ready to engage online?

Posted in: how to, social media

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Five Tips For Pitching Me

08.11.04

As time goes on and the number of readers of this site slowly grows, I’m receiving an ever-increasing number of pitches from people hoping that I’ll write about their product, service or news. Very few of them are any good.

Occasionally I receive a good pitch. Sometimes I’ll even write about good blogger outreach. On the other hand, if I receive a bad pitch there’s a chance I may write about that too.

I’m open to people pitching me. If you read my site over time, then you already know me and you probably know how I like to be pitched. However, I know how the communications business works. Unfortunately, if you have a new client or you’re new to an account the chances are fairly high that you won’t have the time (or budget, for that matter) to dig way back in every blogger’s archives to see what they’ve written about pitching.

So, today I’m following in the footsteps of people like Jason Falls and Todd Defren have also done – I’m publishing a set of tips on how to pitch me. When I have a spare second, I’ve also added this to my blog header so it’s available on every page of this site.

I don’t need special treatment (quite frankly I’m astonished that anyone wants me to write about them). In general, if you follow these tips you’ll likely do ok pitching most bloggers. If, on the other hand, you send me what I consider a bad pitch:

  1. I’m not going to read it
  2. You’re wasting your time and/or your client’s money.

Hopefully this will help at least one person to change the way they approach pitching. If you have your own site, you may want to consider doing the same thing yourself. Who knows, it may help to improve the pitches you receive. If not, at least you’ll have a page to point people to when they spam you.

Five (plus one) tips

If you’re about to pitch me, I have five tips for you (plus one for luck):

  1. Know what I write about
  2. Know where I live
  3. Remember my name
  4. Write to me personally
  5. Use the ‘to’ field in your email
  6. Bonus: Get to know me first

#1: Know what I write about

I write about social media, communications and marketing. If your pitch isn’t about one of those topics, you should refine your target list.

#2: Know where I live

I live in Toronto. If your event is in San Francisco and you’re not planning to fly me down there, I’m not likely to be interested. If it’s in Toronto, however, you’re on the mark.

#3: Remember my name

It’s in the URL of the blog and at the top of every page. It’s Dave Fleet. Not “Dear Blogger” or “Dear Sir/Madam.” Thanks!

#4: Write to me personally

I’m a person. I appreciate a personal email that acknowledges why the pitch is relevant to me, breaks the ice and shows that I’m not just another email address on a list. I don’t mind if you copy a press release at the bottom of the email, or provide me with a link. If that’s all you send me, though, I’m not reading past the headline.

#5: Use the ‘to’ field in your email

Simply put, if you ‘bcc’ me on an email it’s game over. Odds are that if you follow the other guidelines above, you won’t do this.

#6: Bonus: Get to know me first

I’m more likely to read your email if I already know you. It doesn’t guarantee that I’ll write about your topic – especially if you don’t follow the other tips here – but the odds go up substantially. I’m not hard to find – try here.

Sound reasonable to you?

Posted in: how to, pitching

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Practical 101s: Tips For New Twitter Users

08.11.03

Twitter logo This post is a follow-up to my recent "Getting Started on Twitter" post. If you’re looking for a step-by-step guide to setting-up an account and using Twitter for the first time, I suggest you start there.

So, you now have a Twitter account and you’re raring to go. But what do you do?

This post gives my suggestions for how to get the most out of Twitter. These are based on my experience and some people may disagree with some of the points; that’s fine (feel free to say so in the comments). Much of this comes down to personal preference.

Let’s get started. I have eight tips for you:

  1. Start slowly
  2. Follow the ‘right’ people
  3. Don’t spam
  4. Interact with others
  5. Post substantial messages
  6. Do more than just self-promote
  7. Set-up searches for relevant topics
  8. Make the most of the tools available

Tip #1: Start slowly

Twitter can take a lot of getting used-to. One of the hardest things to deal with is the sheer number of posts you’ll see.

Start slowly. Follow a few people at a time. When you first start, I suggest following no more than 30-50 until you get used to it.

Reason #1 for this: if people see that you’ve followed hundreds or thousands of people and that only a few are following you, they may assume you’re a spammer and just ignore or block you (or worse, report you as a spammer).

