The 3 Musketeers of Facebook

Photo by StonySteiner

Saturday I was my political alter ego, but social media followed me even there. Although it wasn’t why I was there I ended up sitting in on a training for political activists and one of the sessions was about using Facebook for small, local political clubs. I was tickled to see social media being promoted, but the presentation was vague on specifics. When I had the chance to grab the microphone for a brief moment I tried to explain the difference between Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages. This post is a continuation of that thought and what I’ll be sending to folks who asked for more information Saturday.

I break Facebook down into 3 types. Let’s call them the 3 Musketeers! Profiles, Groups, and Pages. Just like with Angry Birds, each have a unique set of tools and uses. I’ll give a short description of each and then talk about best practices for business.

Profiles

Profiles belong to people. It should have a real first name and a real last name. How do you know you’re looking at a profile? Look for the ‘Add friend’ button or a link that says ‘See Friendship’. Another hint is whether Facebook refers to them by their first name. If anyone other than a real person has one it’s open to suspension or deletion by Facebook.

Business Uses for Profiles

Feel free to talk about your business in your statuses, but I wouldn’t advise using your profile for business promotion. Facebook has tailored everything about profiles to be personable and people expect to see personal stories on a profile. I’ll stop there before I get all carried away about sharing options and psychological consequences of a compartmental life. 🙂

Groups

Groups are exactly what they sound like–they’re a group of personal Facebook users who have a common interest. They basically provide a private wall that multiple people can post to. You can either join an open group or be added to a closed group by a member.  Anyone can create a group. No one speaks as or for the group. Every post in the group is from an individual member, so it definitely has to be a group effort (har, har).

Business Uses for Profiles

When it’s important to hear from individuals on a specific topic Groups are the ticket! Do you have a new product that you need feedback on? Ask your first 100 buyers (probably early adopters) to join your group and update you on their experiences with it! Do you need a quick way to communicate with employees who have forgotten to check their email? Make a private group, just be sure to drop members when they move onto a different job. Nonprofits can use a Page (coming up next!) to speak to the public and then a private group for all the logistics of volunteer shifts and supports. A particularly useful feature of Groups for volunteers is the ability to create and share documents. I still prefer Google Docs but some folks aren’t as familiar with it as Facebook.

Pages

Pages are profiles for businesses, bands, celebrities, and organizations. They have many of the same tools and apps as personal profiles (photos, statuses, notes, ability to like other pages, ask questions, etcetera), but have extra features such as the ability to run ads, track activity with Insights, and have custom tabs.

Business Uses for Pages

Everything. Pages are the #1 Facebook tool for businesses. Click on the Facebook tag at the bottom of this post and browse. And look for more to come!

Dreaming Social

Three of my family members are looking at some new business ventures. One of them is even under construction as we speak! Being the social media addict that I am, I’m already dreaming up ways that internet technology and social media can be of assistance to their efforts. I very much want this blog to be practical and hands-on. Blogs extolling the virtues of social media are a dime-a-dozen, after all. So, here are some futuristic case studies, if such a phrase is legitimate. 😉

Business Scenario #1: Taco Stand

My uncle, Fred Sutherland, is in the last stages of being released from the Texas State Prison System on parole. It’s a scary economic world for us all right now, but ex-cons have a much worse time of it than the rest of us do. A long story short is that he has a business plan ready to implement for several food wagons (he’s currently looking at tacos and burgers). He wants to target the downtown professional on lunch break, the construction crews that do not have their own transportation while on site. The plan is to be able to hit two or three key locations in a day at their specific lunch/supper rush.

Possible Social Media/Technology for Business Scenario #1

FourSquare: I’m recommending to Fred that he create a FourSquare account for each food wagon. I would like to see original quirky names. Each FourSquare account would build a strong local network of friends for each of its stops. Through push notifications and ‘Nearby’ features a lot of the daily promotional work will be ‘outsourced’ to FourSquare. Bonus: when a new location or stop is added for a wagon Fred can use Forecast (posted about previously) to plan an opening splash.

Text Club: The most obvious use of a texting group is to broadcast specials and locations, but you could do a lot beyond that. Customers could text orders and then receive a text when the order is ready. Which brings us to…

Payment: Square. The vendor pricing is quite competitive with traditional card payment methods. And you can’t beat the wow factor. 😉

It’s going to take my superior communication skills to present this to Fred. Social media wasn’t even thought of when he was last in the business world. I’ll let y’all know how it goes!

Business Scenario #2: Compressed Natural Gas (CNG)

My brother’s father-in-law (what do I call him? Father-in-law once removed? 2nd Father-in-law?), Bob Kulp, is a seasoned business owner and entrepreneur (It runs deep in his family) and his latest project is the conversion of traditional gasoline vehicles so that they run off of natural gas, which is significantly cleaner and cheaper than gasoline. He is in the process of building a CNG filling station on his property. He is avidly promoting CNG  and fleet conversion across Wisconsin.

Possible Social Media/Technology for Business Scenario #2

App: the best sales pitch is to show someone the money and I find the easiest way to track money is through an app. A CNG app could track

• mileage of CNG vehicle and how much less pollution it exhausts
• how much saved per gas purchase compared to gasoline prices in the area
• how close you are to paying off conversion cost with lower fuel costs and better gas mileage. Once conversion is paid for this converts to a pure savings number.
• how close you are to a CNG filling station

Each of these tracking should allow for sharing the positive numbers to social networks. “Aliya has saved $326 so far with Kulp Energy Solutions!” followed by a link.

Bob is already quite active on social networks, both personally and professionally, so just go observe and learn.

