Originally published at Magical Experiments. Please leave any comments there.

I got into a really interesting metaphysical tonight with my friends about group time vs individual time. I was describing to them some of my paratheatre work with time and we got to talking about the difference between Western time, which is monochronic and this very scheduled and linear with one thing happening at a time and polychronic time where lots of things could be happening at the same time and its very non-linear with little in the way of scheduling.

Then I began thinking about group time, time which is created when a group starts meeting and working together. It’s a kind of sacred time in its own way. When I interact with a group, the experience of time changes quite a bit because of the group interaction, but also because I’m no longer in individual time, time spent with just myself. And I notice with group time it is different because with interaction of other people, the sense of time changes. It feels like the moment lasts longer, instead of with individual time, where the awareness of time is based more on solo activity and when those activities are finished.

It’s an interesting realization and it speaks to some degree to the efficacy of group time, because everyone participating in a group is also participating in the experience of time in that group. The contribution of each person’s awareness of time creates the experience of group time an consequentlly can alter the awareness of the flow of time.

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

It’s the holiday season and now might seem like a good time take a rest from your business, but before you go to lots of holiday parties and drink lots of eggnog, take a moment to think about defining your business goals for the first quarter of 2010. Yes, only the first quarter, because realistically a lot will change in three months for you.

When I talk about goals, I’m not talking about new years resolutions which are vague and abstract. I’m talking about a defined end result and an action that helps you achieve that end result. I’m talking about picking out specific business activities that your business engages in and defining actions that helps you reach end goals for each of those activities. A business activity could be networking, marketing, social media, customer service, etc. You will ideally know what your business activities are.

For each business activity, first rate your level of satisfaction with that area. a 1 indicates you have a lot of work to do and a 7 indicates that you are doing just about everything you can and its working great.

After determining the level of satisfaction, you’ll next want to think about where you would like to be with that business activity in 3 months. What would the end results be. An end result needs to be measurable so you should have an idea of what results you would like to accomplish.

Next you need to determine what action you will take to help you achieve that end result. The action needs to be targeted and specific to the business activity.

Here’s a goal I have for the next three months

Business Activity: Services and Products

End result: I want my clients to be able to sign up for classes without me having to email them.

Action: Learn how to use auto-responders and integrate them into my website and event announcements.

A specific result and a specific action. Now apply that same approach to your goals. Of course setting goals is wonderful…following through is another matter, so make sure you can follow through by not just writing the goal, but putting it somewhere you can see it everyday.

Originally published at Magical Experiments. Please leave any comments there.

First, the latest issue of Rending the Veil is available. I’ve read a few of the articles and it looks good.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about some of my recent work with time, particularly the concept of being present in the future without focusing on the future. In some cultures that standard of time is actually part of their perception of it, but in Western culture, there is an emphasis on the future and on sharply regulating time. Edward Hall provides excellent examples of this in the Dance of Life, and I’ve found his observations to be sound.

I’ll admit I’ve struggled with just being present in the moment. It’s such a foreign experience of time that it feels counter-intuitive, yet I also know it offers something valuable to me, because it allows me to work with a different understanding of time. And the moments when I can get into that place of just being present has its own value because I’m much more aware of the possibilities in those moments than I previously was. I’ve realized that the tendency to focus on the future, to fixate on it, can become an obsession, and is one that many people indulge in without fully appreciating that reality.

I do think there’s value in being able to focus on the future and on desired goals you want to achieve, but I’ve also come to realize there’s value in being in the moment and being open to what is available to you. Too often that can be ignored because of a focus on the future. My challenge has been to be more aware of the moment I’m in. Sometimes it’s worked and other times, not so much, but undoing the cultural perspective on time that’s been held for over 30 years of my life is pretty challenging, so I’m not expecting over night success. Just trying it is more important than anything else, because I’m being open to the experience.

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

One of the common mistakes I see on different social networking sites is a tendency toward sending out a stream of advertisements, in what is often a vain hope of attracting business. The reason it’s vain is that every single tweet is driven toward a goal of getting a sale as opposed to providing genuine and useful information. It should be obvious that social networks aren’t sales platforms, but many businesses try to treat them that way.

