Work smarter

I just came back from Ragan's Corporate Communications and the Social Media Revolution conference where I met members of the PR twitterati (@briansolis, @PRsarahevans). The conference was geared towards a wide spectrum of social media acolytes– from newbies to old hands with backgrounds in education, healthcare, military, aeronautics, etc.

With social media, monitoring and participation go hand-in-hand. You can’t participate meaningfully if you don’t pay attention to what other people are saying. One of the questions asked several times during the conference was on the topic of time management. We all aspire to the 4-hour workweek, but for many of us in the PR industry, even a 40-hour workweek seems out of reach. Add to that the high level of engagement required by social media and you have what seemingly looks like endless hours with your fingers on a keyboard.

Many of the speakers shared the apps they used to streamline social media efforts; BackTweets and Tweet Later were two that I was particularly excited to learn about. Here are some other social media shortcuts that you might find helpful:

• ShareThis, AddThis, GetSocial, etc – Don’t know HTML or CSS? Use these free code-generating sites to add social bookmarks to your blog, website or other online communications. All you need to do is submit your URL and these services will create a social bookmarking button for you, similar to the one you see at the end of every PRBuzz post.
• RSS – This should probably be #1 on the list. RSS is like getting an up-to-the-minute table of contents to all your favorite information outlets. It’s also like portable Tivo for text: it lets you archive stories and, and you can access your RSS feeds from anywhere as long as you have an Internet connection. posts for future reading
• A Twitter app – almost any Twitter app will offer more features than the Twitter website. For monitoring on the go, try TweetBeep or CoTweet if you’re maintaining a corporate Twitter account. TweetDeck, Twhirl and Twitterific are great for regular use at your computer. You’ll have to try a couple apps to find the one that works best for you, but there are a lot to choose from and 99.9% are free.