If you want to, you can let the number of people you follow grow over time. Bear in mind that as the number of people you follow goes up, you will need to change how you use Twitter. Whether you want to do that or not comes down to personal preference.

I currently ‘follow’ around 700 people, which is towards the upper end of my tolerance. At that number, a message will scroll off my screen, to be replaced by others, in about a minute. In order to follow that many people, I have to accept that I won’t see every message that people post. Instead, I dip in and out every so often, check the last few messages posted and look for trends.

If you would rather read every message from the people you follow, I suggest you keep the number of people you follow down.

Regardless, start slowly or it will get overwhelming.

Tip #2: Follow the ‘right’ people

One of the most common complaints I hear about Twitter is that "people are always just posting what they had for lunch" or similar.

My response: People who have that problem are following the wrong people.

What constitutes the ‘right’ people will be different for everyone, as we all have different friends, interests and preferences for how to use Twitter.

Back in January I wrote a post looking at how people find other people to follow. I polled my Twitter contacts to get their thoughts, too. Four trends emerged:

  1. Friends: First and foremost, people follow those that they know.
  2. People That Others Follow: People rely on the quality of their friends’ friends.
  3. Similar Interests: People look for other users with similar interests that they can learn from.
  4. Conversation: People gravitate towards people who are involved in interesting conversations. One-way information pushing doesn’t work.

Earlier this year Chris Brogan started a wiki called Twitter Packs, where you can find lists of Twitter users divided into groups by topic, by location, by company and by events. As a new user, this is a great resource if you’re not sure where to start. I also suggest you check out my post on how to get the most out of Twitter Packs before you dive in.

If you like, you can stick to following people you know. That’s absolutely fine. However, I have derived huge benefits from expanding my online circle in Twitter and connecting to people with similar interests.

Some people argue that you should follow everyone who follows you. I don’t buy that for a second. That’s like saying you have to be friends with someone simply because they want to be friends with you, regardless of who they are.

Follow the people you want to interact with and don’t be afraid to click the ‘un-follow’ button.

Tip #3: Don’t spam

Spam

As Twitter has grown in usage, it has seen a growth in people/companies simply posting automated messages to their account.

In my view, that’s unfortunate and, in most cases, a fruitless attempt to drive traffic using old-school spamming techniques (there are exceptions, for example, BreakingNews or GlobeandMail, which offer good reasons to follow their updates).

Twitter has now set up a spam account to which people can report spammers, and continues its efforts to fight them. Don’t be one of the people caught.

Tip #4: Interact with others

This is another one of those ‘personal’ choices. I strongly advise you to use a large proportion of your messages to interact with other people.

Why?

  1. To get to ‘know’ people
  2. To learn from them
  3. To build a community

Now, some people choose not to do this with their accounts. That’s fine, to an extent, but unless there’s a good reason to read your messages, you may find you’re talking to yourself as few people will follow you.

Looking at my last 20 tweets, 13 of them were to other people.

Use the ‘@’ function frequently and you’re likely to get much more out of Twitter.

Tip #5: Post substantial messages

Remember the complaint I mentioned about people posting about their lunch?

That’s what I’m talking about.

If you want to post the occasional pithy comment that’s fine. However, if your Twitter stream is full of messages like that, people will unfollow you in droves.

Again, the type of things you post is very personal, so rather than telling you what to post, here’s what I tend to post:

  • Links to interesting articles or posts
  • My opinions on articles
  • Thoughts on current events
  • Conversations I have with others

Tip #6: Do more than just self-promote

Don’t get me wrong here – I think some self-promotion is ok (I have the Twitter Tools plugin installed on davefleet.com, which automatically tweets my latest blog posts). However, if that’s all you use your Twitter account for, you’re missing out.

Try to set a good balance between the messages you post about your own properties and the messages you post on other topics.

The end result if you only self-promote without providing some value: you guessed it – people won’t listen.

Tip #7: Set up searches for relevant topics

If you want to turbo-charge your Twitter experience, set up some searches for topics relevant to you.

The way you do this is up to you. You can do it using Twitter Search and keep that open in your browser; you can pump the Twitter Search results into an RSS reader, or you can use a third-party application to do the searching.

