If you can’t see this video, click here: Anne Reuss on social media and accessibility.

Stop what you’re doing and watch this short video. In under two minutes, you will receive a very powerful message.

When I first connected with Anne Reuss on Twitter, of course I didn’t know she was deaf.  But I did notice that she was looking for a job, so I did what I could to help her.  Connecting Anne to my friend Sean McGinnis led to her first big social media networking event in Chicago.  She later told me that she was nervous about being deaf at a business event like this but felt immediately comfortable when she realized that everybody had their head down, communicating to each other through Twitter!  Twitter. The great equalizer!

For Anne, and many with disabilities, social media has become an amazing connection point. And ever since I was introduced to Anne, I have been trying to see the social media world through the eyes (and ears) of the disabled … How would this work for a deaf person? A blind person? Not always easy.

“I’m working in Social Media because being deaf is not detrimental in the wide world of the web,” Anne said. “I’m madly driven and focused despite what may be noisy settings for other people!”

I invited Anne to make this video for you so you will begin to think about accessibility issues too. She put a lot of work into making this video for {grow}. Please tell her what you think in the comment section.

Have you ever considered the ways a blog can help you get a job?  I meet a lot of young people entering the work force and I always recommend blogging as a way to get ahead … in almost any career. Here’s why:

1) Show what you’re made of.  In any interview, you normally have to try to convince people that you know what you know.  In a blog, you can SHOW them.  Blog about current events in your industry, your view on trends and developments and demonstrate your areas of expertise.

2) Build a professional network.  There are lots of examples where people found jobs through connections in a blog community.  Just last week I helped connect a young woman into the professional marketing scene in Chicago because I was impressed with her blog. Your blog community can certainly become a professional network.

3) Engaging versus advertising.   Let’s face it. No matter how creative you get, a resume is still an advertisement. I struggle reading carefully through a lengthy resume. However, I will read interesting stories on a blog all day long.  Compelling content is a way to engage prospective employers in a way that will hold their attention.

4) Point of differentiation.  In today’s world, blogging may be an expectation of many entry-level jobs. Demonstrating an ability to create content may just be the difference that gets you the job over a non-blogger.

5) Sharpen your professional skills. If you’re going to blog about a subject, you need to know your stuff. Putting out thoughtful content requires that you stay on top of your game, which will certainly be an advantage to you, especially if the job-hunting process is a long one.

6) Expand your reach. Building your personal brand means showing up in all the places a prospective employer might find you. Of course that usually means LinkedIn.  But having a link to a blog on your profile, as well displaying a feed of your recent blog posts, gives a potential employer stalking you on LinkedIn more ways to connect with you and learn about your skills.

7) Extend the interview. Here is the last thing you say to your interviewer: “I’ve enjoyed our time together but there is so much more I could tell you about my abilities. I hope you’ll take a look at my blog (the web address is on my resume) so you can see for yourself the way I think about things.”  And you know what? They’ll do it.  You have just extended your interview by another 15-30 minutes and that may make all the difference!

What do you think?  How has blogging helped you in your professional life?

The importance of strategy is woven into the fabric of every consultation and class I teach.  I shout it from the mountaintops.  And yet, sometimes I break my own rules … and with good reason.  In a fast-changing competitive marketplace, sometimes not locking into a strategy is the best strategy.

I have an entrepreneur friend who said that his start-up company has a different direction every three months. On the surface, that may seem extreme, but when you are a small company, even something like gaining a new customer, hiring a new employee with special skills, or a sudden move by a competitor can dramatically create a course correction.

One of the most costly mistakes you can make in business is brilliantly executing an obsolete strategy.

In my particular field, the dynamics are changing tumultously. Right now, building a competency in social media marketing is barely-controlled chaos.

2011 was really a year of “wait and see” for me.  And I’m glad I took this approach.  It was uncomfortable in some ways but I needed to just let things unfold to see what monetization opportunities would emerge. Here’s what happened:

Although I have been teaching at the college level for several years, the demand for my services shot through the roof in 2011.  I was flexible enough to embrace opportunities that didn’t exist at the beginning of the year.

My consulting business shifted dramatically from multi-million dollar companies to multi-billion dollar companies.  I think this is where I am more comfortable, but it means I would have to risk more by taking on fewer, larger clients.  And can I find the right resources to help me scale in this way? Some big strategic decisions will have to made for 2012.

The speaking schedule also shifted quite a bit in 2011.  I evolved and matured as a public speaker and learned that I am very good at this.  Do I want to grow the speaking side of the business?  The trade-off with travel — is it what I want? I’ll have to bring focus to this area in the next year.

