Case in point: Yesterday a clueless media relations professional whom I do not know sent me an e-mail with the subject line: “I sent a poem to a wannabee crotchety old bitch.” He was alluding to my recent birthday post, in which I reflected on aging.

The comment this person attempted to append to that post — which I did not approve — was the poem When I am an old woman I shall wear purple. That was in itself a mistake, though not a fatal one. If ever there was an overused, reflexive cliche response to any woman who mentions aging in a positive light, that poem would be it.

So this PR guy e-mailed me to let me know he’d tried to post that comment. Here’s the start of his message, and where he really screwed up…

He wrote:

“Hello Amy. I don’t think I’ll ever get to put the word ‘bitch’ in a corporate email subject line ever again but happy birthday. I hope you like the purple dresses poem that I commented with on your blog. It has stuck fondly in my memory since I was 13 and while I probably won’t wear purple dresses when I’m older, I aspire to that living.

“Anyway, here’s a pitch with some findings further below…”

And he did, indeed, follow that intro with a PR pitch. The real reason he was contacting me was that he wanted me to write up for CNN.com (where I blog about mobile technology) a study that his company recently released.

What can I say, but: Ick! No! Not in a million years!

I bear no personal animosity toward this media relations rep. But his note squicked me so much that I think it’s worth offering as an example for what people should generally not do when reaching out to strangers in order to try to get them to do something for you.

What was wrong with his approach?

• Transparently slimy.I have no problem that he read a post on my personal blog that contained personal information. I wouldn’t have published that post if I hadn’t intended it to be public. However, using my personal disclosures as a basis to try to ingratiate himself, and then launch straight into a PR pitch, lacked finesse and forethought.
• Presumptuous.If he wanted to comment on my personal post — even with that cliche — fine. Other people who I don’t know commented on that birthday post, and I welcomed (and published) those responses. But it was presumptuous for him to assume that leaving a comment on my personal blog post actually created some kind of personal connection between us that might encourage me, more than otherwise, to use his pitch for a CNN.com story.Granted, I have sometimes struck up meaningful personal connections and friendships via blog comments, and sometimes these cross over with professional matters. This is a process that happens organically over time. Trying to engineer that in a single e-mail is a really bad idea.
• Inappropriate/rude. When I saw the word “bitch” in the subject line of an e-mail from a person with a male name whom I don’t know, I nearly deleted it as spam immediately. That’s not the kind of thing a man should ever say to a woman who doesn’t already know him and consider him a friend. Even if she recently used that word in a blog post. And especially if you’re trying to contact her for professional reasons. No matter what you do, that language just won’t look friendly or funny. Gender power dynamics suck, but they do exist. So it’s dumb to act like they don’t, especially when you’re trying to build bridges.

What could he have done instead? If he felt so moved, he could have left his blog comment. Really, that would have been fine. Cliche included.

Then if he wanted to pitch me, he should have sent me a separate e-mail that did not refer to his blog comment, and that did not use language which could easily be mistaken for a gender-based insult. From there, if I recognized his name, I might have noted or asked him about his blog comment. But it was inappropriate for him to draw this connection, since it implied that I should give his pitch special treatment in a professional decision.

There’s a huge fuzzy gray area between the personal and the professional realms, especially online. So I can understand why these missteps happen. Personally I think it’s futile (and fundamentally not credible) to try to separate the personal and professional spheres entirely. It’s better to blend them thoughtfully in a way that suits you. That’s what I’ve been trying to do since I got online way back in the early 90s.

Being ignorant of, or choosing to ignore, the emotionally and socially crucial distinction between personal and professional information (and how they might imply relationships and influence) leads to overstepping that can look invasive or offensive.

In light of this reality, it’s more important than ever for everyone (especially media pros of all kinds) to be aware that there is still a difference between personal and professional, and to use those different kinds of information mindfully in pursuit of your goals.

In my opinion, journalists should be equally mindful of this pitfall when scouring personal posts on blogs or social media in order to find sources to contact, especially regarding breaking news with deeply personal angles like a murder or arrest. If you want to use digital communication tools to build those kind of community connections, do that up front as much as possible.

If a journalist must approach someone they don’t know about a sensitive personal matter in order to cover a story, be very very sensitive to the personal/professional distinction. Don’t use their available personal info to ingratiate yourself by pretending to be their friend, or that you care for personal reasons, and then try to get them to give you the information for your story. That tactic can work, but it’s unethical and slimy. And from a practical standpoint, it can easily backfire in a way that not only thwarts your goals but undermines your personal and professional reputation in a very public, findable way.

I chose not to publish this PR guy’s name or employer because I really don’t want to smear him personally. He made a mistake, and this is a “teachable moment.” We can all move forward from that.

INDEX: Your blog / Rules of engagement / Twitter / Facebook / Other social media / Scribd and Slideshare

(Note: This toolkit is a work in progress. I invite comments and suggestions. I’m trying to keep it simple — just a few key tools and tips to get people started with basic online engagement.)