You can divide these searches into two categories:

  1. Search for yourself
  2. Search for other people and topics

1. Search for yourself

Twitter’s ‘replies’ function is pretty basic – it only shows you messages that begin with "@[your username]." Other applications like Twhirl or Twitterific offer an improved replies function, but I find it very useful to have a search set-up for myself anyway – every so often something seems to slip through.

2. Search for other people and topics

Are you interested in marathon running? Set up a search for "marathon" and see what people are saying. Interested in politics? Set up a search for "Obama" or "McCain." Using Twitter on behalf of a company? Search for your company name and those of your competitors.

Tweetdeck really is king for this kind of searching – set up all of your searches in one application.

Tip #8: Make the most of the tools available

My previous post on Twitter looked at a couple of the tools available to help you use Twitter. However, Brian Solis has a comprehensive list of the plethora of tools available. Check it out, and use them to make your Twitter experience simpler, easier and more enjoyable.

What tips would you offer?

There you have it – seven tips for newcomers to Twitter.

What other advice would you offer to people who are just getting started?

This post is part of an ongoing series of ‘practical 101′ posts on public relations and social media topics. For other, similar advice, check out the ‘practical 101′ series. What else would you like to see a practical 101 for? Let me know in the comments!

(Image credit: Getty Images)

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Posted in: 101, how to, social media, Twitter

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Practical 101s: Getting Started With Twitter

08.10.28

Twitter logo If you’re into social media, you’ve probably heard of Twitter. Twitter is one of the fastest-growing social media tools around right now; in fact the Wall Street Journal just declared that “Twitter Goes Mainstream.”

As the WSJ article says in its lead paragraph, “One of the hottest technologies in Silicon Valley is also one of the simplest.” This 101 will walk you through a couple of simple steps to getting set-up on Twitter and suggest a few guidelines that will help put you on the path to getting the most out of it.

There’s a lot to take in, so I’m dividing this topic into two posts. In this post I’ll walk you through the basics and five “how-to” steps to get started on Twitter. In the next post we’ll take a look at some guidelines for getting the most out of this tool (or, at least, my take on them).

Honey, I shrunk the blog

Twitter’s concept is very simple – it lets you communicate short (140-character) bursts of information to the people that subscribe to your updates. These updates are known as “tweets.” It’s like blogging, only smaller – hence Twitter, and services like it, are known as “micro-blogging” services.

You can also subscribe, or “follow,” other Twitter users yourself. The tweets from people that you follow are aggregated into a stream of updates.

Part of what makes Twitter so accessible is the plethora of ways you can access the service. There are many, many websites and desktop applications you can use, and you can even post to Twitter using instant messaging services or SMS messages. In fact, the options available are so convenient that most users rarely use the main Twitter website.

Here’s a great video by the folks at CommonCraft, putting Twitter into plain english:

How do I get started?

Getting started on Twitter is really easy. There are five main steps:

  1. Set up an account
  2. Enter your profile information so people know who you are
  3. Find your friends
  4. Select a way to post messages
  5. Get posting!

Step 1: Set up an account

This part’s easy.

  • Go to http://twitter.com and click the big green “Get Started – Join!” button.
  • On the resulting screen, enter the username you want, your desired password, your email address and complete the spam checker

Step 2: Enter your profile information

Twitter is, to a large extent, a social network. If you want people to want to connect to you, you’ll need to tell them a little bit about you. Nothing scary; nothing that will compromise yourself; just a little bit so people know who you are.

Log into Twitter, and click on the ‘Settings’ link at the top of your Twitter homepage.

Click the 'Settings' link in Twitter

Your profile on Twitter follows the same principles as the updates you post – short, sharp and to the point. The ‘Account’ tab of the ‘Settings’ section includes a text box that lets you input a 160-character blurb about yourself, along with a link to your website and the city where you live. Again, it doesn’t have to be anything horribly revealing. Here’s my information:

Dave Fleet's Twitter profile

You also have the option of ‘protecting’ your updates if you like. Protecting your updates lets you choose the people who can see what you post – every time someone tries to subscribe to your tweets, you receive a notification that you can approve or decline. There are pros and cons to this:

  • Protecting your updates can feel safer if you’re nervous about other people seeing what you post or if you’ve had problems with online privacy in the past
  • However, it will also limit the number of people who will try to follow you, which can limit the conversations you have – thus reducing Twitter’s potential to an extent.

