Social Media Time Management Tips for Professional Enrichment

Ad agency clients are looking for leadership. Provide it by eliminating distractions and creating a ritual.

For success in agency new business, you must lead. To get to and maintain a position of leadership within this industry you need a consistent and strategic program for professional enrichment. Keeping pace with the amount of new information, thinking, and rapidly changing communication technology is exhausting and time-consuming.

What is the key to staying on top of your game? Avoid distractions. 

It is super easy to become distracted online. You start out searching for particular content, such as resources to write for your agency’s blog  and some article catches your eye, before you know it that has led to dozens of other topics and links that have taken you away from your primary mission and a precious hour of your day.

One of the best ways I’ve learned to not be distracted is to have rich content automatically  fed to me rather than me manually searching for it.

One of the ways that I accomplish this is using a RSS Reader. I chose to use Google Reader. It was awkward at first but I knew that if I stuck with it, it would be a great time management tool.

It took me awhile to find and subscribe to the best web-based resources for my own personal enrichment but now I have hundreds of RSS feeds coming to me in a central location, in specific topical folders that allow me to quickly scan through topics. Here are some of the category folders in my reader:

• Agency New Business Blogs
• Social Media Blogs
• Client Blogs
• Competitor Blogs
• News Feeds
• Sports Feeds

Additional tools to keep you from distraction.

When I find an article that I want to keep, come back to later, use as a resource for a blog post or post to Twitter I can use some of the short-cut tools made available through the reader itself or special buttons that I’ve added to my browser bar. This allows me to save or share information within seconds and continue to stay focused on my reading. Here are a some of the tools that I use:

• Google Reader: Add a subscription
• Google Reader: Starred items
• Google Reader: Shared items
• WordPress: Press This
• TwitThis
• Stumble!

I also have some key newsletters that I receive through my inbox. Some of these are daily briefs and others are received either weekly or monthly. Here are a few of my choice newsletters:

• Management Tip of the Day: Harvard Publishing (which provided the inspiration for this article)
• Smart Brief: Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA)
• Propulsion: Ignition Consulting Group
• Steal This Idea: Neutron
• The eMarketer Daily
• SmartBrief on Social Media

A few other online sources that are directed to my Inbox allows me to stay organized and focused.

• Blog post comments (I’m alerted to any new comments and can easily click on the link to respond)
• Google Alerts (Some handy uses of Google Alerts include monitoring news stories, keeping current on a competitor or industry)
• TweetBeeps (Keep track of conversations that mention you, your URL, your clients, anything, with hourly updates)

Consistency is also key when creating your own program for professional enrichment. How do you stay consistent? Through ritual.

Peter Bregman, CEO of Bregman Partners, recently wrote an article, “An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day” where he provided this time management insight:

“Jack LaLanne, the fitness guru, knows all about tricks; he’s famous for handcuffing himself and then swimming a mile or more while towing large boats filled with people. But he’s more than just a showman. He invented several exercise machines including the ones with pulleys and weight selectors in health clubs throughout the world. And his show, The Jack LaLanne Show, was the longest running television fitness program, on the air for 34 years.

But none of that is what impresses me. He has one trick that I believe is his real secret power.

Ritual.

At the age of 94, he still spends the first two hours of his day exercising. Ninety minutes lifting weights and 30 minutes swimming or walking. Every morning. He needs to do so to achieve his goals: on his 95th birthday he plans to swim from the coast of California to Santa Catalina Island, a distance of 20 miles. Also, as he is fond of saying, “I cannot afford to die. It will ruin my image.”

Be sure that you develop your own daily program that is realistic. One that you can maintain when your agency is at its busiest. The program that I created takes about an hour to an hour and a half of my day. But its the things that I must do to get ahead and stay ahead.

Additional articles that may be of interest:

• How Do I Keep Up with Social Media?
• Socializing Your Ad Agency’s New Business Development
• How I typically start my day using social media tools for new business
• Tweetlater A Great Ad Agency New Business Tool
• Socially Benefitting from My Twitter Habits