Quitting my job, three years and counting …

July 30, 2010 – 9:05 am

As Ryan reminded me the other day, this week marks the third anniversary of us quitting the last jobs we held and going into business for ourselves. For those of you who didn’t know us during that phase of our lives, I was a producer with Current TV and Ryan was a product manager for the gaming division of CNet.

I find myself admonishing people not to do a lot of the things we’ve done – get married so young, move to a new city with no jobs and no place to live, get two dogs at the same time – and this is no exception. Quitting our stable, relatively well-paying jobs for no “good” reason, within days of eachother has been one of our bolder, crazier decisions. Yet as with most of these types of decisions we’ve made, it continues to work out in ways I don’t expect, ways that are happily surprising (and not-so-happily surprising, to be fair).  I’m not sure I’d do anything differently. … Well, other than give ourselves a bit of a safety net by staggering our timing by more than a few days.

So what the hell were we thinking?

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By admin | Posted in career, self-employment, work-from-home | Comments (0)

Work/(no) Life Balance

May 17, 2010 – 11:05 am

You probably hear a lot about this whole work/life balance. As a consultant and internet worker, I think about it frequently; my work is accessible to me with a touch of a finger nearly 24/7: when I’m away from my laptop (which isn’t often), I have my phone; I frequently return emails in the wee hours of the morning from my bed; I take conference calls when I’m running errands (shh … don’t tell anyone). But really, you don’t have to work online or be self-employed to feel that your career follows you everywhere. It’s a common concern, one on which many, many blogs, books, articles, sites and philosophies have been built. And they’re usually built on some balancing premise: how to manage your life so you can create boundaries. And yah, that has a place. Like it’s probably not healthy to compulsively check email when your alarm goes off at 5:30 am.

But I don’t want balance. Balance is safe. Balance is reliable. Balance is for people who aren’t consumed with the idea of making an impact.

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By admin | Posted in career, self-employment, work-from-home | Comments (1)

Local Biz and Social Media: Clover Stornetta and 1000 True Fans

April 21, 2010 – 11:19 am

It may seem odd to write a post about social media and a dairy farm. I won’t get into the backstory of my love affair with Clover Stornetta (@cloverstornetta) – you can read all about it on my personal blog, Alexis in the City. What I want to get into here is the type of social strategy Clover has employed and how and why it may be different from others we so often see.

By way of a tiny bit of background, Clover has all the things I require in an ideal dairy farm: locally-owned and operated, humane treatment of their animals, hormone-free, and a commitment to their community: both of the bovine and human varieties. That instantly won me over but then I began to engage with their social strategy and it only got better. They’ve taken their mascot, Clo, and given her a voice on their social networking profiles. They’re a family-run company and you get the feeling that you are part of the family and they care about what you have to say. Am I a sucker? Maybe, but they didn’t have to convert me, I came on my own – and here’s where it gets interesting.

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By admin | Posted in case study, social strategy | Comments (0)

Socialize your book: beyond social profiles

April 15, 2010 – 12:24 pm

I’m speaking at a local writers’ group Sunday, April 18th at 3pm on how to go beyond the typical social media efforts to publicize your book. Go here for details, I’d love to see you there!

Alexis James
Social Strategist * Blogger * Web Producer
10thfloorpr.com

After an early career as a TV news producer, Alexis began her journey to Social Media in 2006.

Since she has orchestrated social strategy for dozens of clients via her company, 10th Floor Media (10thfloorpr.com).

With her help, authors, individuals, and small business owners have:

* Built an established presence online
* Moved into first page search results in a crowded niche
* Become sought-after experts in their field
* Increased book sales by 500%

Alexis provides Social Coaching to equip clients to engage with their demographic personally as well as creating and implementing full-service Social Strategies – always with the goal of using personable, transparent communication to engage with a desired demographic and rise above the noise that can permeate the social web.

Her presentation and discussion will include:

Socializing your book without managing profiles

* Research bloggers: identify your niche(s), start making a list of sites/blogs within this niche

* Actively comment: add value to their community

* Directly contact sites/bloggers

* Don’t forget about Meetup!

By admin | Posted in publicity coaching, self-employment, social network, social strategy | Comments (0)

Do you work at work?

April 13, 2010 – 11:17 am

I’m a virtual girl. I tend to believe that not a lot more (and probably less) gets done via in-person meetings, teleconfereneces etc., than could be accomplished if you just boiled it down and sent it to me in an email. As someone who’s worked predominately from home for the past 2.5 years, I’m a firm believer in the power of the virtual office. Not only has my standard of living gone up (I travel when I want, see my family when I want, go to museums, have lunch with friends, walk my dogs, etc.), but the amount of work I actually get done has dramatically increased because I’m motivated by the fact that I own my time.

A recent interview with Jason Fried of 37 Signals shows that he, too, shares many of my qualms about the in-person office requirement. He talks about how the modern workplace is structured completely incorrectly and is optimized for interruptions, so people end up working longer hours and more days – not necessarily because they have more work to do but because when they’re at work, they don’t actually accomplish much. This goes hand in hand with a statistic I heard that people only get four hours of work done in a typical eight hour office day.

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Monitoring your Personal Mentions

April 7, 2010 – 11:30 am

How do you find yourself out there in the world wide ether? I’m not talking about some sort of digital Eat, Pray, Love journey (although if you’re like me, you’ve probably gone on one or two such quests …). What I mean is – how do you make sure you’re catching everything out there that has to do with YOU? I ask this questions because, in working with individuals, authors and small companies, this is a question my clients constantly face. They’re interested in figuring out things on a personal level, so oftentimes the brand monitoring services that crop up aren’t a good fit for them. Their needs are a little bit different from a large brand that can get what they need from one of these services or by doing a Google or Twitter search.