Note: You can protect or unprotect your tweets at any point, so you can always change your mind later.

The ‘Picture’ tab lets you – you guessed it – upload a picture to your profile. Again, not everyone is comfortable with this and it is optional, but it will again make you more approachable and open up the potential of Twitter a little more if you do upload one.

The last tab to worry about right now is the ‘Devices’ tab. If you want to use your cellphone to post and receive messages, you can set that up here.

Step 3: Find your friends

There are a few simple ways to find people to follow on Twitter:

  1. Search for people you know who are already using Twitter Click the ‘Find People’ link at the top of the screen. You’ll see three tabs:

    Tabs on the 'Find People' screen on Twitter

    The first of these tabs lets you enter your email address(es) and searches your address book to see if anyone has associated any of those addresses with a Twitter account.

  2. Invite your friends to join The second tab lets you enter your friends’ email addresses to invite them to join Twitter.
  3. Search for new people to follow Unfortunately the ‘search’ tab is currently disabled. However, you can mimic this function to an extent by using http://search.twitter.com. Search for the city where you live to find other users who live close to you. Enter your career area to find business peers. Enter your hobbies to find people with shared interests. The list of potential things to search for goes on and on.

Step 4: Select a way to post messages

As I mentioned earlier, one of the great things about Twitter is the variety of ways you can interact with it. You can use the website, you can use another website (I just tried itweet.net, for example), you can use mobile or desktop applications, or you can use SMS.

What to choose?

There are way too many choices for me to outline in this post. Check out Brian Solis’ list of Twitter tools for a comprehensive resource. I’ll just quickly outline three of my favourites here – Twhirl and Tweetdeck.

Twhirl

twhirl

One of the most popular ways of using Twitter is through an application called Twhirl. Twhirl is a desktop application that runs on the Adobe AIR platform, and provides a simple graphical interface that automatically updates with your friends’ latest tweets. If you also have accounts for services like laconi.ca, Friendfeed or seesmic, you can keep tabs on them using Twhirl, too.

The benefit of running a desktop application is that it can sit, minimized, in your system tray and just notify you when someone sends you a message. You can do everything that the website lets you do, all in a re-sizeable, convenient application that notifies you when you receive a message directed to you.

Installing Twhirl is very easy – from the homepage just click the ‘Install Now’ button on the right-hand side of the Twhirl homepage (you will also need to install Adobe AIR if you haven’t done so already). Once the install process is done, just give it your Twitter login credentials and you’re good to go.

Tweetdeck

TweetDeck_128

I’m a big fan of Tweetdeck. Like Twhirl, Tweetdeck is an Adobe AIR application that runs on your desktop.

Tweetdeck’s unique selling point is that it lets you group the people you follow by creating different columns which display each group’s updates. If you interact with a large community on Twitter, this can be very useful.

You can also set up persistent Twitter searches to run within Tweetdeck, which is extremely useful. For example, I have a search set up for every client for whom I work and another one for PodCamp Toronto, which I co-organise.

Installing Tweetdeck is, again, very easy. Just scroll down the Tweetdeck homepage and click the black installation button. Once it’s installed, getting started is as simple as logging-in using your Twitter username.

Twitterific

Twitterific works only on Macs, not Windows-based PCs. However, despite not having a Mac, I do use Twitterific on my iPod Touch. Twitterific is the best way I’ve found so far of interacting with Twitter on the Touch.

There are two versions – a free ad-supported version and a paid ad-free version.

You can download Twitterific from iTunes.

5. Get posting!

You’re all set! There are just a few more things to know before you can get tweeting.

First – how to interact with others.

(The second part of this post will go over some suggested guidelines for doing this – this is simply the how-to)

  1. To post a regular message to all of your subscribers (aka. followers), just type it into the website/application and hit ‘post’/'send.’
  2. To send a message to someone publically, type “@” followed by their username, then the message. So, if I wanted to say hi to me (I’m lonely), I’d type “@davefleet hi there!” These are known as “replies.”
  3. To send a private message to someone (aka. a direct message), type “d” then a space and then their username. So, to send me a direct message you would type “d davefleet That’s a really long blog post on Twitter!” Note: you can only send direct messages to people who you follow, and who follow you. That means you won’t get them out-of-the-blue.