1. Home base: Your blog

Links make the web go round, so first things first: You’ll need an easily findable home base on the web that people can link to. This is the most important way to gain search visibility and improve your search ranking.

Your home base should be entirely under your control, easy for search engines to index and understand what’s new, and easy for you to update.

This means you need a blog. If you don’t already have one, I recommend you sign up for a free blog at WordPress.com, and then pay the extra $17/year to register a domain name and “map” (apply) it to your blog.

Getting your own domain name right from the start helps substantially. In the long run you’ll get better search engine visibility, faster, compared to using a subdomain from a service like myblog.blogspot.com. Also, if you end up not liking your blog host (WordPress.com, in this case), you can move your blog elsewhere without breaking inbound links. (That’s not necessarily easy or trouble free, but it’s important to have that option)

You can also use a custom domain with a blog on Tumblr, another popular free blogging platform — but the process is a just little bit more technical.

You don’t need to post often to your blog. But anytime you have something to say that’s more than a tweet or two in length, consider posting it to your blog and then linking to that from social media. This encourages people not just to engage with you, but to share links to your blog — which helps improve your search visibility.

If you already have your own blog, and it’s not under your own domain, don’t panic. If you’ve had that blog for more than a couple of years, and it’s been at least occasionally active, just keep it and use it more frequently. That usually helps more than starting over with a new blog from scratch.

Allow moderated comments. If you publish a blog, it’s a good idea to allow people to comment on your posts. This demonstrates you’re open to discourse. However, do use a comment spam filter like Akismet (which comes with WordPress.com blogs). And if you’re writing about a controversial or sensitive topic, use the WordPress comment moderation feature. To encourage conversation, set up e-mail notifications so you’ll know when you get a comment, and then review and approve/deny them quickly.

You don’t have to take abuse or approve off-topic ramblings, but being willing to engage politely with people who disagree with you is one of the best ways to boost your credibility and visibility.

Make it easy to post to your blog. Install and configure the WordPress Press this bookmarklet in your web browser toolbar. (Other blogging platforms usually have similar posting bookmarklets.) This allows you to blog something you see on the web, and add some commentary, just by pushing one button. Whenever you make something fast and easy, you’re likely to do it more often.

2. General rules of engagement

Whenever you’re interacting with people online — whether in public discussion or private/semiprivate conversation, use these guidelines:

1. Create a useful profile for every service you join. People will want to know who you are before they engage with you. Clarify who you are, what you do or what roles you play, and where you work or other important organizational affiliations. Post at least one picture. It’s helpful to try to use the same, or a similar, username or handle across as many services as possible. But if you use a handle, I recommend also giving your real name to aid credibility.
2. Listen first — a lot! It’s always easier, and more effective. to join a conversation than start one. Also, listening forces you to question your assumptions about what other people think or want.
3. When you do post, respond to or amplify others more than you speak up, self promote, or advocate. Prove that you’re listening, and that you care what others say, and they’ll return the favor. This is basically socially appropriate ingratiation. To see it in action, Aaron Williams just did it here! And hey, so did I, just now
4. Always be helpful, useful, interesting, and supportive — or at the very least, be civil and not creepy. Adding context, clarifying, or clearing up misconceptions (politely, without scolding) with links to supporting material (on your blog or elsewhere) is a great approach to public engagement.
5. Use your blog first. If you have something important to say, or an important question to ask or issue/concern to raise, say it on your blog first and then link to it via social media. This gets you maximum visibility and gets around some of the limitations of services like Twitter or Facebook.
6. Be careful with humor. People are touchy and it’s easy to seem sarcastic online. If you offend someone by accident, apologize, even if you think they’re being thin-skinned.
7. Disagreement and criticism are good — as long as it’s civil. They are opportunities to learn, explore, and extend your reach beyond your existing circle. Engage with your critics, and be humble (but not self-denigrating). You don’t have to agree with them to treat them with respect.
8. Don’t be a jerk. Resist the temptation to defend yourself, argue with people, or demean/ridicule/bait others. That behavior not only discourages positive engagement; it attracts trolls.
9. Do not feed the trolls. There will always be trolls. Just ignore them. If they’re overly aggressive or persistent, then block/unfriend them. But do not respond to them or engage them.

3. Use Twitter

Once you grasp the rules of online engagement, it’s time to put them to use. Twitter is a good place to start.

If you haven’t done so already, sign up for Twitter. I recommend just using one account so you present a coherent and nuanced identity, which is inherently more credible and engaging. If you try to be all professional all the time on Twitter, that tends to discourage engagement. And maintaining multiple Twitter accounts can get really confusing.

Who to follow? Follow the people you want to engage on Twitter, see what they’re talking about and who they’re engaging with on topics that interest you. Don’t just automatically follow everyone you know, or anyone who follows you. That quickly makes Twitter seem too chaotic and less useful.