The reason this occurs is fairly simple. They are too busy thinking of the bottom line, of trying to make money, to consider the process by how that actually occurs. Instead businesses use social networks without a clear understanding of what the technology allows them to do. In fact, the tendency is ultimately to focus on the technology, without recognizing what the technology does: Namely connect us closer to other people.

Nobody likes an infomercial, so when put your status updates and tweets out there, spend a moment reading what you wrote and ask yourself, from the perspective of a reader, whether you would actually be interested in the message, whether it would actually speak to you. If it doesn’t for you, why would it for anyone else?

Look through your last thirty or so tweets and then ask yourself how many responses either on twitter or on your website you got from those tweets. If there’s no traffic and no responses then you have to question whether the activity is really productive. In fact, it isn’t productive if you aren’t getting a response.

Spending time looking at what you’ve written can help you determine if you are treating your audience like people, or like sales numbers. Can you guess how your audience would prefer to be treated?

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

Recently I’ve started offering a new package with my business services, which focuses on helping business automate what they do. It helps a business owner remove the overthink out of their process. It also helps a business owner create an objective record of the processes that can be passed onto someone who might buy the business.

The real value of documenting your process however is that it clears up the mental  clutter in your mind. It can be very easy to get mentally cluttered when you haven’t documented the process for how you accomplish a specific task. When I document a task, I find it gives me clarity, helps me understand the purposes for doing something, and stops me from overthinking it.

Documenting a process doesn’t have to be elaborate. It can be as simple as listing the desired results and then listing the steps taken to get to those results. But what does help is that as you write it out and later as you test your process, you will find that you’ll be able to eliminate steps that aren’t needed, as well as refine what is needed. You can test what you do against what you’ve written and determine what you are doing that is productive as well as what isn’t productive.

Documenting a process isn’t just putting it on paper. It’s getting the process out of your head and into a space where you can objectively observe it and change it as needed, and consequently change your activities so that they are productive and focused, and also automated.

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

The latest Social Media Coach radio show is up. Go here to listen to it! In it, I discuss how to use facebook successfully.

The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber

This is a must-read book for anyone who wants to be a small business owner or is one and is frustrated by the lack of success they might be experiencing. Gerber lays out what the issues are for why business fail and also what business owners need to do to address those issues. Gerber’s suggestions are practical and very useful. The concept of systematization for a business is ultimately a very useful idea and one more businesses need to implement. This book gets you started on learning how to do that.

5 out 0f 5

Upcoming classes

Social Media Webinar: How do I use Twitter for my Business?
When: Dec 18th, Noon to 1pm PST,  From the comfort of your office or home
Register, go to http://www.imagineyourreality.com/Events.html

Social Media Webinar: How do I use Biznik for my Business?

When: Dec 18th, 2pm to 3pm PST, From the comfort of your office or home

Register, go to http://www.imagineyourreality.com/Events.html

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

While social media technology continues to develop apace, what is becoming more important than the technology itself, is the behavior all of us engage in as we use social media. Almost from the beginning there has been expected protocol as well as ideas as to what people should or shouldn’t tweet about, but at the same time, for the most part, social networking is fairly unregulated when it comes to what people say and do. And in many ways this is a good thing, as such regulation would take away from the spirit of social networking. At the same time, social networking communities are self-policing to a degree, and this is made more helpful when you can indicate if someone is spamming you.

However an actual focus on successful social media behavior and what that means is something which is only now beginning to be focused on. Sure we have our social media strategies which explain how to use twitter or Facebook or other sites to get people interested in doing business with us, but there hasn’t been much focus on behavior. Successful social media behavior ultimately needs to look beyond the marketing and networking to the actual connection that social media enables.

What does it mean to follow someone? What issues arise when you unfollow someone? These aren’t questions, which are really asked, in part because its not something that is thought to be asked about. And ultimately by virtue of sheer numbers is not something that might be considered relevant. But as social networks evolve and as use of the technology become more sophisticated, questions of what constitutes successful social media behavior will need to be addressed.

