Normally $50, I’m able to offer both mine and Joe’s analysis, along with the survey results, as a free PDF to Technotheory readers.  Read on for a couple snippets and a link to download the full article.

Creating the survey was fun, though I wasn’t surprised with the direct survey results, so I wanted to see if there were any correlations in the data.  Since I know little about regression analysis and sample sets, I contacted Zoë Thorkildsen (an economist/statistician who is looking for full-time or contract work right now—contact me for info on getting in touch, she’s in DC) and we discovered some fascinating correlations like this one from page one of the article:

Users with more than 100 messages in their inbox are…

• Less satisfied with the quality of their finished projects
• More behind on their projects
• Less likely to know what tasks they need to work on at the start of a workday

There were other interesting correlations about the way people prioritize their time, when they finish projects, and how much time they spend working after hours.  You can download the full article from Cutter Benchmark Review here (my article is pages 13-19 and all of the survey results are included.  Joe’s article, which really digs into the data, is also included).

                                  Download it here! – use code PERSPROD

While I think you’ll love the article (it’s amazing how much an editor can improve one’s writing!), here’s a snippet I wanted to make sure made it to Technotheory.  It’s my explanation of The Critical Path, a topic I’ve been meaning to explore here:

–The remainder of this post is from the article.  For much more, download it!

When analyzing the research data above, I touched on the urgent-versus-important prioritization.  A technique for visualizing and clarifying the most important items is plotting out the critical path.

Urgent tasks are ones that ought to be completed in the immediate future, like a memo due this afternoon. Important tasks are ones that will have a serious impact on your position or your company, like migrating staff to a new accounting system in which your company has already invested. There are times when an important task becomes urgent. There are times when an urgent task feels important. But to get my head past these nuances, I like to think of a third category called critical tasks.

My company has a software application, and if we don’t launch its next version, then we will go out of business. Thus, my critical objective — my most important goal as the company’s leader — is that we launch and that we do it in the fall. The tasks that get me much closer to launching our application are what I consider to be critical, as they’re on the critical path to the company’s (and my) success. It’s important to identify both your critical objective (or if you have two or three, what they all are) and the tasks that will get you there. Your critical objective is likely the accomplishment you’ll write down on your résumé some day as something you’ve done. It’s the item that takes a lot of work but will be transformative for you or your company. To determine your path to your most critical objective(s) follow these steps:

1. Grab a sheet of paper and spend five minutes brainstorming every task that you need to complete. List the small things and the big things, crucial tasks, and incidental tasks. List everything.
2. Grab another sheet of paper, this time lengthwise, and write out your most critical objective on the right side in the center (see Figure 1; while for ease of reading we’ve presented an example in a more formal way, yours may certainly be handwritten). If you have two critical objectives, write them both (one at a third up from the bottom of the page and one two-thirds up).
3. Draw an arrow (or arrows) from the left side of the paper pointing to the critical objective(s).
4. Using the list of tasks you brainstormed, plot the ones that will get you close to your critical objective on the line. Treat it like a loose timeline, with the tasks that must be completed first further to the left.

What you’ll likely find is that there’s a very small percentage of your responsibilities that are essential enough to be on your critical path. Every day you’ll want to make sure you make some progress on those responsibilities. They’re not just important, they’re necessary. What you’ll notice is that on the days where you address those critical tasks you’ll feel like you’ve made progress; you’ll feel like those are the best days at work. On the days where you get things done that aren’t on that path, you may actually feel worn out because, to some degree, you didn’t get the bigger project closer to the end point.

I’d suggest keeping that piece of paper near you at your desk. If necessary, you can draw up a new one every month as your responsibilities shift. You’ve probably heard of the concept of the “critical path,” but time and again I’ve seen people’s eyes light up when they actually grab a sheet of paper and go through this exercise. Visualizing your tasks and identifying those tasks that will truly move you forward can really change your perspective.

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Do you have any thoughts or questions about identifying your critical path?  If you’re interested, there’s much more in the Cutter Benchmark Review article (with more awesome illustrations), download it here.

Flickr photo credit: CarbonNYC

So I hope you’ll take my faith in them when I ask that you to consider their book today.  I’ve learned that today’s sales will affect the long-term impact of their book’s message, so I’m taking their advice and passing along this book recommendation today.

