Time Management in the Age of Social Media

David Allen talks about ways you can make Facebook and Twitter work for you on the job

These days I'm asked frequently about the role of social media in personal and organizational productivity. The question is timely, as the major social media applications have millions of users and are still growing fast. Also, the phenomenon is closely tied to e-mail, which itself has presented major challenges to professionals in time management and keeping an appropriate focus in their work and life.

The most obvious issue about social media: Is this a useful way to spend your time, or is it a sinkhole of attractive distraction? It could very easily be one of those one minute, and the other the next! It all depends on why you're doing it, and this must be evaluated moment to moment. It's an important distinction to make for yourself, because focus is probably your greatest asset that you can control. You must be judicious about where you place it and what you let grab it, thus reducing your effectiveness.

Bear in mind that the most potentially productive activities (e.g. meetings) can undermine your control and focus if they're not carefully managed. And some pursuits that are commonly viewed as "time-wasting," such as random Web surfing or Facebook socializing can be productive, if you use that term in the broadest sense of achieving something you want.

Someone noticed that I was now on Twitter and said: "How can you be productive on Twitter?" My simple answer: "If I want to have Twittered, then it's productive!" I wasn't trying to be facetious. The truth is, if you're taking a vacation to relax and you don't relax, then it's an unproductive vacation.

Why would I (or anyone) want to "have Twittered," or be involved with any of the social media at all? There is inherently some sort of magic between the lines in much of it that seems to have struck a chord in so many of us. I attribute this to the transparency, connectedness, and immediacy that social media offer, which are key attributes of quality relationships—something humans crave at a basic level.
Looking at if from a more tactical, practical perspective, it seems there are three main reasons that it can serve people well:

You're an incorrigible extrovert, and you just love to schmooze.

If so, social media may be right up your alley. You simply need to be careful with balance, and whether your virtual social life is detracting from your physical one, or from your other responsibilities. You may need a prenuptial agreement that it's O.K. to disappear for hours away from your real-life partner to chat with people you'll never see. But if you're wired to get inspirational juice from multiple relationships in that way, it can be productive.

You have an agenda that is supported by this kind of connection.

If you need to know what's new and what's happening, moment to moment, social media can provide a competitive advantage. If you are building a global brand, as I am, and leveraging your personality and having a following is part of that strategy, playing in this arena is smart. I've only been on Twitter for a couple of weeks, but already it has invigorated lots of great discussions and a sense of connectedness with thousands of people in and around my network.

If having some sort of immediate communication from me helps reinforce the best practices that my methods represent for people's work and life, then there's lots of goodwill as well as good ideas spreading virally and quickly. Or, if you're in a business that excels with its "now-ness" in the market and culture, such as entertainment or consumer high tech, you'd better be on board. Or if you're out of a job, this hugely expanded Rolodex may be your best resource for your next opportunity.

You're researching.

You're intrigued, maybe a little intimidated by the early adopters and the popularity in the media about these media, and you're curious about what all this is about and want to find out whether and how you should engage. That's probably the majority of us, and I think there is still much to know about this world. You'll be in testing, trying-out mode. I'm still very much in this space, attempting to not miss out on whatever opportunities might lie waiting while at the same time not letting myself get too sidetracked along lines that start to require more energy than they deliver back.

It's not an easy call, because I've discovered that the proof is in the pudding. That is, I've got to participate in order to really know what's going to pay off and what isn't. The experience in Twitter was unexpected; and it took quite a bit of experimentation to get a feel for what was going on, and how to find a groove there.
The big key is to stay very clear about what your agreements with yourself are, relative to your engagement with such things as LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, and the like. The opportunity that the various social media offer is the ability to quickly communicate, collaborate, and get feedback from a large and previously inaccessible number of people, with varying degrees of filtering capabilities.

The challenge is that each of those social media involvements can represent another virtual in box, with an implicit assumption that you should think about and deal with what lands there. If "processing" those additional streams of input is simply a matter of scanning to see what's of interest to you, that may not take much time; and you can simply drop in and out on a whim. That's no different than channel surfing, other than the added seductiveness of interactive rabbit trails to pursue.
But if you are expected—by yourself or others—to be more familiar with the content, or to contribute and respond to content directly, you're going to have to be judicious in how you manage your social media commitments. It's not as innocuous as another cable station, unless you have specifically downgraded your expectations of how you're going to be involved.