They need to determine more “convoluted” things like when the book review or interview they gave will be published. Or when their guest post will go live on a site. In a perfect world, the blog or publisher would let them know, or they’d get an @mention on Twitter. But I’ve been involved with and observing conundrums like this for several years so I can say with some authority, it just doesn’t work like that (usually). So here’s what I recommend to my clients so they’re sure to catch at least the good majority of their mentions – after all, a missed mention is a missed opportunity for networking and publicity.

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By admin | Posted in blogging, publicity coaching, social strategy | Comments (0)

Local biz and social media: a look at my favorite restaurant

March 30, 2010 – 1:49 pm

I’m obsessed with La Boulange (@laboulange) in San Francisco. I’m not going to go into great detail on their amazing yogurt or deathly delicious pastries, because the point of my post here is not to regale with foodie delights but to talk about how they’ve utilized social media and totally impressed me.

Not long ago, I blogged about another local business in my neighborhood who was clearly trying their hand at social media, and it begged the question of whether or not everyone should have a blog or a social presence. Their execution was lack-luster in spite of the fact that they were apparently advertising somewhat heavily their foray into social. Sometimes when I see small, local businesses pimping out a Twitter handle or Facebook page I wonder a few things:

1). WHY are they doing it? Did they hear that it was something “everyone’s doing” so they thought they needed to jump on the bandwagon?

2). WHO is doing it? Do they have someone who actually knows about social media and engagement managing these profiles or are they even maintaining them at all?

3). WHAT is their strategy? Is it just to get their name out on a network or do they have concrete goals?

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By admin | Posted in social network | Comments (0)

Finding and following people you (sort of) already know

March 23, 2010 – 10:48 am

Most of us have a good idea how to find interesting people to follow on social networks so that we can connect and expand our reach and possibilities. But what about finding people you already (sort of) know? It sounds easy ~ if you know them it should be easy to find their profile page on any one of a number of networks. Which is why I say – people you “sort of” know. They may be someone you ran into at a conference, or someone you’ve interviewed with or guest posted for. Or maybe you’re helping a client find some of their not-so-obvious contacts. Here’s what I do when I’m having trouble adding someone to my (or a client’s) network:

1. Go to the source: checking the person’s website is a good way to get directly connected to their social profiles. But even nowadays not everyone links to these. Try using the name of the person’s website or company in a Google or social network search to see if they’re active under that name.

2. Cross-reference: usually when I can’t find someone on, say, Twitter, it’s because there are several variations of their name and I’m not sure which one is the person I’m looking for. Check other networks to see if you can put the pieces together. If you can find the person on LinkedIn and determine what city they live in, that can help narrow your Twitter results. If you Google their name and read some of their content, that can help determine what industry they’re in.

3. Image search: ok, it sounds cheesy but if you don’t remember what the person looked like – or if you’re working with a client and therefore have no idea! – it can be helpful to search images and cross-check with various social profiles to see which ones match up.

One last word to the wise – you don’t want to be creating these types of conundrums for people who are looking for you. Make sure you link to your public profiles from your website, LinkedIn, etc. and do what you can to make yourself accessible in search results.

By admin | Posted in social network | Comments (0)

Worlds Collide: should you have a public and private persona?

March 1, 2010 – 9:47 pm

I was in an interesting conversation the other day about social media adoption and best practices. That in itself isn’t interesting since I’m involved with social media for my job almost all the time and such discussions are fairly commonplace. What made this conversation different was the group – except for me no one in the room did any kind of work with social media, or even within the online sector. The group was comprised of a doctor, salesperson, designer, stay-at-home mom and several others. We talked about the relevance of Twitter, the wide-spread adoption of the social web, the frustration we sometimes feel when we realize our parents and grandparents are on Facebook and – perhaps most interestingly – we talked about how we should present ourselves online.

My doctor friend – who is active in social media on behalf of her practice – said she’d be admonished by a colleague to maintain two “personas.” One for her business, one for herself. She’d rejected this idea and decided that she didn’t want to expend the physical energy to maintain two different profile, not to mention the mental energy of keeping everything straight.

I tend to agree with this school of thought. After all, a big part of social media is a cry for transparency and believability and if you’re maintaining two different personas, it’s going to be harder to do that. Sooner or later someone will probably find out and your credibility will suffer. Now that so many of us have bosses, clients, co-workers, colleagues and the like as friends on our social networks, the idea is that if we wouldn’t post something people in our professional sphere should see, should we be posting it at all?

So how have you seen this play out in your business? With your friends and family? How have you dealt with your worlds colliding?

By admin | Posted in blogging, online marketing, social network | Comments (0)

Use Online Advertising to Capture Opinions

February 12, 2010 – 9:56 pm

I don’t have a TV so I watch the shows I’m interested in on Hulu. They’ve done wonders with their advertising, from a consumer perspective, over the past year or so and today I got the opportunity to participate in something I wish companies did more often: a survey about a particular product. This wasn’t a Hulu-sponsored survey (though I usually take those, too, since I enjoy the service so much). This was actually in lieu of an ad, and I was given the option to answer five questions about a L’oreal product and then watch my show commercial free. Of course I opted for this choice, and I can’t imagine that there are very many people who wouldn’t! Which makes me wonder why I haven’t seen more of this type of online advertising.

It seems like it’s a win-win for both parties involved. The user gets to watch their video commercial-free and the brand gets feedback from people who are likely to be their target audience. Even if you’re not advertising specifically on Hulu or even in a video capacity, the option of a survey seems like a no-brainer.

Of course then you have to have a system in place to deal with the data you’ll receive which does require a bit of extra work than if you just threw up a traditional ad campaign. But wouldn’t it be worth it to have data about potential customers more readily available?

By admin | Posted in blogging, online marketing | Comments (0)