You know I don’t write a lot of reviews here to begin with, and I’d never recommend something I didn’t put myself behind.  But this book is about building trust online, and my recommendation—even without reading the book—is how much I trust their abilities and their recommendations.

Here’s a video about the book that summarizes many of its key points, but the book itself will likely be a warmer tone and very tactical:

If you’re interested, you can pick it up here.

But you can stay in people’s lives.  You can make enough time for a select few.  And, no matter what your decision, people will judge your actions.  This isn’t the internet, it’s the real world of real people.

I don’t know what it’s like to be special online.  If I’ve got too much going in my life now, it’s because of self-imposed projects—not 1000 people vying for my time.  And yet, when I read Chris Brogan’s The Importance of Digital Touch, in which he talks about the power of reach but the difficulty in scaling individual touch, I realized we’re all in the same boat.

Social Media Part Two: We’re All Real

If you’re new to social media, let me get a little lesson out of the way: the way you think of the tools you’re using now is completely different than you’re going to think of them a year from now.  Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and LinkedIn are not just just ways for building relationships strategically and quickly.  It’s easy to think of it as a game or sales channel, but it’s not.

The people will be so much more real than you ever thought.

I was coming to terms with this myself in my Avoiding the online popularity contest to seek a deeper connection article.  But until one gets past that, this whole online social thing will just be a game; unfortunately, viewed that way, it’s easy to lose.

Real Presence

I’ve come to terms with the idea of being present in people’s lives at many points.  Sometimes it has to do with romantic relationships, sometimes it’s personal friendships, sometimes it’s business.  If you’re feeling voyeuristic, here’s some of my own journey through this:

• September, 2001: The setting of conversations from afar – some reflections on how important the context is for where we read/write our communications
• March, 2007: Presence, and the barometer of friendship
• April, 2007: The person and the experience – the difference between when you’re providing company and when you’re actually part of the experience
• May, 2008: Maintaining real relationships online and off: a guide to presence

Have things changed in the past 18 months when the prevalence of social networks has grown even more?  No.  The only thing that’s changed is the number of connections.

Back to Chris’ Article

Chris is keeping up with JP Rangaswami passively: he enjoys JP’s posts, tweets, and so forth.  But he’s not keeping in touch with JP, or at least he fears that his presence isn’t felt by JP—that JP doesn’t know Chris is paying attention.  Chris is afraid of “becoming a ghost” in the world of some of the friends he values.

Chris feels that it isn’t hard to touch people lightly online if there are only “a hundred or so” people, but that it’s difficult or impossible with thousands of people.

Here’s where Chris and all of us have something in common: we all are struggling to let our presence be felt by those we care about.  Sure, our number of connections may be different than Chris’s, but we all have people we care about who we’d like to hold onto.

Bringing It All Together: Reality and Real Presence

The more we recognize our online (and real life) connections as real people, and the more we show them that we still want to be in their lives, the more present we’ll be for them.  Of course, this can’t scale to thousands of people but, with Chris as the archetype, it can scale to dozens.  Here’s a table of presence I posted in the guide to online/offline presence in May ‘08:

It is possible to keep in touch with hundreds and to be present in dozens’ of lives.  (And advice on that is in the other links I provided, as well as Chris’ article.)

The point here is that most people will simply disappear, and that’s fine.  But you ought to think hard about whether you want to appear or disappear and with which people.  While I try very hard to be around those who I care about, I do make mistakes and slide out of people’s lives, too.

While I could say that the call-to-action of this post is to go out and email someone you care about, the real point is that, if you don’t, you may slip out of view.  This isn’t a game, but this is an opportunity to hold onto lifelong relationships.

Flickr Photo Credit: clagnut

The following is a video of me from WordCamp Mid-Atlantic talking about both productivity at work and balance in life.  Though the presentation was initially geared toward blogging, there are 13 minutes I’ve highlighted that I hope you’ll enjoy.

Below the video I’ve listed out the timestamps to skip to, as well as some articles that cover the concepts in greater, actionable detail.  And below that, the slides.  Enjoy!