Depending on your personal and professional interests, you can choose from the variety of social media the ones that fit for you. If the productivity best practice is to target your social media very precisely to attain your goals, then the productivity worst practice would be to indiscriminately hook into multiple sources of poorly defined static. To use social media effectively, just be sure that you aren't putting more effort in than the result you're getting.

David Allen is the internationally bestselling author of Getting Things Done, Ready for Anything, and Making It All Work. He is the chairman and founder of the David Allen Company and is a leading authority on developing personal and organization capacity.

Finding the Right “Brand Voice” on Twitter

March 9th, 2009 | by Kai Turner

Kai Turner is head of Information Architecture at Agency.com – London.

When businesses open an account on Twitter, they must consider the right “Brand Voice.” One that is appropriate for what they want to say, and who they want to reach. This is a different sort of voice than the one companies have been familiar with in their traditional print and broadcast media channels, as it’s a more open and authentic form of communication.

While there is no established roadmap for launching a brand on Twitter, I’ve made some observations about some approaches to follow and pitfalls to avoid.
1. DO see it as a branding exercise

Companies already understand the importance of creating a strong brand identity for marketing and advertising. However, it is the expression of the brand identity that needs a new approach when working with Twitter.

Typically, when a company is planning a marketing campaign for broadcast, print or the web, the brand identity will have travelled from its conceptual and strategic origins through a process of formalization until it arrives as clear and well-defined guidelines to be put into a brief. This can be effective in carefully crafting a static piece of communication but, much like bringing a script to a dinner party, formal rules can’t be applied to casual conversation.

Instead, companies should return to an earlier exercise in developing their brand identity – that of describing their brand personality. These are the human characteristics of the brand. Many brands fall at the first hurdle on Twitter, which is, simply: sounding human. A company’s “Brand Voice” should reflect the personality traits of the brand. If your brand personality is meant to be “refined and sophisticated”, does it sound refined and sophisticated, or does it sound like a door-to-door salesman?

The Brand Voice of Starbucks is the voice of Brad, who posts on Twitter for them. Here he’s posting a picture of himself with some colleagues, just as any group of friends might do on Twitter.

2. DON’T imitate the voice of the community

What makes people interesting is that everyone is unique, and everyone has their own voice. Brands often go wrong on Twitter by thinking that in order to appeal to a certain demographic segment they need to somehow imitate that group. This is most obvious when brands go after the youth market and awkwardly pepper their language with outdated slang and a tone that is meant to sound ‘trendy’ or ‘urban’.

Companies make the wrong assumption– they believe that they need to wear a disguise in order to speak naturally to people. In fact, people want an authentic conversation with brands that speak as we would expect them to. People don’t want brands to be their friends, or to be overly familiar with them, but they do want a dialogue with brands whose products or services they enjoy using. Brands that feel the need to adopt a false persona, in some ways, are using it as a defense mechanism. After all, you can’t criticize the brand, you can only attack the false persona.

This post is both conversational, and informative. It’s what you would expect from Capgemini.

3. DO let it all hang out

The hardest thing for large companies to accept is just how exposed they are on Twitter. If there has been something negative in the press, your press conference begins as soon as the news breaks amongst the Twitterati. There is no time to prepare a statement.

Again, however, the rule is that the Brand Voice is a human one. And just as people have their own foibles, and make mistakes, a company on Twitter needs to accept its flaws, own up to them, and then it can begin repairing its mistakes. Hiding away from this conversation only makes matters worse, because then it becomes a one-sided argument without any representation from the company.



You can’t hide. Motrin had a PR disaster with their Motrin Moms campaign. The problem was only compounded by not having a voice on Twitter. In this example someone, pretending to be Motrin, continues to make jokes at the company’s expense.

4. DON’T just use Twitter as an RSS feed

The Twitter audience is a tech savvy bunch. They know how to read RSS feeds, so repurposing an RSS feed for Twitter isn’t adding value. You can post links to recent news and updates, but have a real person contextualize it. The link is interesting only if the person posting it is credible, and making a judgment call about what is or isn’t worth posting.


This Adobe developer posted about the product he’s working on, and since we’re getting a behind the scenes view of his work, it’s much more compelling than just having the link on its own.

