I just got back from hanging out with friends and colleagues at the FinCon conference in New Orleans this past week.
Aside from the informative and entertaining sessions, FinCon is an opportunity to actually shake hands, hug, and hang out with those I’ve engaged with online.
FinCon is a place where you can move an online relationship into an offline friendship. And that’s the glue that keeps this personal finance community growing – and why we all keep going back every year.
My favorite part of the week is when I get a chance to host and join our weekly tweetchats.
Tweetchats are great because it allows you the opportunity to meet and engage with dozens and dozens of people in real-time. I’m always learning something new and meeting amazing people in these chats.
In the last year, I’ve launched a weekly #CreditChat and #MarketingChat and want to share with you my process in case you’re interested in hosting your own at some point.
This is my process …
Find out about dates and times of any tweetchats that have similar topics as yours.
Before launching your own tweetchat, make sure to find out if there are any tweetchats that already exist on a similar topic. Simply do a Google search for “topic + tweetchat” to see what appears.
When I was getting ready to launch #MarketingChat, I found out about many different digital marketing chats that already existed. I also discovered this crowdsourced tweetchat schedule on Google Docs that archives all known tweetchats along with date, time, topic, and who moderates.
As a community manager, I’m always studying my company’s tweets to see what content drives more engagement than others. And this can help me decide on what type of content we need to be developing more of.
Researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center studied 74 million tweets through the Twitter API to discover common attributes of tweets that get retweeted.
They wanted to find out what elements in a tweet helped increase the retweet rate (e.g. URL, hashtag, mentions) and what about tweet authors drove more retweets (e.g. follower count, followee count, age of account, number of favorites by user, etc.).
Here is what they discovered:
Read More…
A big part of my job as a community builder is to encourage community members to engage with each other and the brands I work with.
One way that I’ve been building engagement with my communities is through live events (e.g. chats on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+). There’s nothing like live online events to build rapport with community members – and improve relationships.
When hosting live events (e.g. tweetchats), it’s important to know what sorts of questions you want to ask to encourage conversation.
Let me share with you some tips to writing engaging questions …
Do you want to increase your company’s visibility on LinkedIn?
Over the last year, I’ve been spending a lot of time on LinkedIn trying to figure out ways to grow my company’s reach, engagement and followers.
I can’t share our stats or dashboards from our LinkedIn analytics – but I can share ways that I’ve learned to dramatically increase our follower count and engagement.
Here are some ways to help you boost your company’s reach on LinkedIn:
It’s crucial to create deadlines for yourself to help you achieve your goals.
Whether you want to complete a project at work – or achieve a personal goal – it’s important to set realistic deadlines for yourself.
I started this blog to force myself to publish content every week. If I don’t set deadlines, then I’ll just let articles sit forever because I’m never fully satisfied. There is always a way to tighten it up a paragraph. There’s always a way to tweak a word and make a sentence sound better.
If I don’t set deadlines, then I’ll just keep tweaking my work and never accomplish anything.
Here are some reasons why deadlines are important:
Deadlines force you to think about what it will take to accomplish your goal.
When creating a deadline for yourself, it forces you to think through the steps you need to achieve it. Each step will require a certain amount of time – and that will better inform how long it will take you to finish the project. Visualizing all the steps involved (and finishing it) can help motivate you to start tackling each small step.
Goal planning is not just for a new year – it’s something you can do anytime.
The trouble with goal setting is that sometimes we lose focus or momentum because we haven’t armed ourselves with everything we need to make them a reality.
Here are five ways to help you reach your goals . . .
1. Make sure your goal is realistic (and recalibrate when necessary)
It’s important to set goals that will stretch and challenge you – but your goals should also be achievable. If you set a goal for yourself that is not realistic, you should adjust your deadline so that you will achieve it. Audit your progress regularly so you can see if you’re on track – and re-set the deadline date if you fall too far behind.
One of my goals this year is to spend much less time on email – which has been a productivity killer for me.
I began researching different strategies to cut down my time in my inbox and want to share some strategies that I’ve learned lately.
First, some fascinating facts about how email kills our productivity:
According to a July 2012 McKinsey Global Institute report on “the social economy,” the average knowledge worker now spends 28% of her work time managing email. If you work 50 hours per week, that’s 14 hours stuck in the inbox. – CNN
A study on a group of workers at Microsoft took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming email or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse the web. – New York Times
In 2005, a psychiatrist at King’s College London did a study in which one group was asked to take an IQ test while doing nothing, and a second group to take an IQ test while distracted by e-mails and ringing telephones. The uninterrupted group did better by an average of ten points, which wasn’t much of a surprise. What was a surprise is that the e-mailers also did worse, by an average of six points, than a group in a similar study that had been tested while stoned. That’s right. Stoned. Those people were literally burned out, and they did better. – New York Magazine
If you’re the type to meticulously file your emails in various folders in your client, stop, says a new study from IBM Research. By analyzing 345 users’ 85,000 episodes of digging through old emails in search of the one they needed, researchers discovered that those who did no email organizing at all found them faster than those who filed them in folders. – MIT Technology Review
Here are 7 ways that I’m reducing time in my email:
Do you ever have trouble getting focused?
Do you want to know some ways to block out distractions to help you accomplish a specific task?
Here are seven ways to get into the zone:
1. Create a hard deadline for yourself (with a time)
One way to get focused on a task is to assign a deadline on when it needs to get done. It needs to be a deadline that is realistic – but also one that will challenge you to stay focused. Set-up time slots in your calender to achieve certain portions of your project.
We all have items on our list that we don’t want to do.
And some projects end up staying on our “to do” list for weeks or even months.
Here are four ways to help you get that research paper or project done in a timely fashion:
Spirituality & Social Justice