First off, I hate that I look like Steve Ballmer’s monkey dance at the beginning, but otherwise I was pretty happy with this (huge thank you to Joe Corbett of iStrategyLabs for filming this!).  Here are the hotlinks:

Blogging Tips: 4:45 – 24:20.  I talk about things like using visual text editors, applications like Texter and Q10, etc.  If you write a lot (even it’s not on a blog), there should be some useful tips in there.

The meat of the presentation about BALANCE starts around 24:40 / slide 17 and goes to about 37 minutes:

• Purge your mind: 24:40 / slide 17: how to make a big ass list
• Masturbatory statistics 25:20 /  slide 18-19
• 50:10 Time management 27:25 / slide 20
• Social media fame vs. real life 29:00 / slide 21: avoiding online popularity
• Unplugging 29:50 (and some talk about SF vs. Barcelona) / slide 23
• In the stream, how to deal with Twitter, etc. 31:15 / slide 22
• Batching email and a cone of silence 32:00 / slide 24: AwayFind
• Identifying your critical path 33:45
• Circadian Rhythms – scheduling around your energy 34:50 / slide 26
• When you’re done with work, go home 35:50 / slide 27

I hope you enjoyed the video : ).  If you have any tips on balance, feel free to share.

Flickr photo credit: SashaW

The following are some of the key points that came up in the sessions.

First of all, thank you to so many of you for coming out and sharing your ideas!  I’ve never organized an event of this magnitude, and you’ve encouraged me that it was worth it.  I just hope a few people got a little push toward starting and succeeding in business.  Now, onto the panels…

What you need (and don’t need) to get a technology business started

In this first session, I moderated a panel with Greg Cangialosi, Scott Harris, Haroon Mokhtarzada, and Paul Singh.  We discussed some of the lessons picked up over the years in the several business endeavors we’ve been involved with:

• A business plan helps to get you thinking about where you’re going with your company, formalizing your thoughts, etc.  But most of us have had to change direction within 30 days and, at that point, the business plan often began to collect dust.  Key point: think hard about starting your business, and write out your overall strategy, but don’t get mired in the details of a fancy schmancy business plan.
• It’s important to cover your ass(ets).  But doing that right isn’t that important until you’ve proven that your idea has legs.  In other words, if you have a product you want to launch, worry first about getting a prototype and later about whether an LLC, S-Corp, or C-Corp is more important.  After all, there’s no shortage of lawyers who can change your business type later.
• While your legal status is not that important initially, it is important that you discuss ownership with any co-founders early on.  You need to get in the habit of having these conversations when the money isn’t already on the table.  Whatever you do with equity, just be sure that other team-members have to earn their equity rather than starting with it…otherwise underperformers can ruin the distribution of equity and create a difficult situation.  This is called vesting.
• Don’t assume that you have a market.  Spend serious time talking to your perceived market and showing them what you plan on creating.  You’ll learn very quickly that either the product you want to create or the audience you want to sell it to aren’t the best options.  That’s okay—let yourself fail in your assumptions early and instead continue to validate both your product and the market as you move forward.  Read Eric Ries’ blog for a continual reminder and tactical advice on this.
• Paul Singh talked a great deal about using Google AdWords to test ideas for just a few dollars.  See if the conversions are there by testing if people are interested in your ideas.  If they’re not, move on.  I mentioned another way to research markets is to take the first few days of the 30 Day Challenge where they teach about using Google’s market-testing tools with Market Samurai, but do it with a disposable email address.
• You don’t need to have $25,000 in the bank to start your business.  None of us had that in our first ventures.  The best time to start a business is not when you have lots of assets but when you have fewer liabilities.  So if you’re in your 20s that’s probably a damned good time.
• Haroon Mokhtarzada made the point that enterprise experience rarely translates into startup expertise.  So don’t worry about having a background in a big company or hiring people from that background.  Instead, focus on being scrappy and finding others with that mentality.
• If you’re building your business while working for another company, be sure you know whether your current employer has ownership of what you’re working on.  Often there’s a clause in your employment agreement to that effect.  Be careful!

How to market inexpensively with social media, events, and creative public relations

Energetically moderated by Mario Armstrong, this was a fun session with Aaron Brazell, Peter Corbett, Frank Gruber, and Kaitlyn Wilkins.  They talked about what to expect with marketing and how to do it through social media and other channels.