The Tao of Twitter, was released in February 2011 and was a surprise hit (at least to me!).  My second book will be released by McGraw-Hill in March and the publisher is expecting big things. This is going to throw me into a new public spotlight and undoubtedly open up more writing opportunities.  Should writing books be an emphasis going forward?

And then there is {grow}.  Blogging is the favorite part of my job but I have done a poor job monetizing the property, at least directly.  I have a new video series coming out in January and a few other ideas but I have definitely sub-optimized these opportunities.

This is a round-about way of saying that it was a very good strategy to NOT have a strategy in 2011.  None of these opportunities would have been fully available if I had decided early in the year to wed myself to one defined path.

Now, I need to be clear that although my strategy was in flux, being fully aware of my core competencies and points of differentiation were not. That’s an important distinction. In a dynamic marketplace, remaining open to strategic shifts is OK but it only works if you are clear about how you uniquely create value.

So I’m going to spend a little quiet time over the next few weeks assessing my opportunities, combining them with my passions, and defining the best monetization path and focus for the next six months. Even now, I don’t think I want to lock in completely. Is there even such a thing as a long-term strategy any more?

That’s the way things are playing out for me.  What is the role of strategy in your company? How has that changed with the increasing speed of business? How do balance the need to stay numble with the benefit of a strategic plan?

I’ve had a variety of sales jobs in my career and have dealt with some great people … and some world-class jerks. Not just difficult and demanding people, but unethical, bullying, liars at Fortune 100 companies.

One time, a powerful VP demanded that my company buy-back $1.2 million of our material due to a cosmetic issue that did not affect the performance of their end product. In fact, the defect would not even be visible to their consumer. It was a dicey situation. Yes, we were “out of specification,” but this was also going to be a painful financial hit for my company.  It was like being ticketed for going 56 miles per hour in a 55 mph zone.

In the end, we paid an $850,000 claim for the products that were made from the defective material.

I later found out this VP secretly sold the defective products to his customer any way, simply adding our claim payment to his bottom line (and annual bonus payment) through some accounting jujitsu.  My customer loved bragging about his cleverness to demonstrate the power he could wield over my company.

The dude was eventually fired for this type of behavior, but that did little to comfort me when I still had to work with him every day. And yet, I really had no choice but to take it or quit.  This guy was personally responsible for the acquisition of $1.5 billion of my company’s products — at that time, 10 percent of my employer’s total revenue!  I had a one-line job description: Don’t lose the account.

I knew that I would only be in the sales position for a few years at the most, so I decided to weather the storm and approach the challenge patiently and calmly, as long as my own ethics or any laws were not compromised.

I realized that the customer is NOT always right. But the customer is always the customer.  I was the one who had to adapt to survive and compete.

Fortunately, this is an extreme example but the point is, we can’t always demand that a customer — even a really bad one – change to conform to our needs and processes. Only we can change to adopt to the customer’s needs … or, if it gets too bad, quit.

Understanding this wisdom is difficult but a key to success in a fiercely competitive world.

This story came to mind because last week we had a debate on {grow} about the customer demands for rapid online service, even from hotels, restaurants, and other providers who are on the “value” end of the product line. This is an unfortunate development but they really only have one choice: Figure out how to adapt to the customer service needs AND maintain a low cost structure. They’re not going to be able to dictate customer expectations and still compete in the long term.

I’m currently working with a supplier that is imposing new processes that will take up more of my time and dramatically hurt my cash flow.  As a business partner, I want to cooperate and make the whole “system” better, but when I point out that their service levels are declining and the value of these new processes seems to be flowing in only in their direction, their response is defensive instead of responsive.  And you know … they might be right and I might be wrong.  I’m not perfect.  But I’m still the customer.

They may get away with it for awhile if the switching costs are high, but in general the information flow of the web has dis-intermediated many traditional competitive hurdles. It’s easier than ever to find new suppliers for most goods.

In the end, all of us who have to compete for a living know we have just one true source of competitive advantage –

LISTEN to our customers more intently than our competitors,

DISCOVER un-met and under-served needs, and

RESPOND more rapidly and effectively.

That’s it.  The customer is the customer. Adapt or die. Right?

A few months ago I was let go from my job heading up the social media efforts for Flightster.  I immediately entered panic mode and frantically searched for a job only to realize that living in Costa Rica was going to severely limit my chances of finding anything. So I decided to table my job search and return to the United States.

