This post originally appeared on the Harvard Business Review.

Push through the discomfort: It’s tempting to stop (or never start) using social media when you realize that you are opening yourself up to the world in a new way: “you mean people can write whatever they want on our wall?” But, often rewards await those who push through the discomfort of the unknown. You can always change your settings if you encounter a problem, but in the mean time you may be surprised at the trust that is built with your customer base if you are open and willing to talk about the good and bad sides of your businesses. Where else are you able to hear what people are really thinking? Use it to your advantage to build better products and better service.

This gem comes from Mike Knutson in Lessons Learned: Using Social Media to Support Entrepreneurship in Rural Communities on the Canadian Rural Research Network site. And it describes probably the most important success factor in any social media effort.

Mike’s post reminded me of a physical therapy session I was in the other day. I exercising for my shoulders when a muscle in my head started to hurt. “If it’s just uncomfortable, let’s keep going,” the physio said. “But if it’s painful, you should stop.”

A physiotherapist would call what I felt in my head “referred pain” — the parts of your body that hurt are the weak parts that can’t cope with knots, tension or dysfunction elsewhere (e.g. the pain in your neck caused by the tension in your mousing shoulder).

Your social media “pain” is similar: it’s caused by knots in your customer service, operations, HR or other area. Social media is just the place you feel it. If you’re getting smacked down publicly for your missteps, taken to task on YouTube for your poor products or lousy customer service, suffering organizational implosion from the overtime hours that are going into your Twitter presence, then maybe it’s time to stop what you’re doing.

Any of those pain points signal that you are not just going too hard too fast, but that you may be using the wrong muscles. Your social media relations team can’t overcome an outdated brand or tone-deaf advertising; your clever blog posts can’t disguise a fundamentally flawed value offering; your tweeting won’t be sustainable unless you’re prepared to expand or reallocate your staff resources. Most of the actual pain that organizations suffer from entering social media isn’t from social media: it’s from all the other organizational problems that social media simply begins to reveal.

But all that just speaks to pain. Mike talks about a different creature: social media discomfort. You will feel discomfort when you talk in a personal voice on your company blog, rather than The Official Voice found in press releases, and when you let your customer publicly declare their dissatisfaction with you. The Facebook wall, as Mike points out, is an invitation to discomfort.

For most of us, this discomfort often boils down to one question: “What if people say mean things about me?” Forget “what if.” People will say mean things about you, and it will be annoying and uncomfortable. But you should do what my physical therapist said I should do: Keep going. Respond to the substance of those comments (if they’re offered with anything other than violent or profane hostility); ask a colleague or two to read your response before you post, to make sure your discomfort isn’t leaking in and making you sound hostile. Then step back and see what happens: I’ll bet that after three or four cycles of responding to negative comments, you’ll discover that the discomfort doesn’t cause pain. You’ll probably even find that living with it, and responding to it, makes you more accessible to — and more liked by — your key audiences.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between discomfort and pain. In my physio session this morning, I decided to keep going; the discomfort was tolerable, and working through it helped my muscles get a little stronger. Tomorrow I’ll know that I can handle the uncomfortable sensation, and I’ll stand just a little bit taller. Work through your social media discomfort, and your organization can stand taller, too.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

What’s it like to be on a panel with rock stars Peter Shankman, Julien Smith, Chris Brogan and Russell Bowers? For all who have wondered, I can answer that question with a video — at the same time, answering a question that came in on Twitter during today’s panel at Mount Royal University’s Social Media Shift:

Everyone is dying to know what is on @awsamuel head. #MRUShift

5/10/2012 12:29 pm via Twitterrific for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@levindixon

Levin Dixon

The object on my head was a Looxie Camcorder: a tiny, over-the-ear videocamera that records a continuous loop of video, and lets you view or share clips by connecting to your iPhone. I got mine this past weekend as a birthday present, so I decided to take it for a spin this afternoon. A lot of the footage consists of me looking at my iPhone to make the camera work (!), or the screen of my iPad as I tried to send a mid-panel tweet:

This video gives you a bird’s eye view of my comments on the phenomenon of hashtag diffusion  – the spread of hashtags from Twitter to e-mail, text messaging and even bathroom graffiti. The clip also captures a follow-up comment from Chris.