• Peter Corbett set a great tone for the session when he pointed out that social media is not free.  It’s a huge time commitment and, without that commitment, it’s just throwing time away.  But when done right it can be rewarding.
• If you’re a great writer, write.  If you have great presence, speak.  But learn your strengths early when it comes to spreading the word and play off those strengths.
• Niche.  Niche.  Niche.  Differentiation.  If you’re not differentiated you’re not memorable.  And if you’re not memorable you’re already forgotten.
• If your brand is all about solving a specific problem that’s a good start.  But if your brand is about a bigger idea, a cause, a lifestyle…then people will have a reason to come back to it, to hold onto it, to engage with it.
• While marketing is great, nothing happens if you don’t make a sale.

Sorry, I had to run around organizing lunch stuff during this session so my notes are more sparse.  Check out Russell Heimlich’s and Justin A. Brown’s notes.

Workshops and exercises in small groups

Tim Grahl and I organized breakout sessions where the 16 groups discussed their own businesses and the various revenue models of eight TechCrunch50 finalists (as a case study). 

While it’s difficult to capture that online, it’s important to explore and be familiar with various product-oriented revenue models.  The following links explain each of the models in more depth:

• Freemium
• Licensing
• Advertising
• Physical Product Sales
• Revenue Share / Affiliate Sales

Getting your technology right…and what people are using to develop today

David Troy led the next panel, which was about understanding certain key ideas around technology…especially if you’re planning on launch a tech company.  M. Jackson Wilkinson, Mike Subelsky, Amy Senger, and Andrew Turner shared their insight:

• One of the most important points discussed was understanding the differences between a programming language (the most flexible), a framework, and a content management system (CMS) (the fastest to deploy).  As a business owner it’s important to recognize that flexibility and speed of deployment are inversely related.
• Along the same lines, it’s important to recognize some of the most popular frameworks and to ensure that your development team is familiar with them so that they’re not reinventing the wheel.  Examples of popular frameworks include Rails (for Ruby), Kohana, Symfony, and CodeIgnite (for PHP), and Django (for Python).  If your team is developing in one of these languages, be sure they’re aware of the frameworks out there.
• There was a great deal of talk about when to use agile development methods and when not to.  Given the audience of my blog, suffice it to say that if you’re leading a team of developers it’s important to be up to speed on agile so that you can make decisions for when it’s most helpful.
• A couple salient points came up in relation to hiring tech people:
  1. Communication skills and initiative are as important as technology skills.  The best programmer in the world that continually builds the wrong features (and doesn’t suggest alternate ways to approach things) will get you nowhere.
  2. When choosing between open source and proprietary development environments, it’s important to consider what type of culture you’re looking to foster at your office (I’m still debating this one in my mind as my personal experience refutes it)

Introductions to local groups and events

The following groups presented.  Visit their websites to learn more.

• Baltimore OpenCoffee
• Greater Baltimore Technology Council
• Refresh DC
• Refresh Baltimore
• BarCamp DC
• BarCamp Baltimore
• NetSquared
• SocialDevCamp
• BeeHive Baltimore
• Baltimore Angles
• TECH Cocktail
• Ignite Baltimore
• Ignite DC
• WordCamp Mid-Atlantic
• DC Tech Events 

Success stories and lessons learned

Matthias Broecheler, Martin Ringlein, and David Troy shared their mistakes and talked about the different forms of entrepreneurial success in the final panel, which I moderated. Some of the topics discussed:

• Martin Ringlein spent some time discussing the different definitions of success, and how we all have to understand the importance of impact, family, lifestyle, and money.  For instance, if you work until midnight every day but don’t get to relax, have you truly achieved success?  Needless to say, I blog about this a lot, but the point of balance is not just for happiness…it relates to our core opinion of our own success.
• We all talked about the merit of having service-based businesses, especially when getting started.  For one thing, one can become cash flow positive in a service business right away; for another, one will learn very quickly what customers want when they’re working directly with them.  And of course, having a service business is a great way to bootstrap the building of a product company (that’s what I’ve done with SET and AwayFind).
• It’s unfortunate that geeks often get the impression that they need people with a business background to launch a company.  They absolutely do not.  It’s much easier to teach a geek about business than the other way around.  This is proven time and again in the most visibly successful companies, large and small.  kthxbye.
• Doesn’t matter how big your company is or how much you formalize the process, you need to talk with your employees one-on-one to discuss each other’s performance at least twice per year.  It will get a lot of information out into the open that you might not expect.
• If there’s even an ounce of negative emotion in an email, sleep on it before you send it.
• If you’re in a family business, draw very clear boundaries between work time and personal time
• If you have a business process and you decide to take on a project with a friend, don’t bend the rules or you’ll slip up.  Follow the same business process when dealing with a friend as you do with clients.
• Whenever possible, avoid taking credit cards.  The reason: you’ll never win a fight with VISA.  (This is especially relevant with high dollar transactions with people you don’t know really well.  Less important for low-dollar transactions)
• If a project is still holding you back, and you’re a tech person, consider turning it into an open source project (if you have the time ; )
• And for the next steps:
• Write down all the things that are holding you back.  Are these surmountable?
• Do your best to be around (virtually or in real life) the people who are where you want to be.  You’ll soon find yourself there.