Over the last two years I’d seen several people use their social media presence to help them find a job. Given that I’d built a decent footprint online, I thought I wouldn’t face any of the typical challenges of a job search.  I tried leveraging my blog and my connections to launch a job search campaign.

I thought there was no way I could fail with this considering I’d seen people who were not nearly as connected as I am wind up with multiple job offers. I emailed everybody I could in my network and asked for their support in getting the word out and my blog post about my job search was tweeted 153 times. The campaign fell flat on its face and I didn’t receive a single inquiry about my job search.

Despite my tireless work in the “attention economy,” I could not convert this to cash.

Why the Social Media Job Campaign Failed

I’m not sure if I could come up with an exact reason that my job search campaign failed, but I thought it might be worth taking a closer look at some elements that might have limited me:

• Too Much Transparency: I have a reputation for being extremely transparent on my blog. I don’t sugarcoat anything, tend to be opinionated and let people know a good deal about my life. It’s no secret to any of you who know me well that surfing is a HUGE part of my life. It’s possible the fact that I’ve been so open about this may have caused a potential employer to see this as a red flag. On the flip side of that I think that transparency is exactly what keeps people from ending up in a job they’re going to eventually hate.
• Lack of Specifics: Looking back at this campaign I think I could have been far more specific about exactly what I was looking for. I’ve been involved in a wide variety of projects over the last two years and I made it a point to showcase the work I’d done on those. It’s possible I didn’t articulate the value I could bring to an organization as well as I could have.
• Not Pushing the Klout Score: Truth be told I’m not a big fan of Klout and can’t stand the idea that somebody would hire me because of my score. But it’s something that probably would have been worth discussing in my job search campaign, given that it is a measure of influence that does have significance to people who are hiring specifically for social media positions.

After sulking for about a week I went back to the drawing board, demoralized and wondering how I would ever stand out in this job market.  Sending out resumes led nowhere, and the more I thought about it, the more I started to think that maybe finding a traditional job was no longer in the cards for me.  My friend Josh Waldman told me:  “Well I think you’re in an odd position because of all the entrepreneurial stuff you’ve done. The right company will see you as a tremendous asset, but many will look at this and see you as a liability.”

When I thought about this, my job search took a new turn as I decided to focus my efforts on  personal projects and keeping an eye out only for opportunities that I considered a perfect fit.

Taking a Dive in the Deep End of the Entrepreneurial Pool

A few weeks ago Stanford Smith wrote a great article on {grow} about the social media mistake that far too many people make and I mentioned in a comment that in many ways, I had become the poster child for being “social media popular” and unprofitable.

I have a blog with close to 3,000 subscribers, a podcast gets 25,000 downloads and multiple speaking gigs and I still can’t live off of what I’ve created.  I have hit a wall.  How was it that people who’d started after I did had become more successful?  I questioned whether I had what it really takes. Why was I not making the kind of money that I thought I was worth?  Questions like this plagued my mind and finally after weeks of soul searching I realized that I’ve reached a point of no return.  I absolutely have to see the social media properties I have built become a success or die trying.  But I had to do something different if things were going to change.

Every single day that I came across a compelling blog post, I decided to act on it. I launched an e-book for a $1.99.  I started writing a guest post at least twice a week for a blog bigger than mine. But I knew there was no way this was going to give me the income I needed in the long term.  I got my hands on books like The Wealthy Freelancer and realized that it might be time to bring in some outside help and hire a business coach.

The Harsh Reality of Making it On Your Own

I am finding that is not easy making it on your own in the social media space.  You have to have a high tolerance for risk and uncertainty.  You don’t know where your next paycheck is going to come from. People around you continually seem to doubt whether you’re going to make it and seem intent on advising you that you’re out of your mind.  The low barrier to entry created by social media has flooded the market with aspiring entrepreneurs, freelancers, and people trying to make it on their own.  Standing out in it is only half the battle. You have to figure out how to turn social media attention into social media income.  Have you successfully evolved from blogger to entrepreneur?  What steps should I take next?

Srinivas Rao is the founder of Blogcast FM and writes about the things you should have learned in school, but never did.  

The other day in my Twitter stream @joe_sharkey asked:  ”As a new graduate, how do I stand out in the social media jungle?”

I promised I would write him a blog post in response, so here it is!

I believe today’s most successful social media marketing candidates will have three key qualifications:

1) Demonstrated understanding of marketing fundamentals.

2) An ability to rapidly identify, assess and deploy appropriate new technologies.

3) Possess superb writing and communication skills.

