How do you reward or motivate yourself to complete a task or project?

I’m tackling this question in one of my pieces for a forthcoming edition of Harvard Business Review’s Getting the Right Work Done. And I’d love your help.

Maybe you’re the kind of person who takes a five minute break every time you check something off your to-do list.

Maybe you’re the type who saves up for a big reward — like a day at the spa after you wrap a major project.

I’d love to hear your secrets to staying motivated at work, or the way you reward yourself for a job well done. You can leave your thoughts in the comment thread below, tweet them to me (@awsamuel) or drop me an email (alex [at] alexandrasamuel [dot] com).

Thanks in advance for your help!

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

At Simply Zesty, Lauren Fisher asks a provocative question: why happiness?

Her point is that social media is frequently challenged for its (purportedly) negative impact on happiness:

What’s also strange, is the idea that social media in some way owes us happiness, that this is what it was created for. Yet when we look at the whole reason the internet was developed in the first place, knowledge and collaboration were the motivators. It was to develop a medium that allowed academics to collaborate and share documents in a way that wasn’t previously possible. This has since developed wonderfully to allow connections all over the world, continually contributing to increased knowledge of the world. But that doesn’t mean it has to bring us happiness. Maybe these things are more important than happiness.

Perhaps social media has been forced to carry this load because it’s arrived on the scene at roughly the same moment as a newfound interest in happiness. From The Happiness Project to the burgeoning academic literature on the science of happiness, more and more people are taking a close look at how, exactly, we get to be happy. And we’re asking that question just as we’re also asking how, exactly, we want to be online.

As Lauren points out, there’s no intrinsic relationship between the two. Social media may make some of us happy, some of the time…but it can also make many of us stressed out, much of the time. That doesn’t mean we should dismiss its potential value as a catalyst for social change, as a provocation to new ways of thinking, or as an enabler of new forms of relationship — some of which make us happy, but some of which will have other kinds of value altogether.

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

In any migration, there are those who go ahead to settle the wilds, and those who linger to ensure that nothing gets left behind. While each of us now makes a different choice about how much of our lives to live online, those differences should not be turned into an ideological divide between “digital utopians” and “digital skeptics”, an economic divide between digital haves and have-nots, or a cultural divide between those who identify as early adopters and those who cling to the “real” world. We can’t throw the reluctant migrants off the boat and wish them luck in the old world.

That’s an excerpt from The Great Online Migration, which I published last week in the National Geographic Assignment Blog. I was delighted that Lou Lesko, who edits the blog for National Geographic, invited me to contribute. This post was something I have been writing in my head for quite a long time. I really hope you’ll read it.

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

At the Lace Market Hotel, Nottingham.

This is the sign on the inside of my hotel room door. I love the fact that a traditional door — you know, of the lock-and-key rather than magnetic card variety — now requires documentation.

It’s a great reminder that usability is entirely contextual. It’s not just about what a user has previously experienced, but what he or she might anticipate. And what people anticipate can change very quickly.

25 years ago — or was it 2.5 years ago? — hotel rooms always locked with a key. Fast forward, and this may be the first time a traveller has every received one of those delightful hotel keys with a fat leather tag. Or the traveller might be someone like me: old enough to remember keys, and old enough to have forgotten them.

What assumptions do you make about how visitors will know to unlock the front door of your site? And what assumptions do you make about how they’ll lock the door behind their data, their content or their identities?

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

Today’s practice: The next time you dive into a time-consuming tech challenge, stop to ask: what would a normal person do?

Saturday morning I woke up at 4 a.m. in preparation for my flight to London — and accompanying time zone readjustment — later that day. I looked forward to having eons of time to relax before the kids woke up, or at least to getting a bit of work wrapped up before hitting the road. Instead, I spent three hours converting, transferring and syncing video files so I could catch up on my favourite shows while in flight.

About two and half hours into this process — after reading up on iPad video formats, updating to the latest version of HandBrake, finding and tormenting a couple of video files, queuing up my video conversions, troubleshooting our home wifi network,  testing transfer options, clearing hard drive space on my Macbook, and syncing my iPad so it would be backed up before I started transferring video — I stopped to ask myself:

What would a normal person do?

You know, a normal person: somebody who doesn’t want to learn about video codecs, install new software, tweak IP settings or do any of the other little techie fidgets that geeks like me accept as part of the price of online living. I am told that the very device I wanted to watch video on — the iPad — is designed for these normals. Apparently many of them use it to watch video. And I’m guessing that none of them use Handbrake or bit torrent. So what’s their secret?

Imaging the normal person alternative is something that has occurred to me during many of my recent tech (mis)adventures.

