Margie Clayman

The more I dig into Social Media, the more I am entirely perplexed at how people who have more on their table get anything accomplished. The fact that they do all they do, in fact, begins to appear downright miraculous.

This weekend, I have been giving a lot of thought to priorities. Actually, this started last Thursday. Someone mentioned that one way to make #30Thursday more valuable would be to make sure I comment on every post that I include. I had already been thinking that.

Today, I realized that I am severely lacking in tweeting about peoples’ posts to my followers.

I am disappointed in myself that I am falling short in those areas. However, I also have a little problem – I am not sure how to budget my time.

Two Full-Time Jobs

Everything that I do here in the Social Media world really has come to comprise, in terms of time and effort, a full-time job. That would be awesome, except that I already have a full-time job. Working for my family’s agency, by itself, with none of the Social Media stuff I’m doing, does an ample job of using my time, my thought, my passion, and my effort. This is not a complaint. I love what I do for my job. I love what I do here, obviously, or I would just stop. However, I will fully admit that I also really enjoy eating, sleeping, and maybe even being unproductive sometimes (but not often).

Priorities are a muddle

I am trying to determine what I should add to my Social Media work and what I should perhaps cut back on. Here are some ideas.

Make 10 comments on other peoples’ posts for every post that I write

Promote 5 peoples’ posts on Twitter for every 1 of mine

Cut back on the number of chats I participate in each week (these take 1-2 hours of time…is this the best way to use my time or is it just really enjoyable and educational for me?)

Of course, I would love to grow my breadth of experiences someday and start to work on presentations and other things that extend beyond the computer machine. Where do those fit into priorities I have going now?

What am I doing that helps you the most? Would it be better for me to comment on your blog rather than write my own blogs here?

I’m all ears.

Image by Ray Smithers. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Ray7775

I’ve gotten a lot of very kind comments lately from people saying that they agree with some of my views or that something I have said has been helpful. This, of course, is an easy way to make my day (if you mean it).

I have to take this opportunity to point something out, however.

The way that I do things is merely my interpretation of what I have learned from people like Chris Brogan, Jay Baer, Ann Handley,  Beth Harte and many more people that I am fortunate to have connected with on Twitter and elsewhere in the Social Media world.

Sometimes, people get frustrated that they don’t get responses from people who have pull in Social Media. Sometimes it seems easy to get attention by writing a blog post saying that that the views of the “influencers,” “thought leaders,” “cool kids,” whatever term you want to use, are wrong, uneducated, whatever.

If you like the way that I am using Social Media, I would ask you to take a moment to realize that these people, under the radar often times, are doing everything I am doing except that they offer at  least a decade of experience behind everything they do, with 10-20-100 times more followers, and with expanded ways to reach out to you, like webinars, presentations, and more.

The parts of what I do that have gotten the best responses are all the result of me doing the best I can to learn from these thought leaders. My Social Media world, and what I do, is the size of  a crumb compared to the full multi-level cake  of people that these industry leaders are assisting every day.

Before you get frustrated, before you decide to try to pick a fight to get some attention, remember that the “cool” kids are people like you and me. They are perpetually doing something they don’t have to do, which is to help us get better at what we do. I am trying to pay back all of that time and free information by living it out and passing it along. Will you join me and do the same?

Image by Chris Greene. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/christgr

I was asked today if I have checked my Klout score. I have seen a lot about Klout…it’s essentially a way to measure your influence (there’s that word again). Klout defines its metrics this way:

We believe that influence is the ability to drive people to action — “action” might be defined as a reply, a retweet or clicking on a link.

So, if you have a lot of people clicking on links and retweeting you, your Klout score goes up. Naturally, attaining a high Klout score will be easier, statistically, for someone with 50,000 followers than a person with 100 followers. 1% of 50,000 will always be bigger than 1% of 100, I don’t care what kind of fuzzy math you’re doing.

That’s not why I have no interest in my Klout score, however.

Put simply, I haven’t checked my Klout ranking for 2 reasons.

1. I don’t need to

2. I don’t care

Let’s explore both of these in a bit of detail.

I don’t need to know what my Klout score is

So, first of all, I have my own ways of measuring clicks. I know how many people are coming to my blog. I know how many people (roughly) are clicking on my bit.ly links. I know how many people are retweeting me. Even if I cared deeply about my Klout score, the plain and simple numbers that I look at to measure what I’m doing tell me that in terms of clicks and Retweets, I am not “influential.” Boo hoo. Don’t cry too hard for me. I’ll survive somehow.

Here’s the thing. For me, clout (spelled correctly and without a .com after it) in Social Media translates to people you’ve helped somehow. Do you know how you measure that? People kindly tell you that you helped them. Yep. Communication on Social Media sites. Wacky, right? Klout doesn’t really measure “influence” in this way, but I think all measures of influence should be based on “thank you” and any and all translations. A lot of the people who have high Klout scores would also probably rank pretty highly on the “thank you” scale. Others would fall off pretty darned quickly, though. For example, the people who spend a lot of time saying, “Please RT” or “OMG CLICK!”. They might have a great Klout score, but not a lot of the kind of clout that I admire.

