Technology is always advancing, and as it does can either improve the value of marketing, or make it even more difficult to get an effective marketing program across to the target audience.

Are you sending SPAM emailing or a valuable newsletter?

Does anyone read your emails?

Does your brochure actually help people want to hire you, or give too much information (the average person doesn’t even read)?

Are the networking events and luncheons and trade shows you are going to actually generating new business?

Does your website bring you customers? Do you even know who reads your website? Have you ever seen a traffic report on your website?

These are all very important questions that a marketing professional must ask, and that an owner or CEO must always balance against the daily needs of running the business. What we specialize in is using technology to economize these activities – to provide a higher level of accuracy in reporting, adaptability to alter course in days instead of weeks should a program be ineffecient, and the experience to know what usually works better than most practices.

How many times have we sat through a marketing workshop that told us we needed to use some new gizmo to reach a trillion new people, only to go through the implementation process, the learning curve, and the complete headache of creating staff policies – only to find out 3 months later we saw no new business, got no new clients, and all in all wasted our time? If it’s not your ideal client you are talking to then there’s no point in talking at all – save your breath, your energy, and your time for the clients and colleagues that make your business and your profession better for the effort!

At the end of the day no one knows your business as well as you do, you’ve been doing it for years and you know your clients better than anyone. Our job is to bring the best practices from a variety of business climates to your doorstep and make it possible for you to reach new heights with new technology at your feet.

You can find Loic Le Meur at www.twitter.com/loic and his product at www.seesmic.com

If you’re a jerk, now the whole world knows it.
If you’re a nice person with jerk tendencies, now the whole world knows it.

Some people are freaked out by this, the merging of public and private lives, and often one must find a new set of boundaries (ie. stop twittering after 9pm – DUH!)

And often as these tools creep in to further degrade the private/public boundaries.. tools like myspace and facebook crossing over to LinkedIN, email, etc. We come up with more ways to waste time and to share our OCD with the world – tools like twitter and digg and del.icio.us

The trick in all this is balance – and one of the easiest ways to balance is to be a slow-adopter. Don’t necessary jump on every bandwagon… give it 6 months or so for the bugs to get worked out and the syncing tools to catch up. Sure you may miss a freebie here and there, but you’ll save yourself hours of headaches.

Take Myspace for example. I thought that tool was great and jumped right on… only to become a target for spammers of the world to unitedly blast. Every time I make an update, I get hit with half a dozen spammers… not to mention the porn and the current dramas in the news about kids publicizing their cruelty.

LinkedIN is one of my success stories. I signed up for it a year ago, but waited 6 months to really get into it… now it’s a huge tool for my networking and KIT systems.

Plaxo‘s a 50/50 split… the plaxo pulse is a weak attempt to compete with other social networking tools, while the address book and calendar syncing tools remain unparalleled for those of us that have to sync home computer|cellphone|office|laptop and aren’t interested in thousands of duplicates.

So when in doubt – sign up but don’t email blast your address book immediately… sit around (aka “lurk) until you see a few friends in there, and then go forward. Always look for syncing ability to your existing technology tools, and never give up your right to wait.

Being the first one to adopt a new technology is very rarely worth being the first one to have a system crash.

Unless you’re in IT, of course.

Cheers,

Rebekah

After trying out the GTD format, and then being a Franklin Covey convert for a while… and then the reality of working for someone else (ie. you use software designed to make your life easier that really -thanks to poor implementation- makes your life harder) have developed my own set of rules for the management of my day/time.

This might work for you, it might not…. but you can waste a couple of minutes of your life reading it if you want to!

1. Keep your calendar updated with REAL events… not those “maybe” appointments that you know never really happen… or those meetings that are scheduled for 30 minutes but always take 2 hours… get real!!

2. Review and update your calendar at the beginning and ending of every day. Keeping a calendar real takes real work, but it’s worth it. Schedule out your time to do admin, put your tasks time in, get your calendar to look like your reality. EVEN MORE go back to yesterday and update that calendar so it reflects what you really were doing.

3. Clean out your inbox. This comes from a long history of being an underling – I may have a msg in there that either gives me back an hour (someone finished the project so I don’t have to) or takes away an hour (last minute presentations). So going through my inbox gives me the piece of mind to know that I am actually working on what’s real as of this minute. If I don’t sort out the reading to my “reading” folder, and the non-work stuff to my non-work folders, I end up reading all that junk when I should be working, and even worse working when I should be goofing around with family/personal stuff.

I could go on and on, but that would tyrannical (and take me much more than the 10 minutes I have set aside to write this article), so I’m going to wrap it up here and wish you the best of luck. Whether you use my system, someone else’s, or mashup your own system… GET A SYSTEM and STICK TO IT. Your piece of mind will increase and your stress will decrease. I promise.

Cheers,

Rebekah

Fellow MLPF friends,

I have a simple, very simple question: how to manage such a huge amount
of information when doing networking?

How many hours do you spend per day doing business networking? And hot
to manage that with our normal work?

Thanks in advance for all the answers and comments.

I hear you! Take heart though, I think feeling just a few steps behind is a good sign that you are actively networking – it’s that sense of drowning that I often take as a reminder to update my networking maintenance systems.

I use plaxo sync’d w/ my computers (both home and office) to keep my address book and calendar’s lined up. I sync my office computer to my treo and then everything stays in line very well. I don’t participate much in the “connections” portion – I just use the tools to update contact information quickly and easily (if anyone you know is in plaxo, when they change their information it will automatically update in your address book).

I use LinkedIN as an online networking tool, and sync that to outlook quarterly. I don’t do the LinkedIN blast invites – I just invite people one-on-one & I let them know it helps me to refer them to my network.

I keep a rolodex sorted by industry (vs company name) that I keep cards in – this is a 2 1/2 inch binder at this point… I only keep cards of people I want to refer, or that I work with. Folks that I know well or refer often I ask for several cards so I can give one away and still have one in the binder. I’ll look through it periodically when I need a networking brainstorm.

I know it sounds like alot, but it’s actually a very simple workflow when you come back from an event: enter the contact info to your computer (which syncs everywhere), put away in rolodex, when done w/ all cards from that event, sync linkedin… ta-da!!

In Followup Mode: I set aside 2 hours a week to go through my new connections and see what we have in common or who they know that I’d like to know. If I took notes at the event that the person was interested in something I can pass along, I will do that within a week. Often there are folks that want to be updated on interesting articles or groups I am a member of, so I will forward an invitation to the group or the articles on a weekly basis – nothing to take more than my 2 hours a week.

I also go to 5 or so events a week, but only take away the business cards that are relevant to what I’m looking for at that event (always have an objective before you walk into an event). Staying active in several particular circles keeps me in touch with the membership.

Cheers,

Rebekah