Another way to find good people to follow is to search Twitter for relevant keywords or hashtags (keywords that start with “#”, a Twitter convention that makes it easier to follow topics or events rather than people).

If you’re highly focused on discussion of certain topics or events, I recommend using a column-based Twitter application such as Tweetdeckor Hootsuite so that you can more easily filter the firehose of incoming tweets into more understandable streams.

What to tweet. I recommend that 2/3 of your tweets should be either responses to other people’s tweets, or retweets of tweets you find especially useful or engaging. The people you’re responding to or retweeting will see that (Twitter makes that obvious). If you’re being helpful, useful, supportive, complimentary — or at least polite, fun, or interesting — they’ll probably think well of you and may follow you.

If you’re tweeting regularly about a topic, look for relevant current hashtags that people are using and include them in your tweets. This will expand your community, making you visible to people who aren’t yet directly following you.

Monitor your replies and direct messages. When someone tries to address you directly, respond as quickly as possible.

4. Use Facebook

While Twitter is useful for reaching almost any group of people about any topic, Facebook is sometimes useful and sometimes not. It depends on who you’re trying to reach, whether those people tend to hang out on Facebook, and what they tend to use Facebook for. But Facebook is so popular that it’s important to learn how to use it, in case you need it.

In my experience, Facebook is generally not the best venue for high-level conversations among specialists, such as utility engineers discussing power grid management strategies. But it might be a very good place to engage a consumer-level audience in a discussion about energy efficiency, or renewable power, or the smart grid.

I recommend that you search Facebook for groups and pages that would seem to attract the kind of people you wish to engage. Join the discussions there — but only stay with the groups that seem most relevant or useful.

Use your Facebook wall to post things that you think might interest the people you’re trying to engage — and occasionally tag items with the names of specific Facebook friends if you’re pretty sure they’d be interested.

Separate accounts? If, after you learn how to use Facebook, you decide you should seriously use it to engage people for professional or issue-related purposes, it’s a good idea to set up a separate Facebook account for that. (The people you friend on Facebook to interest in protecting your watershed probably would get annoyed by your photos of your kitchen renovation — although your actual friends might really like those photos.). This gets a little complicated, because Facebook accounts are about people, not organizations.

However, if you aren’t using Facebook much for professional/issue-related outreach or advocacy, you can probably get by well enough with using your personal Facebook account. If you’re not sure, just use your personal account to learn and experiment.

Facebook apps, pages, groups, and events. Facebook offers lots of ways to connect with people. In general, it’s a good idea to use your personal account to experiment with using things like pages and groups that other people have already set up, before you try it yourself. And in general, don’t try to create something new when an existing effort is already going strong. Just try to be a constructive, visible part of what people are already doing.

4. E-mail lists, forums, and other social media

People talk in all kinds of ways online besides Twitter and Facebook. In general, figure out where the people you need to engage already are, and go there. E-mail lists and forums are still very popular, especially on niche topics. Sometimes you might need to get permission from the group leader to join.

Depending on your goals, strengths, and who you need to reach, other kinds of social media such as Flickr (photos), YouTube (videos), SoundCloud (audio), etc. can also be useful.

Social bookmarking services such as Delicious and Diigo can help you engage for some communities, on some topics. They generally aren’t a venue for direct discussion, for the most part, but they’re valuable for sharing links to information and resources. If you’re already using one of these tools as a “backup brain,” why not get some more mileage out of that effort? Generally you can set up groups, lists, and other modes of sharing on these services.

Sometimes communities form around tags or other features of social bookmarking services. For example, lots of smart, influential technologists follow the nonprofit technology (NPtech) tag on Delicious.

5. Scribd and Slideshare

Scribd and Slideshare are especially useful services for publishing or sharing documents or presentations.

Both allow you to post the full document and create a YouTube-style embeddable player, which you (or others) can then add to blog posts, event invitations, or other online media. These players also include a “download” button.

Make sure you’re only publishing content that you own the rights to, is not subject to copyright, or that you have permission from the copyright holder to post.

The advantage of using these services to host documents is that they allow you to easily bundle substantial content into a blog post, so people don’t have to follow a link somewhere to get it. Also, if you annotate or highlight a document, you can post a version of the document with those additions.

So for instance, if you’re a chemist and you have the right to publish your latest journal article about mercury pollution in rivers, you could annotate the pdf of that article to highlight points that would be important to non-experts, and explain what they mean in plain language.

But also, these services get very good search visibility in their own right. So when you post documents to these sites, make sure each document includes a link back to the relevant post on your blog (or at least to your blog’s home page) so people who discover you there can connect to you via your online home base.

…These are just a few very basic tools to start your online engagement strategy. There are plenty more, but based on my extensive experience these are the best places to start. Learn how to use these tools — and how to use them together — to cultivate the kind of online engagement you seek.

