Working from home

courtesy static5.businessinsider.com

If you’re getting into this line of work thinking you can just hang out all the time in your jammies at home to work, you’re going to have a bad time.

If you aren’t engaged and productive when you work at home, you will a) have a hard time getting work done and/or b) have a tough time advancing in your career. Let’s look at the pitfalls to watch out for if you work from home.

a) You will have a hard time getting work done.

Check out this video that describes why it can be hard to work at home:

• you will be distracted by your life. You will clean house, make dinner, clean up cat vomit, pick up doghair tumbleweeds, eat, sleep late (because you can work into the night, right?), etc. You can develop bad habits fast. You will get lazy.
• people you work with won’t send you what you need. They will forget about you and why your work is important, and – most importantly – why it benefits them to communicate with you. You will lose touch and become a poor spokesperson for the organization.

b) You will have a tough time advancing in your career.

• you won’t know the people, the culture, the brand well enough to speak for them. You need to have a pulse on what’s going on.
• you will miss opportunities for the message. People downplay the role of “the watercooler,” but that is where you get the real story from the customer service reps on how consumers view the product because they are the ones who hear from the people who buy the stuff. That’s where you pull the subtle nuances you need to craft your message.
• you will miss opportunities for your career. It’s not just that you are “out of site, out of mind” for that promotion. It’s that you don’t know what your boss REALLY values and is looking for. Sure, you’ve got great organic engagement numbers, but is that what your boss truly values? (“value” is often different from “metric” as a measurement of good work and I’ll blog about that at another time)

I’m not saying that you have to sit in a cube, sucking down coffee and pecking away at your keyboard, heck no! This job is about relationships and you have to develop relationships at work to be successful at your job and in your career. When you do work from home, you have to go the extra distance to develop and maintain those relationships.

If you have the latitude on your work schedule, set times for when you’re in the office and stick to those hours. Make sure folks know when those hours are. If there is a deviation you must be sure people know it. Add your contact schedule in email salutations, include your contact info and monitor your contact devices constantly.

You can work from home and be productive and engaged, just remember that you may have to compensate for not being physically present in your work relationships.

What have your experiences been in working from home?

I’d love to hear from you!

-Tina

Social Media is a 24-Hour Gig. Can you hack it?

Courtesy under30CEO.com

You’ve gotta sleep sometime!

I’ve learned the hard way that you can’t be on 24/7. Since I can’t be the 24-hour-a-day Social Media Mama I’d like to be, I’ve found a couple of easy hacks to help me get the message out and stay engaged around the clock.

I’ve taken a tip from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. It’s the idea of putting all your big rocks (in this case, your message) into your glass (your schedule) before it gets filled with other stuff. Trust me, it will get filled with other stuff if you don’t take control of your schedule and get the important things scheduled first.

Since you have a finite amount of time, attention, and space to communicate in, make sure you have the important messages out there first. I do this by scheduling my posts at least a week into the future.

I figure out what is the most important message/s to get out this week and schedule those posts first, typically one post a day at different times. Those are my big rocks. No matter what goes on in the world, this is what must be communicated.

Then I have space in between those rocks. I can play in this space. This is where I bring in breaking news, polls, funny videos. I can engage fully and respond quickly when I’m not worrying if I’ve fully communicated my message/s. I can focus.

Zack Levine via HudsonHorizons.com

To schedule posts, I prefer HootSuite to any other scheduling options out there. It’s fairly comprehensive; you can schedule & monitor Twitter, FB, Google+, LinkedIn, WordPress and others. It’s also easy to manage many accounts in one place. There is a free version for up to five networks. I highly recommend tinkering with it if you aren’t already in HootSuite. Of course, they do have an app for smartphones and tablets too.

I also use the smartphone and tablet apps for the various networks I’m on. So far, I’ve set my notifications only for retweets, shares, comments, new followers. This makes it manageable for me to respond and engage immediately without much negative feedback from friends and loved ones. (Stay tuned for my blog about monitoring digital media 24/7 while having analog relationships.)

What do you use to hack your social media posting schedule? Are you managing it all or crumbling under the pressure?

Speaking of being under pressure, enjoy this sweet video from the incomparable band Queen. Do you ever feel like this?

I’d love to hear from you.

-Tina