Like when I found myself two days into learning the Google Maps API…because I wanted to make a photo album of our latest family vacation. Surely, normal people make photo albums without learning any APIs whatsoever.

Or when I nearly clicked “buy” on a $200 WordPress Plugin that would let me integrate Amazon affiliate links….so I could monetize my compulsive shoe shopping. Surely, normal people indulge their shopping habits without expecting a direct ROI.

Or when I spent 10 hours trying to create a bootable dupe of my Windows netbook’s hard drive….before turning it into a “hackintosh”. Surely, normal people who want a Mac, buy a Mac.

Thinking about a normal person would do when confronted by a particular obstacle has proven to be a useful check on my habit of diving deep into a tech challenge without asking how much of my time it’s really worth. Unfortunately, by the time I think to ask the question, I’m usually several hours into the process, and so many steps past what a normal person would take on that I can no longer fully imagine pursuing the normal person path.

From what I see, the normal person path is usually one of the following:

1. Pay money for it. Instead of doing my 8-step video download, conversion and syncing process, a normal person would just buy the damn show on iTunes.
2. Take it or leave it. A normal person would use the digital photo book software as designed, even if it didn’t offer the ability to make a map of where all the photos were taken. If she didn’t like the way that photo book looked, she just wouldn’t use the software. Modifying it to make it work the way she wanted wouldn’t be a viable alternative.
3. Don’t even think about it. A normal person wouldn’t try to do half the stuff I end up wasting time on. It just wouldn’t occur to a normal person that you might want to turn your PC into a Mac.

Of course, the normal person path has its limitations. Much of the knowledge I have to offer my clients and colleagues is acquired in the course of attempting some time-wasting, non-normal endeavour: just a week after I “wasted” the weekend learning all about Google Maps, a client asked me to mock up a web app that was a perfect use case for a photo+maps combo, and I knew just how to do it.

More profoundly, my fundamental ease with technology comes from a willingness to knock my head against a wall until I finally accomplish what I’m after. Sure, I may spend a lot more time than the task really warrants, and I may not always prevail.

But most of the time my efforts are guided by a simple philosophy: Big woman, small computer. I’m bigger, so I will make the computer bend to my will.

For some reason, normal people don’t make the assumption that being physically larger than a laptop or desktop means that you will prevail in a battle of wills. While they may miss out on the opportunity to test and strengthen their tech skills, they make up for it with sheer efficiency. They can crank out a lot of wax tablets (or more realistically, Word documents) in the time it takes me to set up an RSS aggregator that automagically creates a single web page with a highly customized content structure.

The normal person lifestyle isn’t for everyone. If you get a rush from making a computer or website do something that you weren’t sure it could do, you’ll continue to spend lots of time on tasks that no normal person would undertake.

But if you’ve ever found yourself wondering where the day is gone, only to realize you’ve spent it delving deep into some tech-low challenge you’d have been better-off pursuing in a low-tech way, it’s worth adding the normal person mentality to your repertoire. The more often you practice, the more quickly you’ll stop to ask: What would a normal person do?

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

Today the Canadian government announced its intention to table legislation that will bring Canada’s Elections Act into the 21st century. Tim Uppal, the junior minister for democratic reform, tweeted today to share the news. That’s right: next election night, Canadians will be able to discuss election results with all the immediacy, humour and clarity that we bring to tweeting about a hockey game or facebooking the latest episode of Project Runway.

This news was particularly welcome after seeing the extraordinary conversation that was captured last election night on tweettheresults.ca, a website I created with Darren Barefoot last April. Darren and I whipped up the site to track the outpouring of debate and resistance over the prospect of censoring election night tweets, Facebook updates and blog posts. (And a big shout-out to Rad Geek Charles Johnson, who upgraded his awesome FeedWordPress plugin to make TTR look pretty!)

As I wrote at the time,

To think that social media users will refrain from sharing election night tweets is at best naive. Even if we could get them to stop tweeting, would we want them to? At a time when online political discussion is held up as the exception to a general decaying of political engagement, it would seem a shame to squelch the kind of lively, engaged and even meaningful conversation that could emerge on election night.

Today’s news may do more than ensure that Canadians feel welcome to engage with an electoral process in whatever medium feels meaningful and appropriate to them. With any luck, it also shows that we are finally ready to embrace the Internet as a legitimate space for political dialogue, and to recognize these online conversations as very real indeed.

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

Tonight I coined the term “intention span” to refer to the amount of time that passes between intending to work on something and actually starting work.

Intention span: The amount of time that passes between intending to work on something and actually starting to work on it.