In Conclusion

It was a rockin’ day with a good vibe and great ideas.  Thank you to all the speakers, small group leaders, sponsors, and of course the University of Maryland for making it all happen.  When I have them I’ll either post or link to the videos.  But in the mean time, here are the photos from me and Bobby Saini (we shared my camera, and he took most of the photos shown above).

Thank you and hope this all helps : ).

Now that it’s over, the following are lessons-learned and things I’m doing now to still make the most of SXSW 2009.

Organizing Trumped Serendipity

A conference is what you make of it, and this year I organized quite a few things.  Say what you might, but the things I planned were my highlights.  And had I better planned, I think the highlights would’ve been brighter.

I organized a group that went running every day, a lunch for companies in the productivity space, an engaging and informative panel (well, some people thought so), and a number of meetings.  Serendipity was great, but the planned activities (of my own) far trumped.

But If You Want or Need Serendipity, Structure It

As a swing dancer I learned long ago that you don’t meet many people when you go to a new city with a friend you can dance with (especially if you’re new to dance and thus less confident in yourself).  But if you go alone, it may seem painful at first, but you’ll ultimately let serendipity run its course.

This year at SXSW I had a lot of friends, most of whom I could run into any night of the week in DC.  I think SXSW (and conferences in general) should be about strengthening relationships from afar or building new ones.  That’s very difficult when you’re with the pack from your city or company, especially if you’re not the networking type.

So if you want to meet people, go it alone or spend your social nights with people from different cities/circles.

Give Give Give

And the best way to give at conferences is to connect.  This ties right in with organizing—putting a group together is both rewarding for you and high value for the others.

Another way to give is to make others look good.  You can do this in so many ways…

• The way you introduce people (“Clay is one of the sharpest people when it comes to business idea testing”)
• By documenting their activities soon after (“Just had lunch with @dragushan, who has mastered doing what’s best for the bottom line while being a stellar employer”)
• Or my personal favorite, shooting (hopefully flattering) photos of them

And Don’t be a Liar.  Follow up.

If I were sitting across from you at lunch right now and asked what you were doing with the business cards you’ve collected, you’d look me in the eye and say “I’ll email those people.”  Maybe what you’d mean is that you plan to email a few of those people who are most relevant.

But I know what happens: nothing. Even if you told them specifically you’d email them.

Please, just smack yourself in the face right now. If you don’t follow up you’ve just thrown away the most important part of the event. Email those people, especially the ones you should.  Even if it’s a short message (but don’t be a jackass and spam them with a bunch of links just to follow your stuff).

Now a Few Highlights

I’m going to follow my own advice here.  Here are some of the people who I’m very glad to have either met or gotten to know better at SXSW.  For more photos, you can visit my SXSW Photo Album.

 
My fellow panelists on Presenting Straight to the Brain, Kathy Sierra, Cliff Atkinson,
and Craig Ball, really came through to make an awesome session…and it was great to work together.

 
Aaron Dragushan and I commuted in together.  Though he’s a buddy from DC, his company always rocks…and he was kind enough to shoot the photos above while I was moderating the panel.

Contrary to the reputation that preceded her, Naomi Dunford was actually quite sweet (at least with me) in person…and had just as many poignant ideas as she does on her site.

Gosh I wish Colleen Wainwright lived around here because she’s just such a joy to be around…and a smartie, too.  I bet you won’t guess her age either ; ).