SpeakerCam from Social Media Shift

“Speaker Cam” is hardly my best use case for the Looxcie. I’m hoping that if I can get in the habit of wearing it regularly, and leave it in continuous loop mode, I’ll be able to capture and share the moments that shed life on the joys of life on- and offline.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Today’s practice: Write your thank yous instead of abbreviating them.

Last night, I caught myself on the verge of a profound etiquette violation. A colleague had replied quickly and helpfully to an email I had sent, asking for information, and my breezy reply ended “tx”. She had taken the time to answer my question in the middle of her busy day, and I couldn’t spare the  extra 2 seconds to type out the full “thank you”.

That’s the kind of violation that reminds me of the relationship between good manners and human decency. Saying “thank you” isn’t just a formality: it’s an actual expression of appreciation, an acknowledgement of the effort or kindness someone else has shown.

It’s easy for the fast pace of life online, or the slow pace of typing on an iphone, to erode our commitment to those deeply meaningful human courtesies. Especially when so many of us have bought into the idea that we should be sending pro forma thanks for each retweet or mention — a practice that cheapens the thank you, and pressures us into condensing it so that it fits in 140 characters.

If you’re writing a tweet, it is fine to embrace the “tx” — so that you have room for a more personalized acknowledgement. “Tx for the lovely tweet — it was so delightful to hear how my post helped you plan your new (very cool) campaign)” is a well-used abbreviation. “Tx for the RT” is meaningless, and training you in the bad habit of the empty thank-you.

And if you’re on email, the only time to use “tx” is as a sign-off (in place of “yours” or “xo”). As an expression of gratitude, it’s more of an f-you than a thank-you. As in, I’m too busy, or your contribution was too trivial, to warrant real appreciation.

A real thank-you deserves all eight letters. Maybe the practice of typing them will inspire you to offer even more articulate appreciation for the people who are helping you at work and beyond.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

This post originally appeared on the Harvard Business Review.

Pinterest is the social media darling of the month, growing madly and reported to be driving more traffic to third-party sites than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn put together.

Think of Pinterest as a hybrid between a photo-sharing service like Flickr and a social bookmarking service like delicious: on Pinterest, you “pin” images the way you bookmark URLs with Delicious. You can curate these images into thematic “pinboards” and follow other people’s pinboards to find inspiration or images you want to “repin.”

From the beginning Pinterest has seemed like it should be useful to marketers, and the hype has only amplified companies’ desire to be there and figure out who’s the Pinterest customer and how to reach her (so far, it’s predominantly her).

I’m here to help, because I am that customer. I’ve been an active Pinterest user for over a year, experimenting with how to use this new kind of social networking service, and watching how others use it. Here are some anecdotal observations from my year with Pinterest.

Shopping: Both compulsive shoppers and anti-shoppers who aim to get in and out of stores fast like and use Pinterest. I’m in the former camp. I created a Pinboard for my quest for the perfect grey boots, and used it to poll my friends on the best option; I’ve now got Pinboards going for Lego storage options and the perfect computer case. While Pinterest makes shopping even more fun for enthusiasts like me, Chris Tackett of The Atlantic points out that it can also reduce their actual volume of purchases by providing form of virtual acquisition that displaces a certain amount of consumption. Sometimes, just looking at all those pretty grey boots is enough.

What it means for your business: Target Pinterest users’ experience of shopping as a creative process, not just a potential transaction, by making your online presence as pleasurable as it is functional. Product photography matters more than ever; you want your prospective customers to pin your hot-looking products, and you may want to engage with the people who’ve pinned your products to see if you can nudge them toward a purchase.

Bonding: Pinterest nudges online shopping into something more like the real thing: a social experience shared by friends. When I joined Pinterest it was still an invitation-only site, so I used my invitations on the friends and colleagues with style I admire or share. Like many groups of Pinterest users, we follow each others’ pins to help each other find the kinds of clothes, shoes and home items we love. It’s the online equivalent of that age-old female bonding ritual, the shopping spree. Marketers might note the opportunity to foster and track the social influence on purchasing, but they should also see an opportunity to build on this experience and reinforce the social experience created here, just as retail stores pipe in music and offer snacks and other freebies to bring groups of friends into the store.

What it means for your business: Busting in on a circle of Pinterest pals to hawk your wares is not unlike sticking your head into the dressing room where two girlfriends are discussing whether that dress makes her butt look good. Better to send your pro-bonding signals from afar, perhaps with a product comparison page that encourages users to pin their top choices so their friends can help them choose what to buy.