Social media is more than technology. It’s behavior and connection, as well. It is people sharing their lives with each other, their needs, their problems, and everything else. We need to respect that even as we learn the technology.

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

Many business owners spend too much time over thinking what they do, when it comes to handling the details of running a business. This occurs because a business owner will keep all of these details in his/her head. Consequently there will be a lot of over thinking, in part because there isn’t a clear process documented that explains what the business owner or an employee should or shouldn’t be doing.

A big reason that franchise businesses such as McDonald’s do so well is that they remove the possibility of overthink from the equation of running a business. They make new franchise owners attend a special series of classes that walk them through how to run a business. They also document every single process for the business. That way the business owner and employees can refer to those processes at any time to handle a situation that occurs. The entire business of running a McDonald’s is systematized.

Most business owners don’t have a McDonalds guidebook to support them. Instead what most business owners need to do is start documenting the processes and systems for how they run their businesses. This means defining what the end results of a given process is and then writing out the steps involved to obtain those end results.

By writing a process out, you now objectify the process, making it much easier to avoid overthinking what you are doing. You can change the process easily now, but since you aren’t keeping it in your head, it actually becomes easier to implement it, without overthinking it. In fact, once it’s on paper, it’s no longer really in mind, because you now have given it a physical placeholder, which you can revisit at anytime, but without the complication of having only an abstract idea of how that process works.

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

I used to be a technical writer and one of my roles as a tech writer was to look at the design mechanics of a tool or technology and critique it for user-friendliness. What I found was that while technology works great, designers and engineers don’t always think about the component of how people will use it, and consequentially make the tool or technology harder to use than it should be.

Social media sites are no exception to that rule. Some social media sites are not well designed. MySpace, for example, with all of its commercials and the awkwardness of its design has not made it a very user friendly site. Facebook is similarly guilt of bad design. This is evident by the fact that it can take up to five clicks or more to find link to create a Facebook Fan page. This is also evident by the design of their paid for advertising which doesn’t allow you to set a budget limit. For instance if you only want to spend 100 on their advertising, Facebook won’t let you do that. They’ll let you limit the amount you spend per day, but what let you define a budget.

Design flaws like that can make you not want to spend time on social media sites. Good design doesn’t just provide  a pretty design. It presents easy and functional access to whatever you need on the site. You don’t need to click more than twice to get what you need.

Now as social media sites get more complicated it may seem unreasonable to expect good design from them, but if anything that very complexity necessitates good design. The harder it is to use a site, chances are the badder the design is. That won’t necessarily stop people from using the site, but it may eventually cause them to stop using it, especially when its no longer as popular as it was before. Part of popularity, in the end, is ease of design, and knowing when not to change the design.

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

I frequently offer classes and one of the dilemmas I always encounter is using the invite feature on Linkedin and Facebook. On the one hand, I want people to know about my classes, and on the other hand I also recognize that some people will simply not want another email in their inbox. Indeed, sometimes I get irritated when I get requested to be a fan for a site or for an event, especially if the person is inviting me and it’s not one I can go to, because it’s far away.

The truth is that while posting events is helpful, there’s a danger of overdoing it and consequently spamming people. Those same people will start delete your mails, ignore you, and otherwise wish that you would go away. So what do you do? You want to put your events out there and tell people about them, but you also don’t want those same people to ignore you.

I’ve lately been re-thinking how I do my invitations. I still think it’s useful to post events on facebook and linkedin, but instead of taking a hard approach of blasting people with invitations, it may be useful to take a softer approach and post a link to the event every so often without directly mailing people. True you can’t guarantee those people will look at the events, but if you off as a spammer they won’t look at it anyway. You have to weigh the potential of spamming people vs actually engaging them.

The reality is that its very easy to cross the line from telling people about what you do to spamming them. You’ve got to be willing to refine your strategy if you find that the results it produces end up being the opposite of what you wanted.

Originally published at Magical Experiments. Please leave any comments there.