IF YOU’RE REALLY SERIOUS ABOUT ACTIVISM or advocacy of any kind, I highly recommend Deanna Zandt’s recent book Share This: How you will change the world with social networking. I bow to her greatness

This is why I like tools that allow reporters and others to break “story box” by creating real-time collages that combine original reporting and commentary with curated contributions from social media and elsewhere.

The past month, NPR senior strategist Andy Carvin has been doing this via Twitter — first for the Tunisia uprising, and now with the Egyptian revolution. Today Berkman Center research Ethan Zuckerman published an excellent interview with Carvin exploring why he’s been posting an average of 400 tweets daily for the last month, and what others can learn from his efforts.

I summarized some highlights from this interview that might especially interest news professionals over at the Knight Digital Media Center site.

See: How NPR’s Andy Carvin is using Twitter to tell Egypt’s story

“While we had a hunch that the skills of today’s 2-5 year olds would be very different to those of kids 20 to 30 years ago, we were surprised to find out just how much the childhood experience has evolved. According to our survey, while most small children can’t yet swim, tie their shoelaces or make breakfast on their own, they do know how to turn on a computer, point and click with a mouse, and play a computer game.

Take a look at some of the findings:

• More young children know how to play a computer game (58%) than swim (20%) or ride a bike (52%)

• 28% of young children can make a mobile phone call, but only 20% know to dial 911 in case of an emergency
• 69% of children aged 2-5 can operate a computer mouse, but only 11% can tie their own shoelaces
• Perhaps the most important piece of data to come out of this survey: the fact that 69% of children aged 2-5 are using a computer in the first place.

It’s exciting and commendable that so many parents are teaching their children such valuable computer skills so early on—they will need these skills to succeed later in life, and perhaps increasingly, not so later in life.

Just yesterday I learned that on Twitter (a social media service I use a lot), if I begin a tweet with an @ reply (such as: @lisawilliams said…), that tweet will only be seen by people who not only follow me but who ALSO follow the Twitter user named after the initial “@”.

You’d think I would have known this already, but every once in a while something major slips by me. Twitter changed how it handles “@ replies” a few months ago — something that caused considerable controversy on the service. It was a controversy I happened to miss. But thanks to the kindness of a stranger, I’m now caught up on the issue and can offer some useful tips.

I’m writing about this issues because it has significant implications for how I’ll be doing live coverage of events via Twitter.

Whenever I’m at an event (such as a conference, talk, or arts event) that I think might also interest some of my Twitter followers, I tend to “live tweet” it — posting frequent updates about what’s being said, what I’m seeing, reactions to what’s happening, etc.

I do this so much, and have gotten pretty good at it, that I have attracted many Twitter followers because of it. So I’ve decided to explore offering live event coverage as a professional service.

BUT: What if only a fraction of my nearly 5,000 Twitter followers have the opportunity to see my live coverage? And what if those people are already, in a sense, part of the “in crowd?”

That’s the situation when I start my live tweets with “@”.

Yeah, big problem. Especially if part of the value I bring to the table with live event coverage service is the size of my Twitter posse.

Fortunately, it’s fixable…

Here’s what I have been doing:

When I live tweet — especially when I’m covering what’s being said at an event — I’ve tended to use a format like this:

@scottros: “I envy journalism students now. You all have the opportunity to publish. Just start publishing now, whatever your passion is.”

…That is, the first thing I do is identify the speaker in a way that people can find and follow that person on Twitter. Then I deliver the quote. This makes sense for reading, but not for how Twitter works now.

Some Twitter users hack around this by inserting characters like “.” or “r [space]” before the @. This is apparently sufficient to trick Twitter into serving those tweets up to all your followers.

It works, but I don’t like it.

I believe in trying to make tweets read as naturally as possible, within that 140-character constraint. It’s challenging, but I’ve come to think of it as an art form. Well, at least a useful writing skill.

In my experience: Being as readable as possible on Twitter counts. It encourages more people to follow you, retweet you, and interact with you.

Too many people use Twitter’s character-count constraint as an excuse to get cryptic or vague in order to save space. The problem is, when people have to think too much (or at all) to decode or interpret what you wrote, you become less interesting. And you’ll only succeed on Twitter if you’re interesting.

My proposed solution:

Here’s what I’m going to try: From now on, when I’m live tweeting and quoting someone, I’ll begin with the quote, and end with the attribution in parentheses. That would only add one character to my current style.

For example, the tweet I shared above would look like this:

“I envy journalism students now. You all have the opportunity to publish. Just start publishing now, whatever your passion is.” (@scottros)

If I live tweet that way, then ALL of my Twitter followers would see the tweet — whether or not they also follow author Scott Rosenberg on Twitter.

What do you think of this approach? Please comment below.

I’ll try this out tonight. I’m attending a book signing, which I’ll be covering for Oakland Local. It’s fun stuff: Local illustrator Chris Lane will be discussing his new book, Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection. (Event details)

Once I try this live-tweeting strategy, I’ll get a sense for whether and how well it really works. But you let me know what you think.