Note: Tweetdeck and Twhirl both have this functionality built-in to them. If you mouse-over someone’s profile picture (next to each tweet) in these applications, you’ll see either two or four icons:

  • Re-tweet (re-post the message that person posted)
  • Reply to that person (publicly)
  • Add this message to your favourites
  • Direct-message that person

Clicking the reply or direct-message buttons won’t send a message immediately; they’ll just populate the input box with the necessary text to send that message, saving you a few seconds.

That’s all for now

There you have it – you’re now ready to start using Twitter.

If you’re nervous about getting started in social media, Twitter is a great place to look. It’s quick to start, easy and flexible to use, helps you get to know other people and doesn’t require the concentrated investment of time that blogging can require. It’s still emerging and still developing, but use it well and you can get a lot of value from it.

More on that in the next post.

This post is part of an ongoing series of ‘practical 101′ posts on public relations and social media topics. For other, similar advice, check out the ‘practical 101′ series. What else would you like to see a practical 101 for? Let me know in the comments!

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Practical 101s: Social Bookmarking With Delicious

08.10.20

As people move more and more of their lives online, it gets harder and harder to stay organized.

Where was that great article you read the other day? What was that great blog you read? What was the name of that cool tool you found?

Of course, you could save everything in your browser’s favourites but, let’s face it, that would get unmanageable very quickly.

That’s where Delicious comes in.

Delicious?

Delicious describes itself as, “a social bookmarking service that allows you to tag, save, manage and share Web pages all in one place.”

Social bookmarking?

If you need a quick primer on social bookmarking, here’s a great (and quick) video that describes social bookmarking in… well… plain english.

Why delicious?

Delicious lets you:

  1. Save an unlimited number of sites
  2. Categorize the sites you save, using as many categories for each site as you want (so I might save this site under ‘public_relations,” “communications,” “marketing,” “social_media,” “blog” and so on)
  3. Integrate Delicious buttons into your web browser to make using Delicious easy
  4. Subscribe to other users’ bookmarks (don’t worry, you can save bookmarks privately if you want to) to add to your reading list
  5. Create your own customized search engine containing pages you find useful

Getting started

Getting started on Delicious is very, very easy. There are three steps to signing-up and saving your bookmarks:

  1. Sign up for a Delicious account
  2. (Optional) Install the browser extension
  3. Save away!

Step 1: Sign up for a Delicious account

To get started on Delicious, head over to https://secure.delicious.com/register. There are two parts to the registration:

  1. Complete your details
  2. Import your existing bookmarks

Personally, I always skip the second step (which you can do via a link at the top-right of the screen).

Step 2: (Optional) Install the browser extension

You don’t have to do this, but it really is the easiest and most convenient way to use Delicious.

Head over to the Delicious Tools page. You have three options, depending on your browser:

  1. Firefox Bookmarks add-on
  2. Internet Explorer buttons
  3. Bookmarklet buttons for any browser

The first two are far more powerful than the third, so if you’re a Firefox or IE user I recommend those. Make your choice and follow the on-screen instructions.

Step 3: Save away!

Not exactly difficult so far, was it? It doesn’t get any harder, either.

To begin saving bookmarks, find a page you want to save then:

  • If you installed the Firefox or IE add-ons or the bookmarklet buttons, click the “Tag” or “Bookmark on Delicious” button in your browser toolbar
    • Enter your notes for the page in the pop-up box
      • Tip: If you highlight text on the page before clicking “Tag” it will automatically put this text in the ‘Notes’ box for you
    • Enter as many tags as you like
      • Consistency is good with this so you can file similar sites together (I have 175 tags for over 1,100 bookmarks)
      • Tip: Tag sites with as many aspects of the content as possible. Remember, a year down the road you may not remember you ever went to that site. Filing it in as many common-sense places as possible increases the likelihood you’ll be able to find that content again when you need it
    • If you want to keep this bookmark private, check the “do not share” box
    • Click ‘Save’
  • If you chose not to install the add-ons or buttons, copy the address of the page and go to http://delicious.com/save
    • Paste the address in the box, click “Next” and complete the “Notes” and “Tags” fields
      • Tip: Save your bookmark using a new browser window or tab. You will likely want to refer back to the page you’re saving when you complete the “Notes” field
    • Click ‘Save’

Conclusion

Delicious really is an easy site to use, and it can be extremely useful. As I mentioned earlier, I currently have just over 1,100 bookmarks saved, and I refer back to them almost every day.