I was in Vegas this last weekend and got to see Criss Angel perform. If you don’t know who Criss Angel, he is a really popular stage magician. He’s been on a couple shows and does some really good performances. He’s also quite a favorite of the ladies. The next day I went to a signing he was doing with a friend of mine and it was interesting because when she got to him, he mentioned how tired he looked and how if he took his sunglasses off, he looked like crap and she told him that he’d never look that way. And what was so interesting about that exchange was that Criss the person might feel like crap, but to this fan, my friend, the pop culture persona of Criss could not ever look like or feel like crap…and it was that persona she wanted to interact with, that idealized version of Criss as opposed to the very real person of Criss who was tired and felt like crap that day.

To me this exchange demonstrates a fundamental truth of pop culture magic, as applied to celebrities, which is that what fans interact with isn’t the real person, but rather the idealized persona god-form of the celebrity. The fan interacts with the celebrity, but not so much with the real person. So Criss, for example, is tired and tells this person that, but to her, he can’t be tired or look anything other than how she wants to see him…so what she’s interacting with is Criss the pop culture entity, as opposed to Criss the person.

The peril of celebrity is that it creates an entity which is the celebrity persona, who is different from the real person. And it is the celebrity persona entity that ends up taking over most of the interactions that this person has. Fed into this persona is all the expectations and desires of the fans. This persona consequently is the shadow of the real person and can have quite an effect on the real person, in terms of behavior, because that person is trying to live up to fan expectations via the effect the persona has on him/her. There is a stress or pressure on the person that is created by the celebrity persona entity, which is fed by the desires of the fans. Ultimately the behavior of the celebrity can be influenced by those same fans to some degree, because its what feeds the celebrity persona entity.

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

I took a holiday this last weekend…a few days away from social media, from running a business, from all the other things I’ve focused on. I really needed it and when I came back I didn’t feel like I’d really missed anything, though I’ll admit I do feel a little behind on a few projects. But I’m also ready to work on those projects and don’t feel burned out. What I learned is that I need to give myself time off. I like what I do, but if I’m doing it everyday I start to become a technician doing a job, instead of a business owner. So I took a holiday and my business didn’t crumble around me. It’s still here and so am I.

On February 11th I’ll be presenting a 4 hour talk and presentation on social media automation for government. If you mention my name and register for the event by Dec 16th you’ll get a 50% discount for the event!

Latest Radio Shows

The latest Social Media Coach and Imagine Your Reality Radio Shows are available for listening.

Automate Your Business Teleclass
When: DEC 10 2-3pm PST  and DEC 14 Noon to 1pm PST
Register at Taylor’s Schedule page or by email

Social Media Webinar: How do I use Facebook for my Business?
When: Dec 11th, noon to 1pm PST, From the comfort of your office or home
Register, go to http://www.imagineyourreality.com/Events.html

Social Media Webinar: How do I use Linkedin for my Business?
When: Dec 11th, 2pm to 3pm PST, From the comfort of your office or home
Register, go to http://www.imagineyourreality.com/Events.html

Social Media Webinar: How do I use Twitter for my Business?
When: Dec 18th, Noon to 1pm PST,  From the comfort of your office or home
Register, go to http://www.imagineyourreality.com/Events.html

Social Media Webinar: How do I use Biznik for my Business?
When: Dec 18th, 2pm to 3pm PST, From the comfort of your office or home

Register, go to http://www.imagineyourreality.com/Events.html

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

The other day I hosted a lunch about automating your business. What interested me the most is that most of the people defined automation primarily in terms of technology, and how technology could be used to automate businesses. While it’s definitely true that technology can automate business, my own perspective on automation goes a step further than using technology.

I believe in automating human behavior. In other words I believe in creating processes that enable a person to network, market, or do any other related business function without needing to overthink it. Many business do over think their networking, marketing, and other various business tasks because they don’t want to make a mistake or lose money. But they don’t take time to actually define their processes for doing all those activities, or define how they will know if they are successful. Consequently the loss in time and unfocused plans hurts them. They haven’t taken time to automate their processes…to define what they are doing, and how they will know its successful.