Collaboration: It’s not all about shopping, though. I’ve also found Pinterest to be a powerful collaboration tool for both work and home. At work, I’ve used it build a shared file of visual inspiration for an ebook design project. At home, we used it to help find a fence that also appealed to our neighbours. By inviting other people to contribute to a board, Pinterest users can collaborate in way that is easier than Google Docs, more fun than Delicious, and quicker to scan than either one.

What it means for your business: Recognize that a single pinboard may reflect the tastes or interests of several contributors. If your customers are frequently comparing a similar set of products, consider collecting all those products on a single Pinboard.

Inspiration: Many pinboards are highly personal, eclectic or quirky collections of images that users find exciting or inspiring. When I joined Pinterest, I decided it was finally time to create a “vision board,” a widely-praised technique for visualizing your professional and personal goals; I collected representative images on a single pinboard that I occasionally look at to reinforce my focus. I now use a separate pinboard to create social media infographics that can inspire my research. For users like me, images that inspire are as pin-able as images that represent what we plan to buy or wear.

What it means for your business: Engagement and branding! Create inspirational custom graphics for your blog posts or website that will appeal to your customers or clients. Cultivate your own well of inspiration by identifying the major areas where you want to develop your professional skills, and curate pinboards of inspiring images or examples that will push your own practice forward.

I try a lot of social media tools, but only a handful become part of my daily workflow the way Pinterest has in the past year. That’s why I’m convinced it’s here to stay, and why you should start using it to target your customers in the year ahead.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Today’s practice: Think about the social media experience you want to have, not the brand you want to build.

About three years ago, in a conversation that ultimately led to me shifting gears and joining Emily Carr, the very wise Morgan Brayton passed along a pivotal piece of career advice: Focus on the experience you want to have, not the form you think it should take.

That advice has been on my mind the past few weeks as I have worried over this recently-neglected blog. Life has been roaring along at a pace that has precluded daily updates, and I’ve been feeling terribly guilty about it — as well as selfishly nostalgic for the opportunity to think by blogging.

So today I’m taking Morgan’s wisdom to the web, and thinking about the experience I want to have with my blog — the experience of sharing thoughts in a form that fosters conversations with people who are thinking about similar questions — rather than obsessing over my structural commitment to a daily mega-post.

Stay tuned to see how it goes.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Why and how should CEOs use Twitter? That was the focus of my conversation with Michael Castner yesterday, on the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Wrap. You can listen to that interview below, or read the Wall Street Journal story we were riffing off: Better Leadership with Social Media. In it, I present six ways busy execs can use social media to make their work easier and more effective — instead of seeing social media as one more thing on a crowded plate.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

If you struggle to keep your Facebook Timeline dynamic and engaging, without creating what is simply a mirror of your Facebook or LinkedIn presence, the solution may not lie with you, but with your friends.

For the past few months, I’ve been running a private experiment in crowdsourcing the contents of my Facebook Timeline. Any tweet that somebody else has favorited gets cross-posted to Facebook, so that my Facebook Timeline reflects not only my Facebook life but also my Twitter life. (Yes, they are different.) It turns out that a decent cross-section of my tweets get favorited by somebody (though not every tweet gets favorited, by any means) so this is a good way of selecting just the more interesting tweets for permanent archiving on Facebook. And to keep even those from being tedious, I have them set so that they are only visible to me, and not to any of my friends.

Or I should say, had them set. A few days ago, the service I was using to do that cross-posting (Twitterfeed) updated its Facebook posting service. This resulted in a handful of changes and glitches, including an error in how Twitterfeed handles privacy settings on Facebook: suddenly, the tweets I’d set to have posted privately were begin posted to my default privacy level (a relatively limited circle of 100 friends, but still a lot more than just me!)

While I had set up private cross-posting to avoid annoying my friends, the sudden appearance of these cross-posted tweets hasn’t caused any waves yet. On the contrary: a number of friends are liking and commenting on the tweets that are now appearing on my Timeline.