 
I met Scott Belsky at the last minute but I really enjoyed his insights and am looking forward to The 99% Conference he’s putting on in NYC.

 
I really enjoyed Melissa Pierce’s panel and getting to know more of her, her upcoming movie, and her views on life balance.

 
After meeting Mark Dillon the week before at eComm 2009, it was great to hang out at a bunch of parties together—we’re in similar industries but he has a very different perspective.

 
I’d never really gotten to know Rachelle Lacroix much before, but she made some great company for wandering around Austin.  We can’t have too many good people in our lives.

 
Thanks to Lauren Jacob I got some company to see Breaking Upwards (next photo), and made a new friend from San Francisco. It’s interesting which things we geeks share and don’t share in common.

And here’s part of the cast from Breaking Upwards (Zoe Lister-Jones & Daryl Wein), since their movie was just so awesome.  Go see it when it comes to a theatre near you!

And Lastly…

SXSW was awesome.  I have a lot of people to follow up with, and I will.  Now it’s your turn to do the same—it’s never too late :-).

Got any other tips now that the event is over?

But I think there are just as many examples of success without transparency or online participation.  Before your diet consists solely of the 2.0 Kool-Aid, it’s worth thinking it through.

Participating and writing is competitive and difficult.  For my own objectives, it’s generally cost-effective and rewarding.  But there are merits to closed systems and old fashioned communication (i.e., between two people…not between you and the world).  I think that it’s naive to overlook techniques that have long worked.

No, I didn’t just sit down with my grandfather to talk about marketing a shoe factory in the 1950s.  Amongst my friends that are building successful web applications, getting funding and finding users, I’m seeing this approach, as well.

They’re staying current on the technology that’s necessary for them to create top quality products, but they’re not involved in the social aspect online.  They’re reaching out directly to the most relevant people, and they’re getting together with them.  They’re building relationships in ways that suit their personality and don’t consume them…and they’re making an impact.

They have an approach that works for them.  An approach that seems antiquated but is far from.  We don’t all need a “tribe,” we don’t all need to be publishers.  We can do this in our own way.

We just need to know what we’re doing.  We need to know who we are, and if we have to get a message out, we need to have some kind of plan.

Sometimes that plan may be to write carefully thought-out letters to exactly who you want to reach.  Sometimes it’s keeping Twitter open all day long with dozens of keywords that you’re monitoring.  But if this online stuff starts to irk you, don’t do what’s trendy, do what’s right for you.  There isn’t one path.

Flickr photo credit: wili_hybrid

Tonight I delivered a presentation at Ignite Baltimore that addressed applying concepts in productivity to make for a happier life.

If you’re relatively new to this blog, this will be an overview of many of the concepts I hold dear.  If you’ve been here for a while this will serve as a refresher.  Either way, I’m very happy with the slides Keith (a co-worker at SET) helped to design for this—and I think you’ll enjoy looking through them.  Without further ado, you can learn why I used that photo of me and Suzanne above…

6 Minute Video from the Talk (the core starts at 1 min in)

Special thank you to Mike Brenner for filming this, and for the amazing organizers at Ignite Baltimore who put on such an energizing event: Mike Subelsky, David Adewumi, and Patti Chan.

Slides from the Talk

Further Elaboration and Notes

• A lot of people asked about Fonolo.  It lets you quickly choose a company you’d like to call (from their menu), select where in their phone menu you’d like to be, and then it calls your phone at exactly that point.  Yeah, it rocks
• The other two products mentioned were mine, AwayFind, and Mike Subelsky’s OtherInbox
• You might want some videos for how to turn off notifications on the social networks
• This was my first experience only checking email twice in a day
• Why you should turn off auto check on your BlackBerry or iPhone
• The value of extreme friendships for extreme growth
• How the company you keep can force you to be accountable
• My riff on loneliness and solitude was inspired by last week’s “The End of Solitude,” by William Deresiewicz in the The Chronicle Review [via @superfem].  I intend to write a post about this sooner or later
• And lastly, go home

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Each time I link back to old articles it amazes me how much content is up here, and how much I’ve gotten to grow by bouncing ideas off and learning from you all.  Thank you for that.

PS I’m in NYC this weekend, so feel free to get in touch -– maybe we can get a cup of coffee.