Automating human behavior is understanding how to remove the overthinking from your processes. It’s understanding how to simplify everything you do and recognizing concrete specific goals you want to achieve. When we automate our behavior we understand the process that informs how we market, network, manage money, etc. And of course we add technology into this, but technology is really just an extension of the automation process. It enables us to make certain tasks easier, but ultimately those tasks, those processes can really only be successful if we automate the behavior, the attitude, and the awareness of how those tasks work.

Originally published at Magical Experiments. Please leave any comments there.

Metaphors We live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

This is a very interesting book, which explores the role of metaphors in the English language and argues that the majority of communication is done in metaphors. In particular the authors explore space and time metaphors which makes for some rather interesting insights to how American culture handles space and time. I highly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys linguistics or wants to explore how language use impacts everyday life. This is a dense read, so you’ll need to spend some time working with it, but you’ll get a lot out of it.

5 out of 5

The Dance of Life by Edward T. Hall

In this book Hall explores how different cultures approach and integrate the concept of time into their lives. He explores in depth how the cultural differences can impact peoples interactions with each other, as well as how we can be more aware of the cultural differences as it pertains to temporal awareness. I felt that this book wasn’t as dynamic as his previous works. I still got a lot out of it, but it did seem like he was rehashing a lot of his earlier work. I’d still recommend it, because he a lot of interesting perspectives to raise.

4 out of 5

Eyes Wide Open by Marianna Caplan

This book raises some tough questions about cultivating spiritual discernment for your own spiritual journey as well as what questions to ask your spiritual teachers. The author’s experiences with the various forms of spiritual charlatanry that occur with teachers is evident in how she explains the symptoms and issues to look out for. I found this book very useful for analyzing my own spiritual journey and looking at how I’ve presented myself to others in a spiritual context. It gave me some valuable tools for evaluating my own journey as well as evaluating people who might claim to have spiritual authority.

5 out of 5

Humans have hidden sensory system

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

Each social networking site has its own rules and realities when it comes to your interaction. What works on one site will not work for another because the purposes of each site and the audience on each site differs. Facebook, for example is a site for friends and families, but not for professionals, whereas Linkedin is a site for professionals. How we interact on each site is going to be different.

This isn’t to say that you can’t use Facebook for business, but even then certain businesses will have more success than other businesses, because of what they offer. For example, a bakery will do well on Facebook because it has a physical location, and products to offer. It will have a local community that are already fans and will support it. Facebook favors businesses that are product driven, and are focused on consumers. A business to business model won’t have as much success because of that.

A site such as Biznik will be much better for a business to business model. Because the site is a business resource, it’s ideal for businesses that primarily work with other businesses. The site is entirely focused on those kind of interactions, and the strategy for using that site will differ from you use Facebook as a result. The audience, and even the design of a site can dictate the kind of interactions you have on that site.

As you spend time on each site, put some thought toward how you will use each site and what your strategy will be. Using twitter to update your linkedin account will only work if you are sending professional updates. Otherwise some of your status updates could be inappropriate because they don’t match the purpose for using Linkedin.

Your intermediate strategy is to learn what the rules and purpose is for each social networking site you want to be on. There’s no strategy that fits all sites and no one size fits all level of interaction. By learning what is acceptable on each site, you can tailor your strategy towards using each site successfully, instead of trying to use a blanket strategy that could alienate others.

Remember that people want engagement and interaction. They want to know that you are genuinely interested in what they are doing. Your strategy for each site needs to account for this in order to successfully use social media on those sites to engage with people. So take some time to learn the rules and norms for each site and know when to break or bend those rules, but also how to use them.

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

The ability to translate social media conversations into sales is an important part of your social media strategy, but its also a part that can be frustrating because social media takes an indirect approach to the process. First you have to build a relationship, and also show up as a credible resource and expert. Next you have to continue to be consistent in your efforts, and through all of it you have to avoid coming across as a sales person who’s just trying to get money from people.

The key to converting social media conversation into sales really involves learning something every successful sales person knows. You’ve got to identify the need a person has and spend time getting to know the person. All of this involves recognizing that the true process of converting social media conversation to sales is based on patience, seeing people as more than just numbers, and really continuing to offer value to those same people. Learn what they need.