My serendipity could be your strategy. By using a service like favstar, which generates an RSS feed of any tweet that has been favorited, you can crowdsource the job of choosing which of your tweets, or which of your company’s, get cross-posted to other social networks. Use Twitterfeed to cross-post to Facebook or LinkedIn; or use If This Then That to pipe your favstar RSS feed into any one of wide range of blogs and social networks.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

How can you conceive the social media project that will enrich your production company, broadcast network, film or TV show? That was the core question I spoke to today at Women in Film & Television Toronto, as part of their International Women in Digital Media speaker series.

My talk walked them through the process of finding a great social media opportunity — a process I’ve previously described at some length in our documentation for the Concept Jam, the ideation process we’ve used at Social Signal. Thanks in part to Heidi Yang, who graciously agreed to turn her Rescue Mediums show into our live case study, the women in the room responded to my inspiration deck with a fantastic set of innovative ideas for using social media to extend, complement or provide an alternative to broadcast programming.

One goal of this presentation was to provide a roadmap for running this kind of opportunity identification process with their own teams or companies. For those who’d like to try, or who would simply like to review the examples I shared today, my slide deck is below.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

This post originally appeared on the site of the Harvard Business Review.

Who are you when you go online? That’s a question that goes way beyond how you feel in your own virtual skin, and affects how we perceive and relate to one another in the world of social media. I recently gave a TEDx talk based on my HBR post, 10 Reasons to Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life. When that talk appeared on sites like The Atlantic and Slate, the comment threads revealed that many people have already embraced their online lives as real — which is why we need to stop using the acronym IRL (In Real Life) to refer to the offline world.

But many wonder whether online people are real. Those who remain reluctant to engage online often blame the frequently confrontational, hostile, or even cruel tone of online conversation. That rudeness might be a sign that we aren’t our real selves online, but some kind of demonic creature that is unleashed by the computer. Or it might be a sign that we are all too real online, liberated to be our real selves by the remove or anonymity of online communications.

The truth, of course, is that people are their real selves online — but they make wildly divergent choices about which part of that real self they’re going to share and project. Some of us may get real by becoming angels: letting down our defenses, sharing our creativity and insights, or even our most personal experiences (sometimes by getting real anonymously). Others get real by becoming devils: losing the sense of diplomacy or offline inhibitions that restrain their brusqueness, narcissism, or cruel sense of humor.

Most worrying, people are often utterly aware of whether they’re being angels or devils. They read their outbound emails through the lens of their own good intentions, their clever tweets as funny rather than mean. Online, the human struggle to honestly understand your own strengths and weaknesses is intensified by the newness of our online customs and interactions.

Fortunately, we have some offline tools that are designed to compensate for our natural inability to see ourselves as others see us — most notably, the 360. The 360 is a widely-used HR and leadership tool in which a range of colleagues, friends, and family offer their different perspectives on your skills, talents, and character, to provide a 360-degree view of who you are.

While the 360 is sometimes criticized for its limitations, undertaking an online 360 offers a huge advantage over the way people usually evaluate their online personas (either not at all, or using a dubious indicator like Klout).

To get a clear picture of your online persona — and make no mistake, the variety of ways you communicate online define your online persona in the eyes of the people who know or follow you — send an online 360 to people who know you both on- and offline, as well as to people who know you online only. (Ideally you’ll also do a 360 of people who know you offline, so you can compare your online persona with your offline personality.)

Ask your respondents to provide a scaled assessment (1= never, 10=always) on the following:

1. Is polite and respectful in their emails, tweets, or other online communications
2. Provides useful or informative content in their online contributions or comments
3. Makes effective use of their time online, and responds to online communications (e.g. emails, messages), comments (on blogs or in Twitter mentions) and feedback in a timely and effective way
4. Provides constructive feedback and generous appreciation in their online comments, replies, and other online communications
5. Is transparent about their relationship to or financial interest in the brands, companies, and products they discuss online
6. Makes thoughtful and appropriate choices about which on- and offline communications channels to use for different purposes or in different circumstances, and inspires or encourages others to do the same
7. Builds online relationships that support their own work and their organization’s goals
8. Is an online leader within their field

Combine the results of your 360 into a single tally that gives you your average score on each indicator. When you look at your average numbers, don’t worry if you’re not a 10 on all eight indicators. What’s actually most useful is to look at the relative variance across each dimension: if you’re strong on content and leadership, but weaker on politeness or constructive engagement, that tells you your persona is recognized for expertise more than conversational style. If the same is true for your offline 360 — perhaps people describe you as a smart person who can be brusque in pursuit of a goal — then your online persona may be a very accurate and consistent reflection of who you are, period.