…Yeah, this seems like a minor, picky point of style. However, given how Twitter now works, it would vastly increase the audience for my live event coverage.

I thought other Twitter users might find this info useful as well, especially journalists and others who do live coverage of events or breaking news via Twitter. After all, I can’t be the only avid Twitter user who missed this, right?

…Oh well, maybe I could be, I dunno.

In my own defense, when Twitter made this change back in May, I was at the apex of several major, stressful life changes — including selling my home of 12 years, downsizing my possessions to fit in a single room, and relocating to a new and very different city. I remember seeing the #fixreplies hashtag, but at the time I didn’t have the mental energy to figure out what people were talking about. My bad.

Anyway, I’m very grateful to Alex Howard (@digiphile on Twitter) who kindly pointed out to me this change in how Twitter works last night. I was live-tweeting a talk that Scott Rosenberg, author of Say Everything and founder of the intriguing new Mediabugs project. Alex liked my coverage, which he only saw because he also follows Scott on Twitter. He wanted more people to be able to see what I was doing, and kindly clued me in about the implications of starting with @.

RESOURCES:

Alex directed me to his discussion with Leslie Poston about implications of the @ reply change. This is quite thought-provoking and readable. If how people actually connect via social media matters to you, give it a read.

More recently, blogger Patrix covered this issue: Understanding Twitter @Replies Behavior. The comment thread here provides considerable clarification.

Finally, it’s important to understand how Twitter distinguishes between replies and mentions.

If you’re a semi-retired professional who wants to build a consulting business, and you’re not an internet whiz, what kind of web site will really help clients find you? And how can you easily build and maintain a useful professional network?

My dad, Jack Gahran, is a semi-retired management consultant who knows many other semi-retired professionals. Today he asked me to look over the brand-new web site of a colleague of his, to offer some advice as to how it might be improved in ways that will build this person’s business.

The site is a pretty standard brochure site — a few static pages of basic information. It had a nice but simple design, and the content seemed to use keywords appropriately — both of which help search engines like Google index the site well. However, Google generally isn’t very interested in small brochure sites that are infrequently updated and don’t attract many inbound links.

I offered my dad’s colleague four basic tips for improving his site in ways that will make it much more visible in search engines, and thus more likely to attract inbound links from other sites (another thing Google rewards).

I get asked for this kind of advice a lot, so I figured I’d make a blog post out of it, so everyone can benefit.

Here’s what I told him…
1. Ask Google to start indexing your site

Eventually Google will find your site, index it, and start listing it in search results. But Google has a lot of sites to index, so it may take a long time for them to get around to indexing your site.

It helps to tell Google you’re there and ask them to list you, rather than passively waiting for Google to find you. Submit your site to Google.

You should also submit your site to Yahoo.

2. Add fresh content to your site often, the easy way: Blog

So far, your site appears to be mainly an online brochure. That’s someone useful for people who already know to look you up online, but it won’t attract much attention from search engines — and therefore won’t get much traffic from people who don’t already know who you are and where to find your site.

Search engines mainly care about timeliness and relevance. There is an easy way to make sure your site provides that: Add a blog to your site.

I noticed that right now, your site’s “news and events” section has no real content. I’d suggest turning that part of your site into a weblog (or “blog”) so you can easily add fresh items to the site on your own, without having to rely on a web designer to upload the content for you.

…You don’t have to call it a blog if you don’t like that term, you could just call it news and views, which would give you more flexibility in what sort of information you can post there.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: After discussing the following tip in the comments below, I decided that it’s better to integrate your existing brochure space into a blog, rather than vice versa. Read full instructions on how to get this done.

Talk to your web designer about integrating a blog into your site. You should set up the account with the blogging service in your own name, so you maintain control of it. But after you have the account it’s fine to get help with setup.

Once the blog is in place you can easily (right through your web browser) add fresh items to your site, and their titles and introductions will appear on that page, with the most recent item listed first.

You could write not just about news and events, but also share your insight or tips about things that might interest the people you want to reach — including answering common questions they have related to your areas of expertise. These can be really short pieces: just 1-3 paragraphs is enough. No need to write long articles.

The point is to post a new item at least a couple of times a month (of course, more often is always better, but you can start slow). Make sure the title and the first sentence of each post include words that you think people who need your services would search for.

If you add a tool like a blog that makes it easy for you to add fresh content to your site on your own whenever you want, over time you’ll grow the kind of site that Google likes, indexes often, and rewards with traffic.

Even better, when you regularly post fresh content to your site, that gives other people a good reason to link to your site. Inbound links are very important to Google. When people link to deeper content on your site (like specific blog posts, not just your home page), Google thinks your site is more useful and is more likely to position you better in search results.

Oh, and: If your web designers say they can’t easily add a blog to your site, they’re wrong. (CORRECTION: Actually, trying to add a blog to a static site is hard, which is why I now recommend moving your site into a blog.) You can create a blog using a free service like WordPress.com and integrate that into any site. Once it’s set up, then you just keep posting to it.