A recent example comes to mind. I’d written an article for Biznik on how to take your networking to the next level. After I wrote the article, I also made it a point to send private messages to everyone who commented, as well as answering their comments in the post itself. In one case, I got into several email exchanges with one of the readers. Before long we got to a point where he wanted to do a free consultation with me. From there we created a business relationship. That couldn’t have happened If I hadn’t spent time getting to know him and what his needs were.

A lot of businesses want ROI with social media, but they don’t understand that investment isn’t just time or learning technology. It’s learning to engage your audience, show them you care, and show them that you want to know more about what they have to say. ROI can only occur when your audience feels taken care of, when you are willing to invest in them enough, for them to feel that they have a return on investment with you.

Originally published at Magical Experiments. Please leave any comments there.

I ‘m reading a book called Eyes Wide Open by Mariana Caplan, which is a book about cultivating discernment on the spiritual path. A lot of what she focuses on is  cultivating that discernment with spiritual teachers. My own response to that has been the realization that I’ve mostly been my own spiritual teacher. I was blessed early on with getting a mentor who showed me the fundamental problem with spiritual teaches: They can never live up to the hype they put out about themselves.

So I tend to think of myself as my own spiritual teacher, and I know I have a lot of flaws, so I don’t put myself on a pedestal, because I’d fall off pretty quickly. Then again, I’m not really interested in enlightenment either. What I’m really interested in is cultivating a genuine relationship with the universe and the people I’m connected to and myself. And I don’t know how enlightened that is, or how enlightened it needs to be. What I do know is that while spirituality is, in some ways, becoming even more of a prevalent issue in peoples lives, it’s important to recognize how much each of us has to own our spiritual integrity and experience, instead of relying on the vision of someone else.

In fact, it’s why I’m skeptical of religion, but also the popularity of any given author who claims to channel some vision of a spirituality reality. I don’t doubt the veracity of that vision as it applies to that person, but I do have doubts when other people eat it up without really applying anything in the way of critical thought or awareness. Asking, for instance, What in this spiritual message speaks to me and what doesn’t is a good start.

I am my own guru, with all of his mistakes and flaws, spiritual insights and compassion. I don’t want to be anyone else’s, because when a person tries to give me that kind of mantle s/he is really trying to abdicate responsibility for his/her own spiritual integrity and journey. And while I am honored if you find some value in my words and ideas, I think its even better when you have some of your own. Find your own spiritual identity. Meditate, pray, etc., but most importantly think for yourself and question always the beliefs you have, if only to give yourself a chance to critically explore them.

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

I was reading Chris Brogan’s blog recently and he complained about a bad customer service experience with Timberland shoes. What interested me most was that a representative of the company got on and apologized to Chris Brogan. It showed me how influential someone who is well known can be. He blogged about it, and got the company to apologize. Would the same treatment have happened with a lesser known person? Probably not.

While it’s true that companies are recognizing the value of customer service and monitoring what happens on social media, it’s also true that many times what will get a response is someone who has a position of influence or power critiquing the issue. Does this sound cynical? Perhaps, but it’s also realistic. It’s not so much how often you say something, as it is who says it, that determines if a company will respond.

Social media customer service is influenced by either numbers, enough people complain, so someone does something, or by the influence of one person to effect those same numbers. Chris Brogan is pretty influential in social media. People trust what he has to say. Even when they might disagree with them, there will still be the simple matter that they responded to him. That response gives him influence and that influence consequently is what will attract the interest of a company. People who want companies to provide better customer service via social media need to recognize that so that they either get the numbers or find someone with enough influence to attract those numbers and a response from the company.

Companies will respond when there’s enough attention brought to the issue that needs to be resolved…and the reason they will respond is because it matters to them to make sure that they handle the issue and have the support of the people. In that sense, customer service is ultimately dealing with a kind of mob mentality. If enough people are unhappy, some kind of response must occur in order to rectify the situation, and as much as possible, regain the favor of the people who were made unhappy by the situation.

