I’m a fan of John Jantsch. He recently wrote about his social media system and encouraged a few folks to do the same. I’m game, so here are some thoughts on how I do what I do.
A Social Media System
The Tools
- Firefox
- Mail.app
- iPhone (for SMS)
- Tweetdeck
The Workflow
(Here’s where John and I differ, because I’m crazy.)
- Constant – monitor SMS and Twitter stream. (40-60% of my opportunities come from Twitter)
- Six times Daily(more, but I’m trying to pretend) – check email
- Twice daily – RSS dives of my 700+ blog subscriptions plus shared items stream
- Twice daily – blog content (sometimes more, like today)
- Daily – review my Task list and add 14 new things to it.
- Daily – beg Colin and Justin to save me (they take a lot of new opportunities from me and work them).
- Daily – put really important stuff into Delicious.
- Daily – swing by Friendfeed. I’m still not at Scoble level there, but I appreciate its intent.
- Less Daily – Swing by LinkedIn
- Less Daily – Swing by Facebook
- Rarely – try yet another new social network. I’m getting burned out on them, unless there’s a huge value.
The Workload
At this point, if I summed up my systems, and how I’m spending my time, which is a little different than John’s original intent, I think it’s something like this:
- Correspondence (of any kind) – 60%
- Discovery (new things, ideas) – 20%
- Execution – 20%
But there’s the rub, right? Social media is, uh, social. If I don’t correspond, then I’m aloof and I have “forgotten my roots.” If I correspond all the time, I run lower and lower on time to do new things, to plan and run my business, and to execute on behalf of clients.
In doing the work of defining one’s system, many things come up, and this exercise turned out to be more worth it than I thought. I think John’s original post is more helpful than this one, but the idea is really good, and I wanted to participate.
What’s your system look like? Blog it and maybe link to John’s great post?