Here are some ideas to help you stand out in those areas, even if you’ve already graduated:

Resist the temptation to be a social media guru. When I graduated from college, I thought I knew it all. Turns out, I didn’t know shit. Then, when I was 30, I thought I knew it all. Turns out, I still didn’t know shit. I know … You’re different. And you probably are. It wouldn’t be all that difficult to be smarter than me. But consider getting some actual marketing and client experience with a company or an agency before hanging out your shingle. Better yet, work at a couple of different places first.

Become a beefy marketer.  An ability to navigate Facebook or YouTube might be enough to get you an entry level job at some places but to really build a career you should become proficient at the fundamentals of marketing.  Star performers will be able to apply their love of the social web to marketing research, consumer behavior, product development, personal selling, and brand-building.   Get a degree if you can. If that’s not possible, join the American Marketing Association and immerse yourself in their journals and webinars. Read all you can, attend free webinars every day of your job search, create an effective RSS feed for yourself.

Don’t goof off.  OK, classes are over and you want to head for the beach or Europe for a few weeks. Whatever you decide to do, don’t be out of touch for a few weeks and then head straight into an interview. You need to stay on top of the latest developments and be able to discuss them intelligently when you get an audience with a prospective employer.

Immerse yourself.  You can’t learn social media marketing in college. In fact, you can’t learn it anywhere. You have to do it. Nobody can help you can find your blogging voice. Nobody can help you sense the rhythm of Twitter. You have to jump in and show people you have the chops.

Get experience, even if you do it for free.  Building on the last point, if you really want to do social media marketing, you better be ready to show some examples of what you can do. In this competitive job market, there are just no excuses not to. Lots of people need help. Charities. Churches.  Schools.  The needs are great and budgets are tight so if you can’t find an internship, go make one.

Build your power base.  If you’re looking for a job, this is a good time to start building some online marketing muscle.  Surround yourself with targeted followers, especially on Twitter and LinkedIn.  Engage with them in a helpful way.  Identify yourself in your bio as a job-seeker.  Identify local business people and marketers you can learn from and try to have lunch or coffee with different people a couple of times each week. Check out how Antonia Harler did this.

Blog strategically.  It makes a lot of sense for new graduates to blog like a house on fire. It’s good skill development, but it will also extend your job interviews.  Here’s what I mean.  You go for an interview. Maybe they give you 45 minutes or an hour. Here’s the last thing you say to them: “You don’t have to take my word that I know how to do this stuff.  Go see for yourself on my blog.”  Which, they will do. You have just extended your job interview by at least another 30 minutes.

Hone your writing skills.  Blogging isn’t enough. You need constant feedback, so connect with bloggers who are great writers and see if you can do some guest posts. Be humble. Ask for ruthless editing.  Repeat.

Emphasize secondary skills … even if it’s just a hobby … to provide an extra bonus to employers. If it’s a tight call between two applicants, you might have an edge if you can offer an employer a “combo deal” based on your passion for photography, editing a newsletter for a charity, doing the books for your spouse’s business. This is especially key if you applying for a job at a start-up where everybody has to wear a lot of hats. Find every possible way to differentiate yourself!

Ask for help. See what happened when you sent a tweet asking for help?  You got a whole new blog post out of it.  In general, people on the social web are really cool. If they’re not, find some new ones.  We rarely say no to somebody who is authentically trying to connect with us.

What are the community’s ideas on this one?  What advice would you give to people trying to stand out and break into a social media marketing position?

Before I tell my tale, let me relate a few of my experiences this week …

• A very talented friend told me he was rejected for a job at a major ad agency because his Klout score was too low.
• A B2B marketing agency Managing Director told me he chose between two qualified candidates based on their Klout score.
• A friend in D.C is creating a Klout 50 Club exclusive to people with high Klout scores. Why? He wants to find good hires for social media marketing.
• A woman told me her boyfriend was accepted to a prestigious conference based on his Klout score alone.

These experiences occurred in the span of 72 hours.

This morning I had coffee with a family friend who just graduated from college and is seeking her first job as a writer/content creator.  She was eager to seek my advice on what she should do to get ahead and land a job.

My leg began to twitch.  My hands became cold and clammy.  My lips quivered.

And then the terrible words came out of  my mouth. “You need to take a hard look at your Klout score. It could make a difference if you’re seeking an entry level social media job.”

Oh my God. What did I just say??  What have I done?  I recommended that this young lady game a score to get a job? That she needed to focus on an internet RATING of her worthiness?