But if your personas diverge — if you’re known for your personal touch offline, but come off as a bull in a china shop online — you may want to think about how you can translate your face-to-face interpersonal skills into your online relationships, or conversely, how to speak so that the authority and expertise you hold online is also recognized by the colleagues who work down the hall.

Just like your offline personality, your online persona now forms a significant part of your professional identity. Understanding how those personas align, diverge, and complement one another is crucial to ensure your professional effectiveness, on- and offline.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

I am super in love with the Pinterest collection of social media infographics compiled by Irene Koehler. But the ever-growing excitement about social media infographics isn’t all good news: along with the gems there are some absolute crimes against infographicality.

Not so much on Pinterest (yet). But out there, waiting for you, ready to contribute absolutely nothing to your understanding of anything.

I’m not quite bitchy enough to name names or link links here. But I am bitchy enough to make my own non-infographic.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

This post is part of a short series that addresses the top questions at Web Fuelled Business, a training program for thousands of companies across the UK run by Doug Richard’s School For Startups. I’ve developed the social media component for this training.

One of the recurring questions at last week’s workshops was:

Should my domain name and Twitter handle match?

You want your Twitter handle, website URL and company name to be as close as possible, and you want them to be memorable and easy for someone to get right when they enter it into Google. If you have yet to buy a domain name for your business, try to find a domain that is also available as a Twitter handle — or is very closely related. For example, our company is Social Signal, our domain is www.socialsignal.com and our Twitter handle is @socialsignal.

How did we achieve this feat of co-ordination? We chose the name for our company based on the available URLs. (Back in 2005, there was more selection — and since we started before Twitter did, we had our pick of Twitter handles when the day came!) We knew our company was going to do only social web projects, so we wanted the word “social” in our name. (Awesome luck that Web 2.0 went out of style and the term “social media” became the industry standard instead.)

I’m in love with OneLook for just this kind of challenge. We used OneLook to search for phrases that included the word social, and then we narrowed the results to “common words and phrases only”. Then we went through the list, and whenever we found a phrase we thought *might* work, we popped over to our favourite domain registrar (these days it’s Hover.com) to see if the name we liked was available as both a .com and a .org (because we did a lot of work in the not-for-profit sector) and ideally also .ca (Canada) and .net.  Of the various phrases that were available at the time, “social signal” seemed like the best bet (strangely, it no longer appears in the OneLook search results.)

OneLook search results

DomainsBot search results

Another tool that is great for finding that perfect domain is DomainsBot. You can put any word into the DomainsBot search engine, and it will show you a list of all the available domains. You can choose a keyword related to your area of business or company name, and it will give you a list of all the possible domains you could register that contain that keyword or its synonyms and variants, which you can then register with the domain registrar of your choice. This is how I recently became the proud owner of bootseeker.com, so that I could create an affiliate marketing site that would allow me to monetize my compulsive boot shopping, until I stopped to ask what would a normal person do and realized a normal person wouldn’t expect  their Friday night boot-browsing to generate an income stream.

Once you’ve found an available domain you like, double-check that it’s available on Twitter before you register. If you can’t get a domain name and Twitter handle that match, you may want to think about a different name/Twitter pairing. And if you are a new company, or one that isn’t known by its corporate brand (maybe you’re known more by the names of your principals, or you’re a walk-in business) you might even think of changing the name of your company to align with an available domain name and Twitter handle.

Having a memorable domain name is much more important than having a matching Twitter handle — you can san always come up with a Twitter handle that is a slight variant, or even fun name, and use the “name” field in Twitter to enter your company’s URL so it shows up whenever people see one of your Tweets. (This is another reason you want your URL to match your company name.) When you are choosing your URL and handle try to:

• Get a .com domain, and if applicable the national domain for your country (like .ca or .co.uk) and possibly the .net and .org as well.
• Register possible typos or points of confusion — for example we own social signals.com and alexandrasamuels.com. Redirect all your extra URLs to your main site.
• Avoid domain names (or company names, or Twitter handles) that could be confusing if they are heard rather than read. That means puns are a bad idea. If you have a chance to do a radio interview that will let you promote your rabbit farm, you want people going to hareraising.com and not hairraising.com. Which is a great reason to put your website (and company) at RaisingRabbits.com instead.
• Keep your Twitter handle as short as possible since you will want people to “retweet” your posts, and the number of characters in your username (handle) will count against the 140-character maximum when they do.
• Google any name or term you are thinking of using as a domain and/or Twitter handle, so that you know if anybody else is already using it — even if they don’t have the domain, you want to be careful before exposing yourself to potential confusion. So think about whether the other people or organizations using that name could be confused with yours, or could siphon traffic from your site.