Chris Brogan also acknowledges this issue of being an influencer. As an authority his words have weight with a lot of people. And this applies to anyone who does a lot to become visible to people. As you become more visible to people and as you what you write resonates with them, your influence spreads and what you say can have an impact on a company for better or worse, as well as with the people who are influenced by you.

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

After you’ve spent some on social media, it’s important to start analyzing how you are using social media as well as what the impact of that use is on your web traffic and business success. This step is important because you need to determine if your basic strategies for social media are working, as well as what sites are proving most useful for you.

To do this analysis, it helps to have a web analytics tool on your website such as google analytics or clicky. These will allow you to track where your traffic is coming from when they come to your website. But web analytics is just the start. You will also want to note on which sites you get the most responses, as well as how people are responding. For Twitter you will want to use Klout, which will allow you to see your analytics for Twitter. Unfortunately other social networking sites don’t have analytics, but you can still keep track by noting how people are responding to your posts.

For example, when I post a discussion to a linkedin group, part of how I rate the effectiveness of that strategy is by checking my blog for the amount of traffic that came to it as a result of the discussion post. I also check and see how many responses come in (and make sure I respond to them). Finally if people want to connect with me as a result of the post, that also tells me I’vve had an impact.

Because different social networking sites have different strategies, what works on one may not be the same as what works on other. As you learn how to use each site and interact with people, you’ll also to start learn what strategies work and which ones don’t. Keep track of each strategy and note the kind of responses you get. If you don’t get the response you want, then experiment.

At the same time you need to recognize how much time and effort you are willing to put into a site, if its not producing an impact that’s useful. Some social media sites aren’t going to fit your strategies, no matter what you do. Some are poorly designed and trying to use them is more of a headache than its worth.

Ultimately to analyze your social media presence, you need to look at your presence and where you spend time and what responses you get. Develop strategies that cultivate those responses and build relationships. Keep track using analytics, but if necessary keep a spreadsheet as well with each social networking site on it and track by number the responses and interactions you get. By continually keeping track you’ll be able to determine what sites are working with your social media strategy.

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

When I give talks on social media to small businesses, the following social media myths are brought up, so I thought I’d discuss those myths.

It’s just a Fad

Some people think social media is just a fad. That it’ll eventually go away, or be something that people will grow out of. This is a myth. The reality is that social media has already been around since the early 2000’s. People have been using sites such as Linkedin and MySpace since the early 2000’s. The advent of Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites also is putting increasing momentum into this phenomenon. Finally, because social media sites can be accessed via mobile phones, they are increasingly becoming integrated into our daily lives.

I’m local and don’t want my information all over the internet

Many people worry that if they get on social media sites their information will be less secure or go all over the place. In the case of small  businesses they worry that they’ll get contacted by people from across the U.S., which aren’t useful clients for them.

If you have an email address or bank online or pay bills online, your information is already out there and social media won’t significantly alter that. If as a small business your main focus is only to interact with local clients, it would still be a mistake to not use social media. The majority of my social media contacts are local ones, in large part because the network you connect with is the one you already are in touch with. Social media allows you to stay more visible to that network and connect with people they know as well. Most of those people are local.

This isn’t to say that you won’t get some contacts who aren’t local, but even then you may actually be able to help them out, and that can be beneficial for your business as well as for yourself.

I don’t have time for social media

Many businesses will claim they don’t have time for social media, but if they don’t have time for social media, they likely don’t have time to run a business either. Social media is part of the marketing and branding for your business. If you can’t make time for that activity, then you probably don’t have time to connect with your clients or prospects, or do the other activities necessary to build relationships that lead to business. Whether you like it or not, social media is essential to building relationships with other people, and to marketing.

There are no doubt other myths and reasons businesses tell themselves that they can’t do social media. But while they do this, they also put themselves further and further behind on learning the technology and capitalizing on the conversation. They give their competition an edge in terms of letting them get on social media and start using it to connect to prospects.

Social media here to stay. It’s not going away…it’s not a fad, and it is something businesses must adapt to, in order to fully reach out and connect with their clients.