3. Offer an e-mail newsletter, the easy way

It’s always easier for you to go to people than to expect them to always come to you. For this reason, many people still prefer e-mail to the web as a way to maintain business relationships.

Dad mentioned that he suggested you offer an e-mail newsletter for your past clients and other key contacts, and I agree, that’s a great way to maintain those relationships. However, you can get even more mileage out of this effort by using a blog to create your e-mail newsletter for you automatically.

If you decide to add a blog to your site (as I suggested above), you can use some features of a free service from Google called Feedburner to turn the items you post to your blog into items in an e-mail newsletter which interested people can easily subscribe to. That way, they can see your latest items even if they don’t remember to visit your site.

Set up a free account on Feedburner, and follow their instructions to connect your site’s blog (they call it “burning your feed”) to feedburner. Then, under their “publicize” section, select “e-mail subscriptions” and follow their instructions. You might want to get your Web developer to help you with this process, but I strongly suggest setting up the Feedburner account yourself, in your own name, so you maintain control of it.

4. Link to your LinkedIn public profile

Dad already suggested that you get active with LinkedIn, a popular online service for professional networking, and I agree it’s very helpful — especially for independent professionals.

One useful option that LinkedIn offers is the ability to create a public version of your LinkedIn profile that anyone can view, whether they’re on LinkedIn or not. (Here’s mine)

I’d recommend completing your LinkedIn profile as fully as possible, and then posting a link to it from your site’s contact page. Then, make sure you keep your profile updated.

…Those are my basic tips, intended for someone with little to no experience with online media. I tried to strike a balance between empowering him to make truly effective improvements in his online outreach, while recognizing that he probably won’t want to spends a whole lot of time online, or know how to use social media.

So even though I could have suggested many social media options for this person beyond LinkedIn, I don’t think that would be a good fit for his current skill levels and interests. Later on he could grow into that. But right now, I think it’s more important for him to create a more effective home base on the web.

I didn’t link to his site because I wanted to give him a chance to work on it first.

What do you think of these suggestions? Are they appropriate for the situation I outlined? Any disagreements, corrections, or suggestions to add? Please comment below.

distraction hierarchy

Hierarchy of Digital Distractions: Top of a brilliant, too-accurate pyramid infographic by InformationIsBeautiful.net

Productivity and task management seem like strictly practical issues, but in fact they’re deeply emotional. That’s what David Allen describes at in the first chapter of Getting Things Done, when he talks about the sense of calmness instilled by having a mind like water.

It seems to me that tuning into and recognizing your own feelings (especially hope, shame, relief, and fear) is THE crucial first step for figuring out what to do, getting stuff done, and letting stuff go. That’s what I’ve been working on today. Here is a little background, and some thoughts and lessons on this theme…

In the last eight months I made several major changes in my life: I ended my marriage (on the best of terms), sold my house, moved to a new state, eliminated my debt, stopped working on some projects I’d outgrown, began some intriguing new projects, had a brief painful relationship with a thoroughly incompatible partner, began a rewarding intimate relationship with a wonderful friend, and downsized my possessions to fit in a room plus small storage area. Plus, I got knee surgery to fix a torn ACL. Plus, a fair amount of business travel thrown in.

Yeah, it’s been a lot to manage — with a lot of mixed, deep feelings involved in every step. And a lot of stuff that needed to get done: projects, tasks, and priorities. Everything from figuring out where stuff goes in the kitchen to selling a house.

Through this process of major life-surgery I’ve had to face something I’ve avoided: I’ve spent most of my life in a near-constant sense of dread. I was scared that my life and work were spinning out of control, and that all sorts of disasters were waiting to pounce due to my inattention or ineptitude. I coped with it by keeping busy. If I just kept doing enough, surely I’d get ahead. Then I’d wake up in the middle of the night in a flat-out panic. And I’d work all day and feel like I’d accomplished nothing by evening, and feel terribly guilty and ashamed. I felt like I was failing at nearly everything.

In fact, I wasn’t failing — at least, not most of the time. Not any more than most people do. In fact, in a lot of ways I’m doing pretty damn well with my life. But because I was certain I was failing, and constantly braced for the next crash, I avoided looking too closely at what was happening, at what I needed to be doing.

It’s kind of like how you shut your eyes and cover your face before a car crash. It’s a reflex. You don’t really want to watch.

But when that kind of mental flinching becomes a permanent way of life, bad stuff happens. Namely, disorganization and procrastination — with all the bad stuff (tax penalties, pissed-off partners, missed opportunities, poor health) that go along with it.

It’s important to recognize that for all the pain that disorganization and procrastination cause, they do offer immediate, addictive emotional relief.

When you deliberately blur your mental vision and don’t look very far around you or ahead, and when you don’t habitually keep close track of information you need, then for short stretches of time you create the illusion that nothing needs to be done or figured out right now. It’s a false sense of security, but it does provide a sense of rest and it’s easy to do. Also, it works about as well as drinking salt water when you’re thirsty.