1/12/2012 5:16 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@awsamuel

AlexandraSamuel.com

“I’ve got to reply to that Twitter mention,” you think. “It’ll only take a minute.”

“I forgot to post that photo on Facebook!” you suddenly remember. “I have to do that before I can get down to work.”

“I owe her a comment!” you realize. “How rude it would be to overlook that post.”

If social media is your professional responsibility as well as your creative, social or expressive outlet, those rationales are even more compelling. Taking care of your social media outreach or replies is part of your “brand management” or “reputation management”.

But the reason you care about your brand or reputation is because it helps you do your work in the world. You know, the work that is beckoning to you from that Word document or Excel spreadsheet or desk full of paper, just behind the window with all the shiny tweets.

Social media will wait for you. And when you come back to it, there will be even more for you to read, share and engage with.

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

Ever since it was announced that Blockbuster would close its remaining stores, I’ve wondered what would happen at the corner of Broadway and Blenheim. A wifi-wielding coffee shop? A wildly out-of-place H&M? An all-you-can-eat, gluten- and sugar-free cake buffet?

Our local Blockbuster was the source of many fond memories — and many late fees, until we finally concluded that the marginal advantage of watching a movie on Blu-Ray was outweighed by the virtue of renting on iTunes, and never having to worry about returning another movie. Obviously, we were not alone: the demise of the local video store is the flip side of the rise of iTunes, Netflix, Amazon and of course, bittorrent.

When technology removes something from our physical or cultural landscape, it’s usually to make room for something new. That new thing may represent a huge leap forward: every time I rent a movie on iTunes I marvel at the instant gratification of watching the movie almost as soon as I pick it. No walk to the store, no wait until it finishes downloading.

The new thing could involve some loss, too. I horrified a couple of colleagues this week with the revelation that I virtually never go out to movies. There aren’t that many movies that are worth $100, I said, which is what it costs two people to see a movie once you factor in the cost of a babysitter. My colleagues didn’t argue, but reflected on what you miss when watching on even the biggest home screen: the experience of conviviality, the sense of an event.

When the old thing disappears, it’s often before we’ve fully made up our minds about the new thing. Is it a gain? A loss? A bit of both?

And sometimes, the old thing dies before the new thing has a chance to appear. Blockbuster closed down months ago, but I am still waiting to see what comes next.

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

It’s time to stop apologizing for your life online.

That was the central message of my talk at TEDx Victoria in November, now on YouTube. From valuing your online attention to taking your online creativity seriously as real art, I argue that we can only unlock the potential of the Internet when we stop talking about “IRL” — In Real Life. Instead, we need to embrace our online lives as part of our real lives; as RLT — Real Life Too.

This talk expands on my blog post for HBR. Watch it here, and find out the story behind the picture above (by LMS Photography,) which is my new favourite photo of me ever.

My talk was part of an extraordinary day that included inspiring presentations by Norma Cameron, Dave Morris, Victoria Westcott, Jim Tanaka and Raffi Cavoukian (yes, that Raffi) among many others. I was honoured to part of the line-up, and hope you’ll check out all of the terrific TEDx talks now online.

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

Today’s practice:  If you haven’t created something lately, try creating something online.

At our all-university kick-off meeting for Emily Carr‘s spring semester, President Ron Burnett talked about the university’s work in terms of materiality; in terms of the work, thinking and process that goes into bringing actual artifacts into being.

In an art and design university, many (but by no means all) of the material artifacts are physical objects like paintings, sculptures or furniture. But materiality can be a property of the digital too.

Friends and colleagues have frequently expressed their envy that my work involves actually making something tangible: web sites, online communities and social media presences. Projects like Participedia, Eat Street and Learning, Freedom and the Web, which I’ve been privileged to contribute to at the SIM Centre, create digital artifacts you can see and use even if you can’t directly touch them. Projects like NetSquared, Tyze and Untape, which I worked on at Social Signal, turned into resources that people use every day.

We live in a world in which more and more people are service or information workers, whose productive output is often transient or intangible. In this world of impermanence, work that yields some kind of durable, visible outcome — work with some kind of materiality — provides satisfactions that are increasingly unfamiliar, and increasingly enviable.

The personal and creative use of social media, which makes it ever easier to create and share words, pictures or even entire communities, makes the experience of materiality available to people whose income may never involve creating anything more material than a memo.  Even (or especially) if your work is entirely conceptual, you can explore the joys and lessons of materiality through social media. You can create something tangible — an image gallery,  a magazine, a community of like-minded people — without ever writing a line of code.

Art and design schools exist because people, businesses and societies need both the experience and results of material production. Digital production makes that kind of materiality available to more people. If you long to create something real, try creating something virtual.

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

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