I’ve gotten to know a lot of great people through the web, and the following are both observations and tips.

Today I’m presenting these ideas to an event at the Greater Baltimore Technology Council, so perhaps a video will be here shortly.

If you’d like a primer on how to find who you should be paying attention to, check out my recently updated Guide to Getting Started with Social Media.

The following six tips/lessons are from my own experiences.  Though they mostly refer to getting to know bloggers, they can be applied equally to anyone who has a public online presence.  Hope you find them helpful!

The web is an approachable community, not an intimidating new land…But you’d better be nice because people know each other here.

The number of people who write and participate online is really small.  That may not seem the case, but when it comes to the subjects and sites you’re most interested in, after a few months you’ll start seeing the same names everywhere.  And these people are approachable, too:

I was alone at a bar Saturday, waiting for my friends to show-up for a 30th birthday party.  The place was hopping, but I just found a corner and sat back—the crowd was intimidating.  It wasn’t really my scene and I wasn’t about to walk up to a stranger to make small talk.  There are few things I enjoy less than meeting people without a reason other than “well, you’re here, too.”

The web is nothing like that.  Any conversation online can be in the context of shared interests with people literally inviting participation.  Once you get used to the web community, it starts to make sense why some people are worried about the next generation never getting outside—it’s really easy to meet like minds online.

But word also gets around fast, so be nice.  Or at least just be cognizant when you’re talking about other people that many relationships exist between folks that you’d never expect.  This depth of bizarre interconnections comes up almost daily in my conversations…so I’m very careful now.

Stop for a second and ask yourself: what are you prepared to give?

It’s not that everyone is keeping score, but when you’re a total stranger there’s not really a good reason for someone to get to know you or to want to help.  So it might be nice to consider how you want to give before you approach people directly online.

By giving, I don’t necessarily mean money, traded services, or even introductions (those are traditional things to give in the offline world).  I just mean the value you’re providing both specifically and in general.  A lot of giving online is about karma—helping the community at large by putting up a project that others benefit from, outlining your experiences, or sharing lessons-learned—much as I’m doing now here, etc.

A good place to start is by adding to other people’s social proof and making the content on their site stronger—commenting on their site, submitting their site to Digg or StumbleUpon, etc.  A long term and more meaningful strategy might be interviewing people or writing reviews of other people’s articles.

Just be sure to think long and hard about what you’re doing for others before you think of what they can offer you.  Fortunately it’s a lot easier to give online than it is in the real world.

Carefully choose the website you link to for yourself.  Have an agenda and action in mind.

When you leave a comment you have the opportunity to link back to yourself.  When you send an email you have the opportunity to link back to yourself.  In every profile online you have the option for a hyperlink with more detail.  Don’t miss that opportunity to link to yourself!

But you need to think carefully about which link you provide.  Your link is the first step toward someone getting to know you, so you want to do it right.

I generally link back to this site when I have to choose one link, since this is where:

• I can offer the most value to people, which also means that…
• I paint a good picture of myself (I hope!), and I’m consistent (unlike Twitter, where I could be on some bizarre tangent when they make it to my page).  This also means they might take advantage of where…
• There are specific actions people can take: subscribing to Technotheory, signing up for AwayFind, following me on Twitter, etc

So whatever site you link to, be cognizant of why you’re choosing that link with the potential audience that will click there.  While it might be nice to promote your company’s brochure website for 10 seconds, you want to hold people’s attention, express that you offer value, and preferably have some sort of conversion or action so as to retain and build upon this new connection…this new potential relationship.  So a blog or site with more detailed information might be a better bet.  Just think through it : ).

Comment long.  Comment pithy.  Comment short.  Comment.

Given the choice between commenting and not commenting, assuming what you have to say is positive or constructive, you should always comment…even if it’s just a sentence or two.  Most bloggers don’t get many comments and really enjoy the social proof you’re providing.  And even better if there’s some depth to the comment.

If your comment is critical, be thorough.  Comments like “that sucks” are just wasting space and making you look bad.  You can be critical, but express yourself articulately or you won’t be taken seriously.

If you want to build a relationship with a blogger, you should leave some substantial comments and come back every once in a while, even if you’re only leaving short comments much of the time.  Continual presence will be felt…and then you’ll have an easier time reaching out directly.