Since I’ve downsized and simplified my life and commitments, I’ve realized that I don’t want to keep living with that daily dread. I could keep it up — because I’ve done it my whole life. But at this point I’m making a conscious choice to change. Dread eats up too much of my energy. I’m 43 years old, and I’d like to use my remaining time and energy in ways that please me.

So I’ve been focusing on organizing my life, especially projects, tasks and priorities. Here’s what I’ve done so far, and what I’ve learned:

1. I CAN’T THINK AMIDST CLUTTER. Clutter distracts me, and provides a ceaseless nagging of all the things I might have forgotten. I cannot focus on a task when I’m around clutter — unless that task is decluttering.

So I’ve put a lot of effort into organizing my new room so that everything I need has an intuitive place, and that things I don’t need on a daily basis get stored or filed, and things I don’t ever need get tossed. This includes eliminating as much paper as possible from my life: I scan every paper I’ll need, shred most of them, file only a few original copies. I have redundant electronic backups (external hard drives AND offsite backup) for all my data.

The downside: Organizing feels so rewarding to me that sometimes I dive into that for emotional relief as a form of procrastination. I’m working on that.

2. MULTITASKING IS A MYTH. This was truly a devastating thing to admit to myself, since I always thought I was a consummate multitasker. But in fact, tons of scientific research and an honest look at my own experience indicates that human brains really can only do one conscious thing at a time. I cannot listen to two simultaneous voices and understand well what both are saying. I cannot run a quick Google search and track what a client is saying on a conference call. I cannot Twitter or instant message while trying to do another kind of writing. I cannot read an incoming text message while paying enough attention to driving.

Of course, I can TRY to do any combination of these things, or more. And I usually succeed to some level with all of them. But usually not as well as if I’d consciously taken a moment to set a priority and then waited to do tasks in priority order.

Focus is important to getting stuff done. But for me, focus can be another kind of trap. I can get so into doing something that I get obsessive or perfectionist about it, and and up spending way too much time on it. It becomes another type of procrastination.

I’m finding that for me, the skills I need to improve are time management and setting priorities. Not just “what are the things I need to do” but “what are the goals I wish to achieve?” Once I have in mind all my goals, I can set priorities among them, and then decide how much is really enough in terms of moving toward a particular goal for that day.

I’m realizing that my tendency to attempt multitasking often stems from a wish to distract myself (and thus procrastinate), or a wish to please (assuming that people expect me to do everything at once), or boredom.

3. ORGANIZE AT AN APPROPRIATE LEVEL OF DETAIL. I was discussing productivity systems today with a friend. She prefers to list out her to-dos in minute detail, including items such as “find Mr. X’s phone number” and “call Mr. X” in the overall task of “Ask Mr. X. to write me a letter of reference.” That works very well for her because it relieves her of the necessity to figure out the next step to take.

I’ve tried that approach, and I’ve found it does not work for me. The labor involved in listing and checking off so many minute steps feels overwhelming to me, and takes considerable time. In my task-management software OmniFocus I tend to list action items like “Ask Mr. X. to write me a letter of reference” unless I’m noticing that I’m procrastinating on a task. In that case, I may list sub-tasks in more minute detail.

I’m still working with this to try to figure out the best balance for me. But anyone else attempting to use a task management system should tune in to how they feel about using the system. If the system ends up feeling like a chore or a burden, if it scares you, you won’t use it and you’ll feel frustrated or ashamed. Recognize all your emotions involved, and name them. They’re important indicators of what you really need.

4. MOST LIFE-MONSTERS CAN WAIT (AT LEAST A BIT) TO BE SLAIN. For the parts of my life that had become dangerously disorganized, I’ve found I couldn’t just sit down and said “I’m going to face Monster Z right now, and parse out how to vanquish it, and get started.” I tried. I really did. Every time, this effort turned into an emotional wreck, unable to sort out which part of the monster to strike first. I’d make lists of tasks and goals, but be unable to sort them into a doable sequence. I’d feel ashamed, frustrated, and like an even bigger failure than before.

I realized that, with most of these life-monsters, I needed to first build up my strength and skills prior to the attack. I needed to attain more of a sense of my life generally gaining order and purpose on a daily basis. After all, I’d put off wrestling the life-monsters so long that I could put it off a while longer.  In the meantime, I set up doable systems to capture enough incoming monster-related  information to spot flags that would require me to speed up my timeline.

So even though organizing my space or developing a new exercise routine may not objectively be a higher priority than, say, developing a retirement plan — giving myself faster, easier “wins” that directly support my ability to tackle longer-term, bigger goals is what allows me to move forward. Right now, if I try too hard to stare down monsters that loom ever-larger due to neglect, I freeze.

Right now I’m only tackling one life-monster at a time. I’ve learned from the last eight months that trying to do them all at once, or in too close sequence, leaves me overwhelmed, exhausted, depressed, and unproductive on other fronts. Getting through knee surgery and recovery (and dealing with insurance bureaucracy and medical bills) is my current life-monster battle. That’s enough.