I don’t care about my Klout score

Numbers in Social Media, for me, have just become moments of pause. I marked when I finally got my 100th follower. I noted progress when I grew my community to 500 followers. I paused again when I reached 1,000 followers. But I have not changed a gull darn thing about how I am blogging or how I am Tweeting. At this point, my game in Social Media is about continuing to learn all I can and then when I’m not doing that, bringing other folks up to speed who might be struggling in the same way I was six months ago. That’s it. I don’t get retweeted a whole lot because generally, I don’t talk in sound bytes. I talk in words that I string together into 140-character mini sentences. Normally, those are written in response to something someone has said to me. I just talk to people. There isn’t anything innately retweetable about “Hey, are you feeling better?” I don’t care. I just don’t. I like talking to the people I talk to. I learn from them, and hopefully they learn from me while also having a little fun (sometimes at my expense).

Point a finger and you have three pointing back at you

I’m not saying that you are a TERRIBLE person if you use Klout. I’m just saying that I wouldn’t get too bogged down in it. Ultimately, if you care about that kind of thing, you could just make your game a Klout tally score. You could trick people into clicking links. You could get a bunch of your friends to retweet everything you say. Your Klout score would probably skyrocket in just a couple of days. But how does that really help you in the end? Ultimately, people will realize that that game is all you’re about. Hungry Hungry Hippo is really fun for about the first hour, and then people want to move on to Trivial Pursuit or Scrabble, right? Well, it’s the same kind of thing. I think people who use Twitter to communicate person-to-person find it much more rewarding, in all of the ways that Klout.com doesn’t measure. Just my opinion, but I’m sticking to it.

1st Image by sebile akcan. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/sebileakc

2nd image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/rubenshito

I was conversing with someone this week about blogging. They were really having a tough time with it. “Am I using my voice? Am I going to let down the Twitter community I have built if my blog isn’t what they’re interested in?” I’ve had a lot of similar conversations. I’ve witnessed others. People who tweak their posts. People who go back and delete older posts.

It reminded me of the days when I was first learning to crochet.

For me, the phase of learning how to crochet (and knit…and cross stitch…) was a lot like learning how to blog. In other words, I thought I should be able to jump right in and do it. Perfectly. This didn’t seem unreasonable in either scenario. In the craft world, I was seemingly surrounded by people who could whip up an afghan in five seconds flat, and it would be BEAUTIFUL! When I was learning how to blog a little better, it seemed like fifth graders were blogging more and better than me (nothing against fifth graders, of course).

Just like with other crafts that you learn, blogging is based on some basic tools that everyone uses. You need a blogging site. A computer is an awesome help. Things to write about. Ways to promote. A person learning to crochet needs a hook and some yarn. A knitter needs two needles and…some yarn. That’s it. Pretty basic stuff.

When you set out to blog, just like with any craft, you think it’s going to be easy. You know all of the pieces and parts. You’ve seen other people do it. You’ve even gotten lots of helpful tips. Where crafters have patterns, bloggers have tons of informational resources. Then you sit down to blog, and it’s like your brain just starts leaking out of your ears on to your keyboard. When I was learning to crochet, I could not for the life of me figure out how to make the slip knot that you need to make before you even start to do the actual crocheting. This did not bode well, I thought at the time. Learning how to knit, which requires, really, two and a half hands, is also extremely awkward, whereas when a long-time knitter is knitting, it looks effortless and even kind of hypnotic.

Inevitably, with blogging, you come to a point of distress or mild irritation, depending on your personality. “Why am I not getting any comments?” You yell at your personable computer. “I mean, I mean, look at this post! This post is about ORANGES and it got 57 comments. This is stupid.” Now, I am not proud to say this, but when I was learning to crochet, I actually threw a project off the deck of a place my family was staying in for vacation. Every time I sat down to make something, it ended up looking like a DNA molecule, all twisty and uneven. Very un-blankety. In a fit of rage, I just threw the whole mess away. I went to pick it up later, by the way.

So what do you do after you hit this point of despair? Do you just give up your blog and say, “I don’t know. I must just not be meant to blog.” No. The temptation might be there, but blogging, like any craft, is ultimately, in the end, a test of patience. You start to realize that the less you stress about it, the easier and better it gets. My first completed crocheted project, although not a masterpiece, happened when I sat down and said, “Aw heck, I like doing this and I’m just going to do it for fun.” My stitches relaxed. I relaxed. Everything got better.

As you get more into a craft, you realize that what once looked like everyone using the same tools is actually people using the same tools in their own particular way. In blogging, some people use very personal anecdotes. Some people like to come across as teachers. Others like to be kind of biting and funny. Sometimes a blogger will drift from post to post *cough* In crafting, it’s the same thing. Some knitters will swear by bamboo needles while others lust for aluminum. Some knitters refuse to knit with anything but natural yarn, while others are okay with whatever *cough*

I would say my blogging is about where my crocheting and knitting are. I can create some passable stuff. Some of it turns out pretty well. Sometimes I sit down to write a blog and I end up staring into space for 20 minutes. Sometimes I sit down to knit a hat and end up with something that is three feet in circumference. In both cases, I’ve learned to calmly back away, take a few deep breaths, and believe that one day I will be a blogging master and a crafty master. And you know what, no matter what kind of blog posts you write, no matter what “craft” you might be learning right now, you’ll become a master too. It just takes a little time, and heck, I’ll go ahead and quote Guns ‘n Roses. It’ll take a little patience.