The Need To Reduce Information Overload

June 30, 2010 Mitch Mitchell 16 Comments

I’m someone who loves getting as much information as possible. Y’all know how I’ve touted that I subscribe to more than 200 blogs, and that, because I speed read, I can get through a heck of a lot of information.

Information Overload

However, I can’t get through it all, and I admit that there are times when I fall behind that I pop open the reader and see well over 500 titles in a category and think “there’s just no way I’m getting through all of that.” Y’all know that’s a bunch of RSS feeds!

What I do then is look for titles that seem intriguing, take a quick look, see what’s compelling, and if nothing is then I move onto the next one. I have no real idea what I might be missing, and my mind doesn’t care. As a matter of fact, sometimes I actually look at a high number of posts and feel like I can’t breathe.

Last night I was going through a large number once again, and came across this one titled Are You Becoming A Fat, Lazy Blogger written by Tom Sinfield of Standout Blogger. As I read the post, I saw myself in it, someone being overwhelmed by information to the point of being paralyzed sometimes. The paralysis for me is deciding I’m not reading at that moment, yet unsure just what I should do next. And that’s not a good way to go.

So, I’ve made an interesting decision. I’ve decided that I’m going to trim my list down to around 100, and that will be that. Now, some of this is pretty easy. I know I’ll be keeping almost every blog that’s in my category of “friends”, and I’ll be keeping almost every blog in the category of “folks I know”; how’s that for category titles? Those will be the first two I’ll go through because some of those folks aren’t blogging anymore, and I’ll know who they are pretty quickly.

The thing is, right now those account for about 55 blogs. I know for sure that 10 will be gone pretty quickly, but I’m hoping to eliminate at least 20 from this group. That will allow me to easier go through the rest to figure out what I want to keep. I know I’m keeping my news feeds, which don’t actually count as blogs, but I’m counting them towards my 100.

What’s my ultimate goal, other than the number? I subscribe to a ton of internet marketing blogs. The thing is, not only are there a lot of those folks, but many of them aren’t offering me anything new or substantial. I almost hate to go there, but few of them are teaching me anything new on how to make money. And, since that’s the focus of those blogs, supposedly, I need to weed through them to get to what I need.

I also subscribe to a lot of SEO blogs, because it’s something I do, but truth be told, these days it’s more about theory than anything ground breaking, and I find myself disagreeing with what I read more often than finding anything new I can use. I think those blogs are great for someone who’s new to it, but I’ve been doing it for almost 4 years now; I’m past a lot of it.

And there are other types of blogs that wouldn’t interest anyone else but me; well, I’ll add “probably”, and leave it at that. In any case, it’s time to reduce and refine.

Anyone else feeling overwhelmed? As Tom said, it might be time for an information diet; who’s with us? By the way, Tom’s wife is close to having a baby, so pop over there and give him some love.

Advertisement, Social Media

First Social Media Marketing Goal

June 28, 2010 Mitch Mitchell 8 Comments

Two weeks ago I wrote two posts on social media marketing. The first was titled Do You Have A Social Media Strategy?. The second was called Goals For A Social Media Strategy. I was attempting to start a general conversation on the topics because I kind of had an ulterior motive planned. Some of you (Scott, Dennis) wanted more specifics on those goals; I didn’t want to give them up. Now I can talk about it a bit more.

On July 22nd, in Cortland NY, I’m going to be a big part of a workshop on social media marketing. Okay, truthfully I’m doing most of it, but my friend Renée Scherer of Presentations Plus is going to be doing a part of it as well. The topic is titled Make A Splash With Social Media Marketing For Business. This is a 6-hour presentation that will talk about social media strategies, mention special social media outlets and actually help people set things up as need be. We’re also doing the same presentation on August 19th, but I really want July to be successful.

We’re charging $149 for members of the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce and $169 for everyone else. That’s because the venue sponsoring us is Greek Peak Mountain Resort, a new member of the Chamber (for those who are local I know they’re not in Liverpool, but I don’t ask questions lol) who’s promoting their new attraction, Cascades Indoor Water Park. And if you think that’s a high price, Renée got a flyer in the mail last week for a similar presentation being given in Hawaii for $475 for the same time frame; this is a steal! And there’s a special price which makes it inviting to turn it into an all day thing with the family; coupons if you will. Here’s the flyer to download if you’d like to check it out.

The thing is I wasn’t initially a part of this event. I was asked if I would take over for someone else, and there were some circumstances that I wanted taken care of before I consented. Those have been taken care of, so now I’m a part of this thing. And I have a lot of work to do; I’ve already started on the initial outline, but this is at least 5 hours of talking, presenting, and hands on teaching, so it’s more than the traditional presentation for me.

Now, something I mentioned to my friend Scott is that I don’t believe all goals have to have a time frame on them, and I stick by that. He is correct that most trainers will say you must have a date on it, otherwise it won’t have a chance to be fulfilled. How many of you have lost the amount of weight you said you were going to lose by the date you set? I thought so. How many of you have lost at least some weight by the date you set? I’m betting that’s a different number, and that’s kind of my point. Sometimes the effort towards the goal is more important than the date on the goal; at least that’s how I’m dealing with this thing with my health club, as I’ve yet to lose any weight but have lost some inches.