If all this sounds like a lot to consider when naming or branding your business, remember that great creativity often comes from great constraint. The fact that it can be hard to find a good URL — let alone an URL and Twitter handle — is hard to find means that you’ll have to think creatively about how to find your name and nice. The great news is that once you find your great name, you’ve made it easy for your customers to find you.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

The entrepreneurs who participated in the Web Fuelled Business program this week are pushing past the limits of physical location. They are bricks-and-mortar shops that are using the web to attract local customers who would never find them on the street; they are manufacturers and distributors who are using the Internet to enter the international marketplace; they are creators and service providers who are creating businesses that exist only thanks to the Internet, either because it allows them to do without a physical place of business, or to provide a core offering that is some kind of online service.

They have been assisted in this voyage by the extraordinary Doug Richard, a successful American entrepreneur who is now the UK’s leading guru of entrepreneurship. In the seven days I’ve spent listening to his presentations over the past year, I’ve watched Doug deliver the best advice I’ve even heard about how to hire, the most succinct summary of what you need to know about SEO, and the kindest dissections of a company’s core flaws. (Doug has a gift for ruthlessly identifying a startup’s essential vulnerabilities, but he manages to deliver the hard truth with the compassionate directness that doctors use deliver a terminal diagnosis.) He’s just as generous off-stage: the frank, thoughtful and surprising conversations we’ve had on the road have challenged my perspective on business and changed the way I think about my work. As a result, I’ve learned more this year about how to grow and run a business than I have in any other year since we launched Social Signal, and maybe more than I have in all seven years put together.

Web Fuelled Business puts Doug’s small business expertise in service to 3500 companies across Britain who are using the web to drive their growth. With the support of the UK government, Doug is delivering a day-long training in 15 cities across the UK; that day covers the first hour for each of five different courses, each of which has another 20-30 hours of material online. I was along to deliver the social media training, for which I’ve created the online course.

Also on the team was James Dening, an e-commerce whiz who launched his own consultancy after several years as Amazon’s Sales Director for Europe. James managed the rare feat of making room after room laugh their way through the job of setting up an e-commerce site and Amazon product listing — in a single hour, while also laying out the fundamentals of e-commerce strategy. If social signal.com or alexandrasamuel.com soon offer shopping carts that sell consulting or content by the hour or page, you can blame James: he left even the most service-y service businesses eager to think about how they could package their services and offer an on-site shopping car. There are a lot of things I could say about how much fun James is or how helpful he is as a translator (there were a lot more vocab gaps than I’d anticipated!), but let me just stick to the thing that will impress some of you the most: he runs his own micro-ISP! Apparently his village is so small that it didn’t have a high-speed Internet service provider, so he got his own backbone, servers etc. I am picturing this as a kind of 21st-century Downton Abbey situation, where the benevolent gentleman ensures the village has Internet access, the way he might once have ensured they have a doctor and a church.

If Doug, James and I were able to show a thousand entrepreneurs in three cities how they could transcend the physical limitations of a place-based business, it’s only because there was an extraordinary team liberating us from the job of thinking about anything beyond what happened on stage. For all that we live in a digital world, there are enormous complexities in doing something as tangible as delivering a day-long training in 3 different cities, 3 days in a row. Four amazing women conquered those complexities and put on highly polished events — events you would seriously think were produced by a full-time, dedicated event planning company — while also handling all the travel, food and psychological needs of Doug, James and me.

They were led by Megan Downey, who has project managed this entire process of developing and delivering a hybrid, on- and offline Web Fuelled Business Program. Her combination of poise and effectiveness led me to assume she must be a lot older than she looks. But she isn’t — my jaw dropped. Thank goodness for her maturity, because she actually had to save me from two potentially humiliating giggle fits. (Hey, you try keeping a straight face while extracting a microphone pack from the inside of a tight-fitting dress.)