Down the road, I’m considering working with a financial planner and maybe a life/career coach to figure out some longer-term monster-slaying strategy. I think getting that kind of support might help, when I’m ready for it. But I’m not ready for that now, so please don’t bombard me with pitches for these professionals just yet. When I’m ready, I’ll ask for it.

5. RECOGNIZE & APPRECIATE WHAT YOU CAN DO OR HAVE DONE. Many people love crossing items off their to-do lists. That gives them a sense of accomplishment. That visual symbol has never worked for me, however. It just feels negative, the act of crossing-off. Not creative, not productive.

I’ve realized that when I’ve been getting depressed because I think I’ve been unproductive, it helps to reality-check myself by taking a day to make a list of all the stuff I actually do in a given day. For this list, anything that takes my time/effort counts. It includes things like:

• Making my bed
• Doing my leg exercises (5X/day, to stick with my physical therapy program)
• Taking my vitamins
• Making breakfast
• Corresponding with clients
• Doing actual billable work
• Arranging to get a transit pass
• Hanging a few pictures
• Vacuuming
• Scanning, shredding, and filing
• Sorting out which jewelry needs repairs
• Reading a chapter of a book

…Most of this stuff would never make my to-do list or get crossed off. I don’t need to track that level of detail day to day. But each of these tasks, and many others, need to get done and take my time and effort. I should at least recognize them. They are not wasted time. So if once in a while I make a “done” list of all this stuff, that reassures me emotionally. In turn, that reduces my tendency to beat up on myself, and gives me more energy to get stuff done.

Those are my thoughts on emotions and productivity for now. I’ll be writing more about this, I’m sure. But what are your thoughts on this topic? How do your feelings — and your awareness of them — affect how you get accomplished in life and work? Please comment below.

On Friday, May 1, I’ll be helping to give the free social media training being offered by the Public Media Collaborative for Bay Area people who work for mission-driven organizations — community organizations, church groups, social service agencies, charities, etc. It’s part of Journalism Innovations II: New Work & Ideas for Making the News, an event organized by Arts and Media. Social media training will be offered in English and Spanish.

• WHEN: May 1, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. PT
• WHERE: McLaren Hall, University of San Francisco (Directions)

I’ll be handling Twitter training, from 1-2:15 pm.

So: What do people who do community- or mission-focused work really need to know about Twitter? First, it helps to know why it works. After that, learning how to use it makes much more sense…

1. IT’S ABOUT PEOPLE AND RELATIONSHIPS

The main value of Twitter, in my experience, is that it makes it very easy for you to build and strengthen personal connections. Don’t get distracted by the technology. Focus on the people, and act human. Don’t be all business/mission. That not only makes Twitter more fun — it makes it more effective.

2. SHORT MESSAGES ARE POWERFUL

Twitter works because it doesn’t inherently demand too much attention. When you’re limited to transmitting just 140 characters at a time, you must get right to the point. Even if it’s just a minor point. Makes it less intimidating for people to tune it to what you’re saying, and more likely that they’ll keep listening.

3. YOUR ATTENTION HAS VALUE

People pay attention to you when you pay attention to them. Twitter is a good tool for showing people that you’re paying attention to them. A good guideline is to spend half your Twitter time reading rather than posting — and half of your posts (“tweets”) should either be responding to or amplifying what others have said. Starting out this way tends to make it easier to get used to Twitter and see the value.

Fortunately, Twitter makes it easy to pay attention to a lot of people. Just slart slowly, so you get used to this communication environment gradually. It is different from how you’re used to talking to people.

4. DON’T BE BORING

In other words, don’t just repeatedly answer the question posed on the Twitter site: “What are you doing?” Most people’s daily lives simply aren’t that interesting.

Start paying attention to what you find truly interesting, engaging, fun, or important in your life and work, and post about that stuff — insights, questions, funny moments, news stories, etc. When you are interesting, people will start following you.

5. LEARN THE LINGO

Twitter users often say strange things like, “I tweeted that,” and “he’s following me” and “I’ll DM you about that.” This can be a bit offputting or annoying, but the lingo actually makes sense and it really isn’t complicated. Susan Mernit published a good Twitter Glossary to help you sort that out.

…During the session, I’ll walk participants through the basics of:

• Setting up a Twitter account and profile. (Much of the advice I gave journalists on this topic applies to anyone.)
• Finding people to follow, like @susanmernit, @newmaya, @allaboutgeorge, @eastbayexpress, @spotus, @insidebayarea, @helpamotherout — or even me, @agahran
• How to post a tweet
• How to post a reply
• How to monitor a hashtag, like #bayarea, #oakland, or #nonprofit, or #CA, or #homeless.
• How to send a direct (private) message.
• Twitter programs that are easier to use than the Twitter site, like Tweetdeck.