Anyway, now I can reveal the goal that I really had, which is to have at least 50 people at this event in July. Actually, some of the things we’ve tried have already been put into motion, but I’ll talk about mine, since I’m going to be trying it the social media way. Once a week for the next 2 weeks I’ll be having a post on the event on this blog; that might mean two blog posts in a day, or it might be the only post on that day. In the last 10 days I’ll be throwing a blurb on here as well, and one of the posts will be a sticky post, which means visitors to the blog that come in through the mail page will see it at the top for those 10 days. I’ll also be writing about it on my business blog; I’m not sure I’ll be writing about it more than once on my finance blog, since the topics aren’t quite compatible.

I’ve already started talking about it on LinkedIn, albeit kind of discreetly. I’ve had 3 people contact me asking me to keep them in the loop when I knew more; that’s not a bad start, and now that I can be more free, I’m going for it. How am I going to do it? I’m going to use the 120 character box on the main page to mention it and link to it, and I’ll be throwing out something in some of the local LinkedIn groups I’m a part of. In the last few weeks my connections have grown, and now I’m sitting at around 235 people; that’s not so bad.

It will become a part of my Twitter marketing. Of course the messages will go out when the blogs post, since those messages go out automatically, but I’ll be wording the campaign differently when I mention it separately. The thing about Twitter is that you can miss a lot of people if you only post something once a day, since the stream moves fast. Lucky for me, I talk about so many other things, as well as talk to people in general, that hopefully it won’t be seen as spamming the masses too much. Oh yeah, there’s also a Tweetup on the 30th that I’m going to, and I’ll be talking about it there as well. It’s an offshoot of social media marketing, so it counts; my rules. And y’all can look to the right there to see how many folks I have following me there.

As for Facebook, first I hope more of you join my Facebook business page, for which the widget is there to the right, or you can click on this FB business link. I’m going to mention it in that group, and of course I’ll create an event link to market it as well. I have almost 450 friends there, but of course I’m only going to send a specific link to those people who are local. I’m also a part of a couple of local groups there as well, so you can bet they’ll hear about it.

Both Renée and I will be doing an email marketing campaign as well, as it’s part of social media marketing, old school as it were. We’ll be getting some help with that one via the Liverpool Chamber; ah, finally something that my paying a membership for is providing me. 🙂 Renée will be using Constant Contact, and she’ll be presenting that since I know nothing about it except I market it as an affiliate.

One final thing we might be doing concerns the webinar we gave last year. I want to talk about YouTube in a bit more detail, so our plan is to take a piece out of that webinar we market and have a short video from it made so we can then create a YouTube page to put it on. I’m not sure how well that will be received, but it’s the next step in my overall social media marketing strategy, so I might as well get a jump on learning how to use it, right?

Anyway, time to end this one. As you can see, it’s an audacious goal, but we’re going to push this one hard. We have verbal commitments; now all we have to do is turn those verbals into actual paying customers. And now you know the rest of the story; thanks Paul Harvey. Stay tuned; at some point after the event I might let you know how successful we were. Oh yeah; future emails will be much shorter. 😀

Entertainment

Michael Jackson One Year Removed

June 25, 2010 Mitch Mitchell 7 Comments

Around this time last year, I started seeing some odd email alerts coming through saying Michael Jackson had been taken to a hospital, then was in a coma. Then suddenly that message came through that took my breath; Michael Jackson was no longer with us.

After that, we went through the strangest of spectacles, which makes a lot of sense because you just couldn’t take a personality that big, one that had been in our lives for so long, and expect it to go away quietly. We learned a lot of things, some very good, a couple shocking in a way but making sense once we thought about it. But what we really learned was just how much of an impact he was in this world.

And how big an impact was that? In the week after he was gone 8 of his albums were on the top charts, and two of them were in the top 5; one was the third best selling album for 2009, and four of them made the top 20 for the year. He was the biggest selling album artist of the year in the United States with more than 8 million albums sold; who knows how that translated around the world. His estate made over $1 billion in the last year; no one else comes close, including Elvis & the Beatles.

Oddly enough, for me it’s still hard to believe he’s not here because of the legacy of music he left behind. When I’m walking at the health club, I listen to a lot of upbeat music, and many of the songs are Michael Jackson songs. As I listen to each song, I remember where I was the first time I heard the song; how classic is that? Of course, all the songs from the Thriller album were heard around the same time, as I had the album before the video for Billie Jean came out; that’s just how it was back then.

Anyway, I decided I wanted to pop a video on here to commemorate the day, and of course I wanted something I hadn’t already posted before. This song and video is my wife’s favorite Michael Jackson non-live performance, so I felt it was appropriate. And the message is apropos as well, because I do, indeed, Remember The Time:

Personal

Jeanni, R.I.P.