Sarah Stephens handled all the travel organizing, from finding our awesome venues (a community church in Manchester, a theatre in Nottingham, and an Indian wedding hall in Birmingham) to lining up great, locally-run hotels (because part of the S4S commitment to entrepreneurship is to patronize local businesses). When I briefly lagged behind the crew on our departure from Birmingham, I had a brief moment of panic when I wondered how I would get back to London if lost them in the crowd. Then it occurred to me that I could look at the train ticket. That was when I realized how completely Sarah had wrapped me in a secure travel bubble, and how rough it would be to return to real life!

Fiona Russell is Doug’s social media goddess, who somehow managed to keep the @WebFulledBiz Twitter feed buzzing along while also managing the registration process — an epic challenge since it required complex coordination between live participant lists and online course registrants. A normal person who has just survived a gruelling fourteen-hour work day might nod politely when a social media smart-ass insists on brainstorming Twitter contests; Fiona not only responded with enthusiasm, but had the whole thing in place by the next early-morning start.

And then there is Fanny, who jumped into fill all the gaps. Fanny reminds me of the old joke about how Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels. You have not seen fortitude until you have witnessed this lady steer a load of conference gear down cobblestone streets, dressed to the nines and sporting 3-inch heels. (Would that I had taken a photo!) She dresses like a diva, but there isn’t a trace of diva in her, so I’m hoping she’ll join Pinterest and be my new trans-Atlantic fashion inspiration.

While our traveling band was enjoying the sight of faces lit up by the revealed potential of remarketing, Amazon storefronts and LinkedIn, the home team was doing the hard work of finalizing the online learning site. Vanessa Knight managed to bend time (or perhaps the minds of web developers) to go from platform selection to full implementation in just 6 weeks. No, I’m not kidding. And yet she still maintained her good graces when I asked for permission to do just one more set of tweaks to my course…and then another…and then another. At 2 a.m. This is the kind of thing that web developers just love.

If she managed to create six kick-ass e-learning experiences that quickly, it’s in part because she fantastic content to work with. No, I’m not talking about my own brilliant contributions. (Though in all serious, I’m incredibly proud of what I’ve put together for this course — I feel like it takes all this stuff I’m randomly spewing out at people 24/7, and turns into into an orderly, comprehensive and navigable plan for building a company’s social media presence.) The really cool parts are the videos created by Adam Tysoe, who got me from a plane to a drafty studio in early November, shot me for two hours, and miraculously produced these amazing explanatory videos that intercut my on-camera comments with related footage.

The live video is complemented by screencasts that were captured and edited by Chris Cunniff, who helped me create step-by-step video walkthroughs on everything from sales targeting with LinkedIn to tweet scheduling with HootSuite. I thought the latter was going to actually break my brain — try lining up multiple tabs with multiple instances of HootSuite, each showing a different set of timings for the same set of prospective tweets, without messing up the datestamp on a single tweet and thus throwing the narrative out of order. Chris met me at 9 am, and by 11 was into full Alex Brain Melt Emergency Panic Mode, but was never anything except incredibly kind and lovely. OK, maybe one thing — incredibly fun.

I’m torn between feeling incredibly lucky to work with a team that is so congenial and so accomplished, and feeling incredibly sad that I don’t get to hang out with them every day. I’m hoping that the Internet will transcend the limitations of our far-flung physical locations just as it transcends the geography of a thousand great, web fuelled businesses.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Social media can be a huge driver of traffic and revenue for a company with an effective web presence, but how do you actually go about setting up an effective site?

That’s what many of the entrepreneurs at Web Fuelled Business asked this week, in one form or another. In the past three days, I helped over a thousand companies in Manchester, Nottingham and Birmingham as they plunged into an intensive day-long workshop that tackled the most crucial aspects of using the web to drive business growth. And when the entrepreneurs took the floor, several questions came up again and again:

• Should my blog be on my web site or a separate site?
• Should my Twitter handle and website URL match up?
• What platform should I build my site on?

I was going to blog the answer to all three of these questions tonight, but then I remembered another question I got today: How long should a blog post be? I advised on 300-700 words, and since answering all three questions pushed me well over 1000 words, I’ve decided to take my own brilliant social media advice and split them up into a short series. So today I’m just tackling the first question.