For some more advanced tips and techniques for Delicious, check out an earlier post of mine on six ways to make life easier with Delicious.

This post is part of an ongoing series of ‘practical 101′ posts on public relations and social media topics. For other, similar advice, check out the ‘practical 101′ series. If you’d like to suggest a topic for the series, let me know in the comments!

Posted in: 101, how to, social bookmarking, social media

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Practical 101s: Google Reader And Persistent Search

08.10.16

As a public relations professional, it is your responsibility to be aware of the coverage your projects are getting. This applies whether you work on the agency side, the corporate side or in government.

One of the easiest ways to keep track of this is through persistent searches.

What is persistent search?

Persistent search allows you to enter a search term once and receive real-time updates whenever there’s a new result for that term, saving you time and ensuring you’re always on the pulse of what’s going on.

You should have persistent searches set for each client for whom you work.

You can set up persistent searches, via Google Alerts, to email you new results, but for today I’m going to focus on using an RSS reader to aggregate your searches in one place.

Your toolkit

This post uses two free tools to accomplish its goal:

For a little more on Google Reader, check out this video from Common Craft:

Four steps to enlightenment

There are four steps to this process:

  1. Set up a free Google account
  2. Search for your terms
  3. Find the RSS feed for your search results and plug it into Google Reader
  4. Organize your results

Step 1: Set up a free Google account

(Note: If you have a different preferred RSS reader then (a) you probably already know everything in this post, and (b) you don’t need the Google account)

If you don’t already have one, it’s easy to sign-up for a Google account:

  1. Go to Google.com (or .ca in Canada)
  2. Click ‘Sign in’ at the top-right of the screen
  3. Click ‘Create an account now’ at the bottom-left of the screen
  4. Fill-in the form on the next screen
  5. Check the email address you provided for the form, and click the link provided in the confirmation email to finalize your account
  6. Once your overall Google account is activated, your Google Reader account is created automatically (along with a host of other free services)

Step 2: Search for your terms

You’re now ready to conduct your searches. We’ll use two different (though related) tools to make sure we capture both mainstream media articles and posts from the blogosphere.

  1. Go to Google News
  2. Enter your search term (if it’s more than one word, enter it in quotes). You’ll likely want to search for client names, but you may also want to consider spokesperson names, executives, brands, specific products, slogans and/or competitors
  3. In a different window or tab, go to Google Blog Search and repeat step 2

Step 3: Find the RSS feed and plug it into Google Reader

Now that you have your search results, you need to find the RSS feeds for them and drop them into Google Reader.

If you want more information on RSS feeds, check out my “What is RSS?” post from a while back.

In both Google News and Google Blog Search, you can find the RSS feed for your search results at the bottom of the left-hand column on the results page.

Google Blog Search - RSS feed position

  1. Click the “RSS” link at the bottom of the left-hand column
  2. Choose “Add to Google Reader” from the two options presented

Step 4: Organize your RSS feeds

You’re almost there (and it really hasn’t been that hard so far, right?)! The last step is to organize your feeds so they don’t get really confusing when you have a few.

If you only have one or two searches to set up, you’re probably ok leaving them unorganized in the short term. From a long-term perspective, though, or if you have more than a few, I strongly advise organizing them.