June 15, 2010 Mitch Mitchell 10 Comments

When I met the woman on the right, I also met the woman on the left. Only the woman on the left was 12 years old, and now… well, I speculate she’s got to be close to 40, if not so. That’s how long I’ve known Jeanni and Amy. For years, you didn’t see one without seeing the other. Then Jeanni married, had other kids, and Amy grew up and moved on with her own life.

Jeanni and Amy

This is my brief story about Jeanni. She wasn’t like almost anyone else I knew. She was loud, boisterous, and very ballsy. She was a bowler, and a very good one as well. She came across sometimes as direct and in your face, but it was a mask for the good person she really was. I could tell that in her daughter, who was the most adult kid I’ve ever met, and whom I finally got to tell that to about two weeks ago.

Jeanni, as it turns out, was very well known around town. A few years ago, she developed diabetes. In the past year, we all learned she had cancer. On Sunday, there was a fundraiser for her and her family to try to help with both bills and possible further cancer treatments. Yes, she smoked for most of her life, but she did quit about 6 or 7 years ago; sometimes, it’s just too late at a certain point. She ended up getting cervical cancer.

However, at this fundraiser, which was held at a local bowling alley, I don’t believe I’m exaggerating if I said that almost 400 people, if not more, came out. We all paid $20 to come in and enjoy the festivities, and then there were many other things we could do in contributing more money to the cause. They had raffles for gifts that were donated from a variety of sources, including a 32″ flat screen HD television; I mean, how many people are liked enough to have someone donate a gift like that? For that matter, how many of us believe nearly 400 or 500 people would come out for us if something like this were held for us?

I was amazed, not necessarily at the number of people but at some of the people who showed up. Turns out she knew a lot more people that I knew, and none of us knew that we all knew her. Turns out she bowled with a lot of both men and women all over the city, helped run adult and children’s league, and bowled in many tournaments. Turns out she volunteered a lot of her time to others; who knew? And on Sunday, all those people came together, along with 3 bands, lots of food, free drinks of sorts (no free diet soda, which is what I drink; what’s up with that?), and lots of bowling and laughter.

Her kids were there; she wasn’t. She had taken a turn for the worse. On Monday, she lost her battle. I thought about it because I believed if she had been well enough to attend that she would have been emotionally overwhelmed by the outpouring of love to her and her legacy. I think most of us would be astonished to have that kind of showing for anything we did.

So, once again, I have to hope that another friend rest in peace. Man, I hate getting older.

Internet

Customize Your Google Page; There’s A Caveat Though…

June 9, 2010 Mitch Mitchell 12 Comments

Last week I heard the news that Google was going to allow people the opportunity to customize their main page. What they were going to do was to have certain images already set, but if you wanted to you could use your own image for the page.

I have to admit that I was excited. Though I have my Google page already altered thusly, there to the left (right click to see it bigger), via Stylish and Firefox, and I have that stupid sidebar shut down through a script on Greasemonkey, the idea of adding my own image was kind of appealing. And all we had to do was wait until, one day, the link to the bottom left of the Google screen popped up.

Mine popped up Sunday evening, and I thought that was pretty cool. I went to look to see what I had to do, and saw some choices already there. I saw that you also had to log in to your Google account, and for the first time I was sort of hesitant, and I wasn’t sure why. Then I realized why. The thing is if you want to use your own image, you must set up a Picasa account, which is their photo sharing site. Then you can upload your image and attach it to your page, and go on with your business. If you didn’t want to do that, you could upload one of their pictures, but you still have to have a Google account to use it, so that when you sign in it knows it’s you. Otherwise, you can stick with your white background, or do something like what I’ve done.

Here’s the thing about a Picasa account. If you have one, it pretty much means other people can go through your images. That’s what the user agreement says. I don’t have an account, so if there’s a way to make it private I don’t know about it. Still, the idea of someone being able to go through my personal pictures and use them for whatever reason they wish to bothers me somewhat. Yeah, I have some pictures on Facebook, but I knew that I’d be sharing those pictures with people I allow into my Facebook life, since that’s the kind of privacy I put on my account there. Anything beyond that, I’m not sure I want to deal with.

For me, I can do without it. Truthfully, if I wanted to tinker with it, I think, because I use Firefox, I could figure out a way to alter one of the scripts to use my own picture if I wanted to badly enough. However, overall, unless you really know what you’re doing, it’s not a great thing to go messing around with these scripts. That’s why my background is black instead of my favorite color, which is red.

Anyway, if you’re not quite as skittish as I am about sharing some of your images with the world, and you want to customize your Google page, go for it. It’s not a bad deal overall, and gets rid of the boring white. Lucky for me, I’ve already taken care of that on my favorite browser.

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I'm Just Sharing

Monthly Archives: June 2010

The Need To Reduce Information Overload

Michael Jackson One Year Removed

Jeanni, R.I.P.

Customize Your Google Page; There’s A Caveat Though…

Blogging, Social Media, Writing, Motivation and General Stuff