I felt sick and … dirty.  Filthy.  Slutty.

I still do. This isn’t what I want social media to be about.  This is not what I want people to aspire to. And yet, I can’t ignore what’s happening out there.  Facts are facts.  I would have been remiss to NOT mention it to her.

An algorithmic measure of influence can never tell the whole story, but it seems that it is starting to become a quick and easy indicator of … something.  Something that people are grabbing on to.  In a world where people are auto-responding their relationships and making business decisions based on 140-character sound bites, this thing seems to be going mainstream.

I’ll turn this over to you and your comments. I need to scrub down.

As somebody with a fairly high social media presence, it’s not easy to “sneak off” for an extended vacation.  I have a blog community to think about and I also get a lot of business-related tweets.  I don’t want to disappoint people so I announced that I was going on vacation, where and when.

Although this was certainly a digital de-tox, I occasionally sent out a few tweets along the way.  An interesting thing happened.  Every time I sent out a tweet I was scolded by multiple people with something like “Why are you tweeting? I thought you were on vacation!” It got to the point where I cringed each time I sent out a tweet. 

Now I would like to know something. Who made the rule that you can’t tweet while you’re on vacation?  And why are we policing each other?

Certainly there is a business element to Twitter. Heck, I wrote a whole book about it.  But Twitter is also home to some of my best friends from around the world and sending out a tweet is an easy and quick way to keep in touch with them along the way.

To me, and I hope to you, Twitter is FUN.  In fact, I even did a little writing on my vacation. Yes, that’s fun too.

I don’t normally obssess about Klout scores but was curious to see what would happen when I went on vacation.  Here’s the answer:

So the implication is, going on vacation makes you less influential!  And of course, a little getaway also cost me value on Empire Avenue, which I care even less about than Klout:

Hey, I’m a great buy right now. Ha!

Scolded by my readers, pounded by Klout, abandoned by Empire Avernue!  What’s a guy to do?  The message seems to be that the world of social media punishes those who go on vacation.  To succeed on the social web, stay put! : )

Addition to the original post: Quite a few people have mis-interpreted this post and I feel compelled to clarify.

This post was written tongue-in-cheek.  I am not seriously advocating dismissing vacation for social media, I am not really lamenting the loss of my “numbers” and I’m not really encouraging people to buy me on Empire Avenue because I’m a deal.

Writing for a diverse audience is difficult, especially under the pressure of other deadlines, as well as making up for vacation time.  I guess I assume that people “get me” and my sense of humor but that is not always the case, especially for new readers.

The point of this post is to encourage balance in your life and NOT be caught up in the numbers.  Stay centered, stay focused, stay real, and the results will take care of themselves. Sorry for any confusion!

The other day I was enjoying a warm spring and decided to eat my lunch outside on one of the many public plazas in New York City.  Pigeons strutted around me waiting for a speck of food to drop.  As I was balancing my plate of chicken and rice, a pigeon dive-bombed my plate, sending half my lunch to the sidewalk … and into the beaks of his swarming cousins.

After my initial pissed-offed-ness, I marveled that this stupid little bird had learned a highly effective new behavior to gather food. It had adopted to its urban environment and surely was setting itself up to be the founding father of a race of hawk-like super pigeons.

It was a lesson that in any environment, those with the ability to adapt to changing conditions will win. I think with the frenzied rate of change we are now seeing on the social web, this will be an important lesson — and life skill — for marketers.

A hypothesis:  Personal “technological networking and adaptability” is going to be an increasingly important characteristic valued by corporate recruiters.  The ability to use the web to network, improve productivity, and find answers will be a highly-prized part of a personal skill portfolio.  In fact, there is some research to back it up

A few years ago, I was in a graduate leadership program at Carnegie Mellon University and took a class from a talented educator and author named Robert E. Kelly.  Dr. Kelly had just written a book called How to Be a Star at Work: 9 Breakthrough Strategies You Need to Succeed.   Honestly, I thought it was going to be one of those kick-your-feet-up, blow-off kind of classes, but it ended up being one of the most interesting sessions of the program.

We all know that certain people tend to rise to superstar level at work. They may not be smarter or harder working than others, but they have a certain “something” that seems to push them up the corporate ladder.

Dr. Kelly had a research grant to determine the factors that these high-fliers had in common. After all, if you could actually test for these factors, wouldn’t that have a powerful impact on corporate recruiting and training?  Turns out it wasn’t that simple, but after years of investigation he eventually found the magic formula.