Reach out to people directly.

Email is a great way to start a dialogue or introduce yourself.  But I’d suggest that you be helpful rather than asking for something, initially.  Even thanking someone for a really great post is a way to reach out.  Just be sure that whatever you write has some personal substance to it.  If you’re taking someone’s time, be sure it’s worth it.

Another great way to reach out is to answer questions someone asks on Twitter.  @’s or DM’s are both okay.  Once again, be pithy rather than “great job, totally agree.”  Bleh.

Then if you can and have a reason to, schedule a call or (as with the last point in the heading below) find a time to meet up.

There’s nothing magical to say about this, but it is the most important step here.  If you don’t reach out to people before you need them…well, you know the rest of this story.

So you might be thinking, “well, how do I know who to reach out to before I need them?”  I’ll be honest here: I hope to get to know everyone personally in the personal productivity space.  I’ve had a great time with nearly everyone in that community I’ve met and I don’t have an ulterior motive in mind.  I have a lot of folks in many spaces I hope to keep up with…and if you go through the steps in my guide to social media, you’ll probably come up with people worth paying attention to, too.  Perhaps someday I’ll need something, perhaps not, but it’s obviously wise to have friends in the spaces where my blog, my product, and my customers exist.  It’s not that you should cherry pick your friends before meeting them, but the people in your related fields are a good starting point.

Meet with people in the Real World.

The best way to add depth to relationships is to meet face to face.  Keep a list of where people are located, and/or what conferences they attend.  Then, when you’re going to be at the same place, reach out.  Or in lieu of the list, when you’re traveling at least check Facebook or LinkedIn’s network search—that’ll get you 80% of the way there, assuming you’ve been friending folks as you’ve gotten to know them.  There’s something about the rarity of an occasion that makes people particularly receptive to meeting up in faraway places (but hometowns are better than conferences—as people will have more time).

As a side: In the next 3 months I’ve got trips to Madison, NYC, Austin, Boston, San Francisco, Kowloon, and Tokyo.  So now you know: if you’re keeping tabs on me from those cities, now’s your chance to reach out!

I hope some of these tips can help.  If I get a video from today’s talk, I’ll let you know.  In the mean time, do you have any advice for getting to know people online?

Flickr photo credit: One Laptop per Child

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, but it’s not really my holiday.  And it’s not yours; well, unless you bring others in…

I got one of those cheesy forwarded cards in my email today—you know, the ones you used to get a lot back in ‘99 or whatever:

When you click the turkey you get an animated sequence that arranges food from the turkey dinner until you end up with a turkey (no you really don’t need to watch it).

Silly?  Yes.  Impersonal?  Perhaps.  A waste of time?  Well, I don’t know.

Our emails are curt and businesslike.  Our friendships are scheduled and one-dimensional.  We both observe and expect certain behaviors in most of our interactions.  But sometimes we have to step outside of these roles.

Well, thank you, Lynn, for sending me this silly turkey card.  Because it was better than no thank you at all.  It’s not my style, but I think we all need to let people know that they’re in our thoughts.  And this is at least one step closer.

My style is sending a quick text message, calling, writing a few-line email, dropping an IM, sending a direct message on Twitter…but whatever it is, it’s a somewhat personal, warm message.  And, of course, for your loved ones, showing that in whatever way you can—in person, over the phone, or in a hand-written card.

Does it seem like I’ve gotten off track?  Perhaps, but here’s a little exercise you might want to try: pick 5 people in your speed dial list and send them a text message with either (depending on when you’re reading this):

• “Hi X, just wanted to let you know I’m thinking of you today.  Thanks for being awesome.  Hope to see you soon :-).  Happy Thanksgiving!”
• “Hi X, I missed you on Thanksgiving, but thanks for being awesome.  Hope you had a great holiday, and hope to see you soon :-)”

Or you could do that over email.  Or the phone.  But just do it.  It’ll make you feel so good and it’ll make them feel even better.

And to you, my kind reader, I really appreciate your time and loyalty, and for helping me to get from the things I was doing to more of the things I truly believe in.  I’ve never felt like I was in a better place, and your support has been a big part of that.

Thank you, and Happy Thanksgiving.

Flickr Photo Credit: ShashiBellamkonda