Fortunately, it’s really easy to organize your results. Google Reader does it by organizing your RSS feeds into ‘folders.’ Personally I have one folder set up for each client (rather than grouping all of my client searches together) – so I have a few searches

  1. Select the feed you want to organize, in the left-hand column of Google Reader
  2. Click the grey drop-down ‘Feed settings…’ box near the top-right of the screen
  3. If you’ve already created the folder into which you want to put the feed, select it from the “Change folders…” list
  4. If you haven’t already created the folder, select “New folder…” from the list and enter the new folder name into the box that appears
  5. If this is a new folder name, you’ll see it appear in Google Reader’s left-hand column

There are a couple of other ways you can (but don’t have to) go about this:

  • If the folder already exists, you can drag feeds into it in the left-hand column
  • You can organize multiple feeds at once by clicking ‘Manage subscriptions’ at the bottom of the left-hand column. There, you can select multiple feeds by checking the boxes at the left of each row, and select the folders for them to go in via the drop-down box at the top of the screen. Note: In this view, “folders” are referred to as “tags.”

Conclusion

That’s it! You now have easily-accessible, real-time search results for your clients. You can check them at any time by going to Google Reader, although I personally prefer to leave it open in my browser all day so I can easily check the latest results regularly.

As you get more comfortable with RSS and searches for your clients, especially if you’re doing work in the social media arena, you may want to branch out into other searches. For more information on how to do this, check out my earlier post on “How to set up a simple online monitoring system.”

Was this helpful for you? What other topics would you like to get a practical introduction to?

This is the first in what I expect to become an ongoing series of ‘practical 101′ posts on public relations and social media topics. For other, similar advice, check out the ‘practical 101′ series. If you’d like to suggest a topic for the series, let me know in the comments!

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Many Computers; One Life – How I Synchronize My Information

08.07.16

Keeping your life in sync can be a real problem. You have your professional contacts and your friends, your work calendar and your personal schedule, tasks you’ve been assigned at work and things you need to do for yourself, and so on. It’s nigh-impossible to keep your work and home lives separate, especially if you work as much as I tend to do. Things just cross over, and you need to be prepared for when that happens.

I’m a bit of a geek. I have two computers at home – my desktop and my laptop – and my work computer. All of these used to have different sets of information on them. Different files, different contacts, different everything.

No longer.

This is how I keep my life in sync:

Calendar, Tasks, Contacts

This drove me nuts for a while. I have Outlook 2002 on my computer at work, I have Outlook 2007 for my desktop and I use Google Calendar on my laptop.

If you only have to deal with Outlook 2003 and 2007 , Google offers a nifty application called Google Calendar Sync, which offers a neat way to keep your calendars synchronized. Install the app, enter your login information and it takes care of everything for you. However, Outlook 2002 is a different beast – the app doesn’t work with that version. A few people told me there was no way of syncing an older version of Outlook. They were wrong.

The key to this puzzle: Plaxo.

How Dave Fleet syncs his information

Slammed by some for spamming people with invites without asking permission when it first came out, Plaxo has learned and evolved into a very useful service for managing your information flow. Sign up for an account, create a ‘sync point’ with your Google account, install the Plaxo toolbar for Outlook on each machine and you’re good to go.

What’s more, Plaxo also takes care of syncing your tasks and your contacts. Fantastic. If you want to pay for Plaxo’s Premium Services – about US$50 per year – you can synchronize your Linkedin contacts with your local machines too.

I have a pretty bad memory for birthdays, so this next app improves things no end for me. Facebook app fbCal grabs all of your friends birthdays from Facebook and creates calendars that you can subscribe to in Outlook. It does the same thing for all of the events people have invited you to via Facebook, too.

Files

A while back I was searching for a way to synchronize my monstrous iTunes library on my two home computers – right now it’s all on my desktop. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way of doing it (grrrr) other than just copying over the files. However, while I was looking into this, I stumbled upon Live Mesh.

Live Mesh is an ambitious project by Microsoft. As their original blog post/announcement said:

Our design goals for Live Mesh are to have…

  • …your devices work together
  • …your data and applications available from anywhere
  • …the people you need to connect with just a few clicks away for sharing and collaborating
  • … the information you need to stay up-to-date and always be available

We’re achieving these design goals by combining the power of ‘cloud services,’ with the convenience and rich experience of your many devices

I’ can’t wait to see more of this functionality (bring on the shared apps!) but for my purposes now I focus on one thing: I can sync up to 5Gb of information between all of my computers, and if I’m on someone else’s computer I can access it through a browser too. Files update in the background without any work from you, and it’s extremely easy to set up. What’s more, Live Mesh just came out of closed beta so you don’t have to apply to use it any more.