According to Dr. Kelly’s research, one of those key characteristics of a corporate rock star is an ability to effectively network and find information quickly.  Let’s say you had two employees — Tom and Tammy — equally well-educated, enthusiastic and nattily-attired.  But Tammy had just one advantage — she knew how to use technology to rapidly find the people and resources she needed to accomplish a task while Tom picked up a phone and started calling people in the company directory. The research showed that Tom had no hope of ever catching up and the more complex the task, the further Tammy would outshine him.

It makes a lot of sense.

Dr. Kelly’s research seems to indicate that expert networking skills like an ability to navigate the social web can also be a crucial differentiator in your career.

So there.  Now you can explain to your spouse that all that time you’re wasting on Twitter is actually a career-advancement opportunity! You may be just 140 characters away from the tweet smell of success.

I would be interested to know … how are you seeing this play out in your own workplace and your own life?  And if you agree that this ability to adapt to technological change is important, how would you measure something like that?

I loved Amber Naslund’s recent post about the always-on, world of digital media. As she correctly said, The New World of Work Includes Social Media.

But here’s the problem. That’s easy for ME to say.

It’s easy for Amber to say.

But is it easy for you to explain to your spouse?  How do you explain why you always need to be tethered to the Internet?

Before I get into the heart of the post, you have to promise me something.  Actually, three things:

1. You are not a workaholic/addictive personality using social media as an excuse to avoid your family. This is not a post about time management. This is a post about sensitively handling a shift in a person’s lifestyle.
2. You are not playing World of Warcraft or Farmville and explaining it to your spouse as social media research, and
3. You are responsibly trying to have a balance with family life most of the time.  That’s important.

If you can agree to these things, I think you’re probably just a stressed marketing pro like the rest of us trying to hang on and stay afloat.  If that’s the case, here are some ideas to explain to your spouse why you don’t have a 9-5 job any more.

Prepare martinis. No, that’s really not the first thing to do. The real first step is to “listen.” But if I wrote “listen” you would skip over this paragraph and that would be a big mistake, so I tricked you. I know you, don’t I?

Seriously.  You need to just shut up. Don’t explain anything at first. If your spouse doesn’t understand why you spend so much time on the social web, let them express their feelings and frustrations FIRST. This doesn’t mean be quiet and prepare to speak, this means authentically connect and try to truly understand what is going on. Don’t rule out that they may be right. Maybe you ARE over-doing it. P.S. Don’t skip this step.

Empathize. This would be expressed in words like: “Wow. I can see how much this is impacting you. I would probably feel the same way.” Or, “I had no idea this was having this kind of an affect on you.”  It’s important that you acknowledge the feelings of the other person as being legitimate.

Lead with feelings. Yes guys, that means you too.  How does it make you FEEL to be immersed in social media marketing? Energized? Depressed? Excited? Renewed? Overwhelmed?  Leading with these kind of words will help set the stage so you can have a non-defensive discussion. You can’t really argue with feelings. They just are.

Don’t explain, show. Chances are you’ve tried to explain what is going on before. Doesn’t work, does it?  There is no way people can understand why social media is so time consuming unless they SEE it. Let them into your world.  And before you have your talk, do a little homework. Have this ready:

1. Something to make an impression that the marketing world is changing relentlessly. The Qualman “shift” video is always good for something like this and I’m sure you can recommend others.
2. Be able to demonstrate your typical routine on each social platform. Show how it is connected to your work, your income and your future. Explain why there are no shortcuts.
3. Give examples of how quickly the technology is changing. Don’t make them read. Show graphs and videos where you can make quick, bold impressions demonstrating urgency and change. Mine Mashable for that stuff.

Be honest. Chances are, the time you spend on the social web is not going to lessen. Let’s face it. These productivity tools only pull us into new niches and corners and rabbit holes. The world is getting faster, not slower.

Tune in to priorities. Be prepared to make a concession to important needs. When are the times you absolutely, positively need to put the smartphone down? Dinner? Vacation? Playtime with the kids? Sunday mornings?  Listen intently, respond compassionately, keep your promises.

Follow-up. Check-in every other week or so and see how things are going on this issue. Are you keeping your promises?

OK.  Help fill in the gaps for me.  How are you handling the workload and explaining social media immersion to your family?

P.S. I have an urge to provide a little explanation here. Sometimes when I read “self help” oriented blog posts I think … “who are you to be giving advice?”  For the record, I do have a masters degree in applied behavioral sciences and spent a lot of time with conflict resolution. I don’t write about this stuff too often but I will probably be getting into those areas now and then because it is interesting to me.