5. DO define your communication channel

Before you can find the right voice, you need to know what it is you want to talk about. Is it a brand awareness and engagement channel? Is it a news and information channel? Is it a customer support and response channel? Each of these would need a different tone of voice.



DELL has over 20 distinct, and well-defined Twitter channels. Notably, the authors behind each account have been named so that a connection can be made with a real person.

6. DON’T just talk about products & services

Again, think of the real world. A person who speaks about one thing, and one thing only, is either incredibly dull or clinically insane. If you are passionate about your business, industry, products then share your passion. I was recently working on a project where I was told about a tech specialist who constantly improves the image quality of a camera lens. He could explain all the little details that go into creating a perfect image with such enthusiasm that you would be drawn into his world, and a topic you wouldn’t have guessed would be exciting– suddenly is.



Adam Denison, “A PR guy at Chevrolet,” talks about cars without always directly promoting Chevrolet products.

7. DO have a casting call for your Brand Voice

So you know what you want to say, and how you want to say it – but the biggest question is: who will be saying it? Most likely it will be someone from the marketing or the PR team. Maybe even a junior intern who has been given a list of things to post on Twitter.

A more successful tactic would be to find someone, internal or external to the company, who is already on Twitter and speaking naturally in a tone of voice that matches your Brand Voice.



An online travel agent or airline could benefit from having a serial traveler like the TwitchHiker working as their brand evangelist.

8. DO have a voice on Twitter, but first have a listen

If nothing else, big brands need to get on Twitter and start following people. Test the water. We don’t bite. Usually.

FAQ Pages Could Boost Your Google Rankings

By Chris Crum

Catering to Intent-based Search the Key
In a recent report, Hitwise said that the length of search queries has increased over the past year. Longer search queries, averaging searches of 5+ words in length, have increased 10% from January '08 to January '09 they noted.

Ask has an interesting blog post up interpreting this data, and the gist of it is summed up with this paragraph from it:

In a nutshell, users are now expecting search engines to not just index the Internet, they are expecting search engines to process the data on the Internet. Searchers don't consider their query to be just keywords; they are starting to expect that the search engine will understand the intent of the query better. Expressing a query with intent requires more words, and the user's investment of more words means that his or her expectations on the search engine are higher. We are clearly experiencing a transition in the way that people are using the Internet.

Intent-based search. We've been hearing the phrase dropped more and more. In a popular WebProNews interview with Bruce Clay, late last year, he spoke of where search was headed and a good deal of that had to do with personalized search. The SearchWiki side of that has gotten the most attention in this area, but he had some things to say about intent-based search as well.

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He talked about Google looking up your IP and revising results based on it while making assumptions about the intent of your search. This would have an affect on SEO, obviously. "The page that ranks for a shopping query is an entirely different architecture than the page that ranks for a research query," said Clay.

It's a topic SEOBook author Aaron Wall and I discussed recently as well. Aaron noted that Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a recent conference call, "Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in that phrase? We have a lot of discoveries in that area that [we] are going to roll out in the next little while."

Aaron Wall The idea of relevancy based on intent is a fantastic one, but chances are the search engines are still going to have to rely on the content that users create to increase search relevancy, at least in this manner. Google still has "a long way to go to get where they want to be with relevancy, but some of the issue of search is simply creating the incentive to make people want to create the content that really answers search queries well in a good format," Wall told WebProNews.

"Sometimes I see Matt Cutts post great how to posts about how to do different things in Ubuntu," he continued. "I believe he does that in part to feed answers into the search engine, especially if/when it did not provide an answer that was as good as he would like."

What is another great way to feed answers into a search engine? Keith Hogan, VP, Technology at Ask offers a piece of pretty sound advice for online businesses: "Web business should take notice of Question/Answering sites that have been built and SEO'd to fill the search engine rankings for these types of user questions (e.g. Q&A aggregators like WikiAnswers, AnswerBag, and Yahoo Answers). While this content is generally very relevant, content directly from companies could be more authoritative. Web businesses may benefit by creating FAQ content that is targeted at answering real user questions about their products."

FAQs as relevant results to intent-based searches about what your business offers. What a concept. And considering the emphasis Google seems to be putting on brand (although Matt Cutts says it's not so much about brand exactly), it sounds like a can't-miss.

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