Five gigabytes isn’t that much any more – I’ve taken more than 2.5Gb of photos in the first seven months of this year alone – but it’s plenty for keeping your most frequently-used files available, and for now I do have my 2008 photos on there along with my other files.

Even with this stuff, I’m no Tommy “Living In The Cloud” Vallier. I’m sure there are ways I could bring other things into this system.

How do you keep your life in sync?

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How To Set Up A Simple Online Monitoring System

08.06.25

Whispered secretBefore your organization launches a blog, before you start playing with Facebook, before you even think about Twitter, you should be listening to what people are saying about you.

I did this recently for my last employer in preparation for a high-profile event and received a lot of questions afterwards about how I went about it. My answer: it’s not that hard.

In this post I’ll walk you through three simple steps to setting up a basic system to monitor your online world. Note: There are professional tools available to do all of this and more – Radian6 for example – which you may want to check out if you have the budget for it.

You’ll need six free tools (+1 more for a bonus) to mimic the setup I used:

There are three simple steps to setting-up your system (plus the bonus if you choose):

  1. Define your keywords
  2. Create your searches
  3. Plug the results into your RSS reader
  4. Bonus: Filter your searches through AideRSS

Step 1: Define your keywords

Before you even switch on your computer, think about the different words and phrases you want to track. These could be brands, executives, spokespeople, competitors, stakeholders, products, programs or whatever else you want to monitor.

Some of your terms may initially be a little broad; you may want to narrow them down by adding creating ‘boolean’ queries, for example:

  • Executive name AND company name
  • Competitor name OR competitor product name

Step 2: Create your searches

(Note: this step happens at the same time as step 3 – as you create each of your searches you’ll plug them into your RSS reader.)

I used five different search tools for my system:

  • Google News for mainstream news coverage
  • Google Blogsearch, Technorati and Blogpulse for blog searches
  • Summize for Twitter coverage (Tweetscan would also suffice)

Plug each of your keywords and phrases into each of these search engines.

A couple of pointers:

  • Google lets you use parentheses to structure your search, so you could do:
    (brand name OR product name OR executive name) AND company name
  • Use the advanced searches in Technorati and Blogpulse to give yourself more options

You don’t need to use all three blog search tools – I used all three to make sure nothing slipped through the cracks. If, however, you want to just use one tool, use Google Blogsearch as the ability to use parentheses in your searches can let you create one query for all your searches – much more manageable if you decide to use the bonus step later.

Step 3: Plug the results into your RSS reader

Each of the search engines I’ve mentioned here provides search results in RSS form. As you run the queries for each search term you came up with, click the “RSS” or “Subscribe” links on the results page and subscribe to the results in your RSS reader of choice.

Subscribe link in Technorati

 Subscribe link in Google Blogsearch
Note: Blogpulse can be a little flaky – you may need to try importing feeds from there a few times before it will work.

Bonus – Step 4: Filter your searches through AideRSS

AideRSS is a free online tool that helps you to filter through your RSS feeds and filter out “the noise,” leaving you able to focus on the important posts.

You may not need to use this if you don’t anticipate a lot of coverage. If, however, you expect to find a lot of online conversations about your organization, this may be worth exploring. It does take a little time to set up but it’s very easy to do so. What’s more, AideRSS’ technical support is superb – very responsive and helpful.

To run all of your searches through AideRSS, use your RSS reader to export an OPML file of your feeds

Google Reader - Export your subscriptions

Then go to AideRSS.com and create a free account. Go to the ‘Settings’ tab and import your OPML file. Once the site has imported all of your feeds (this may take some time) you can set the level of filtering you want for each of them.

The last step is then to subscribe to the RSS feed that AideRSS creates for you, et voila! You have an RSS feed of your coverage, filtered for you!

(You can then unsubscribe from your original searches if you like, or archive them for future reference)

Suggestions?

I used this approach to set up a quick and dirty monitoring service for a high-profile issue and provided an update & analysis every 90 minutes to executives. Still, this isn’t a comprehensive solution and it certainly doesn’t offer the functionality of a professional product. However, for those just starting out or those without the budget for a paid solution, it should suffice.

What do you think about this approach? What would you change here?

Posted in: 201, how to, social media, tools

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