Ideally, your blog should be integrated with the rest of your website, if for no other reason than your own sanity: why burden yourself with maintaining two sites? This will also make it easier for you to use related content from your blog on key pages in your web site, and to make other SEO-boosting interconnections between your blog and other parts of your site. Since a lot of blogging platforms (like WordPress) also let you create regular web pages, it just makes sense to do that as a single site if you’re starting from scratch.

Even if you build and/or host your blog and your website separately (e.g. you have a website built and hosted by a local web company, and a blog hosted on a site like WordPress.com) you should set them up so they share the same domain. In practice that often means setting up your blog on a separate subdomain. If your site is at www.yourcompany.co.uk then you can set your blog’s address to blog.yourcompany.co.uk — many blogging platforms offer the option to have a “custom URL” or “custom domain” as part of their service. On WordPress.com, you can set up a free blog, and it costs another $12 or $17 per year to have that blog on a custom URL (like blog.yourcompany.co.uk) rather than on the default of wordpress.com/yourWordPressusername

I’ll answer the other two questions over the course of the next week. It’s the least I can do, given how nicely everybody lined up to ask them. We Canadians may think of ourselves as an orderly people, but the Brits put us to shame.

Web Fuelled Business enterpreneurs lined up to ask questions of James Dening and me during our lunch break today.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

“I make leather armour.”

That’s a sentence I never expected to hear in this lifetime. In fact, until about 4:30 yesterday afternoon, I didn’t know what leather armour was. I din’t know that leather armour existed.

Leather armor, it turns out, is what you wear if you need to look like you just walked out of a medieval jousting tournament. If you work a desk job, that may not come up a whole lot, but it’s quite useful if you are making a movie or TV show about Ye Olde Lords and Ladies. There’s an even larger market of people who wear leather armour for LARP. (Live Action Role Playing — thanks James Dening for that translation.)

The armorer in question was one Julie Morrisroe of Cosmic Workshop in Manchester, England. Julie is a participant in the Web Fuelled Business program created by Doug Richard, for which I’ve developed the social media course. She’s already an active social media user with a lively Twitter presence, and she wanted to know how she could keep track of all her different social media activities.

No wonder social media works for Julie’s business. She’s in a defined and memorable niche, with customers who are hugely passionate about the part of their lives (role playing) that her products speak to.

If you feel like social media couldn’t possibly work as well in your organization, take a cue from Julie’s role-playing customers. When you create a Facebook page, or a Twitter account, or even a blog, you’re putting on a persona just as surely as if you were slipping into leather armour.

I’ll give you a moment to digest that image.

OK, still with me?

Here’s what I mean: yes, social media is all about authenticity — all about speaking to your audience in a sincere voice that feels human and immediate instead of organizational and message-boxed. But you still get to choose which sincere voice to use.  I’ve yet to meet a person who doesn’t have multiple facets to their personality, and that’s even more true of a company, agency or not-for-profit.

Leather purse by Cosmic Workshop

At the end of the day Julie gave me a lovely little purse she had made for herself the night before. This photo can’t do it justice, since it is made out of the nicest leather and manages to be both very pretty and very tough. It’s going to be the perfect container for my business cards, especially since it will allow me to reply to compliments with, “You like it? It was made for me by my leather armorer.”

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Do you have trouble making good on your New Year’s resolutions? Do you have a hard time staying focused on your most important work? Do you simply get overwhelmed by all the tasks on your plate, and worry about how to get them all done?

When I’m trying to stay on mission or on task, Excel is my best friend. That’s right: the lowly spreadsheet can be a powerful tool for accomplishing your goals. My latest blog post for the Harvard Business Review shares my 7-step process for achieving your goals, using Excel to help you focus on what matters.

Since this system is based on using a spreadsheet to sort and organize your tasks, I’ve created a multi-page Excel template that steps you through the process. Some parts of this process borrow from Stephen Covey (the idea of prioritizing tasks that regenerate you is analogous to his “sharpening the saw”) and David Allen (like the “someday/maybe” category). Most importantly, this process was inspired by my work with executive coach Jeff Balin, who kicked my ass until I finally had to acknowledge that simply putting something on my to-do list wasn’t enough to get it to done.

Download the Excel template: 7 steps to achieving your goals, and please feel free to share with friends.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online