Business Scenario #3: Local Sports Scene

My brother Ethan has noticed that there is one sport that gets a lot of attention nationally that has a local scene in the Tulsa area who is ignored by all local media. I can’t tell you which one because you might capitalize on this idea before he gets to. ::glare:: don’t even think about it!

Possible Social Media/Technology for Business Scenario #3

He is first going to build an online reputation of an expert in the sport. Once that is established he wants to leverage it to get radio spots. All of this is a little hazy because some of it requires equipment investments that he does not currently have the money for. Any angel investors out there?

Twitter: He should live-tweet national events in this sport. He should also host a weekly TweetChat (which I described to him as a “twat on Chitter’ just the other day. How embarrassing.) on the sport.

Google+: He should do hangouts from local events and do hangout interviews with the athletes on Google+. He could also broadcast hangouts from the teams’ gyms with multiple interviews.

Blog: Predictions, commentary, reviews, interviews, etc.. of each local event.

Podcast: live broadcasting from local events that are also being broadcasted on television (which might restrict Hangouts). This will be the easiest part to convert to radio.

Many of these require portable wifi or 4G internet, a laptop or tablet with a good web camera, an external mic (maybe 2?), and access to cable television. With that high financial threshold this venture might take some time to happen, but I’m confident Ethan can make it a success!

Ask the Right Questions

As a perfectionist I’m never done with a project. So, as I mentioned last week, I’m still working on an intake form for clients. I hope someone else can learn through watching my process here.

Thank you so much for picking Magic Bottle Marketing to be on your team! I am so excited to get to work with you! I’ve found the best way to start something is with asking lots of good questions. Please think through each question but don’t over analyze it.

Contact Information

1. What contact information do you want to give customers on social media?
2. How should I contact you?
3. Who do I communicate with?
4. Is there a best time or worst time to contact you?
5. Is there a best time or worst time to visit your location?
6. How familiar are you personally with social media? What sites, if any, do you frequent?

Story Telling

1. How did you get into this field?
2. How did this business start?
3. How did you get started in this particular business?
4. Tell me about your customers.
5. Why Claremore for your business? Why Claremore for you personally?
6. Tell me about your employees.
7. Who is your competition?
8. Who (customer demographic) and what (product/service) is your base?

Goals

1. What is your big goal for your business or what is the mission statement?
2. What are some immediate or short term goals for your business?
3. Have you made any changes (products, major price changes, vendors, locations, etc..) to your business recently or are you about to make any ?
4. Is there a particular part of the market or your customer base that is a priority for expansion/growth?
5. Is there a product or service you want to push primarily?
6. What do you primarily want to get out of social media? New sales leads? Better/cheaper customer service? Maintaince of relationships with returning customers? Awareness? Advertising? You can list as many as you want, but please prioritize them.

Practices

1. What is your philosophy on customer service? Be both abstract and concrete. 😉
2. How do you show customer appreciation?
3. How do you handle a difficult or complaining customer?
4. How do you approach conflicts with your employees?
5. What are your current marketing efforts?
6. Do you use sales or specials? How? How often? What are the goals for these?

Love

Photo by Tim Feig

I spent all of last week in Stratford, Wisconsin, the childhood home of my new sister-in-law Jarita (Kulp) Bavido! As appropriate for a wedding, the whole week was filled with all kinds of love—words, promises, actions, abiding presence, old, y0ung, new, and proven. Here are a few pictures of some of the love.

This is the Chinese character for love. Since both bride and groom are fluent in Chinese and living in Taiwan AND in love it was a very appropriate theme. This particular photo shows how the character decorated the not-quite-finished bride’s cake.

Photo by Janet Bavido

It was wonderful to get to know the Kulps better. I found that they are very artistic and have a great love of craftsmanship. For instance, here is Reuben Kulp, Jarita’s grandfather, making a miniature wagon wheel. He sells model carriages, wagons, and harnesses, fitted to whatever type of toy horse you have. Check out his eBay listings!

Photo by Janet Bavido

I was also impressed by these pastry dishes made by Laura Kulp. I love to see everyday things done with care and art!

Photo by Janet Bavido

This isn’t the best photo artistically, but the lanterns are another representation of love! There were 100s of them in the decorations and each is a message from friends of the couple that were not able to make the trip from Taiwan for the ceremony. It was amazing too to see how quickly social media got pictures and notes from the ceremony to these friends!

Both immediate families together!

We clean up pretty good, don’t we? This is not from the official photographer and doesn’t include Jarita’s brother-in-law, nephew, and niece. When we get copies from the photographers I’ll swap them out with this photo.

Photo by Bob Kulp

This is Jarita with her grandmother, Pauline Kulp. Aren’t they both so beautiful?! They’re that beautiful inside too!

Creative Director: Jarita Kulp Camera Owner: Bob Kulp Photographer: ???

This photo was Jarita’s idea and I’m in awe of it! She and the bridesmaids had such a fun time doing it!

These outside pictures happened so fast! Cold is a great motivator!

Photo by Tim Feig

 

Jarita loves surprises so Samuel kept the honeymoon a secret from her. As a member of the inner circle (hehehe!), I knew that he was carrying her off to Hawaii!

Thanks for reading this off-topic ‘Personal Stuff’ post! More pictures will be up on my personal Facebook, if you’re interested!

Facebook Insights

Few things delight my nerdy little soul as much as a graph of a useful metric over time.  I prefer line graphs, but a pie chart can be fun, too. Graphs are definitely the strong point of Facebook’s Insights for Pages. I think even the Cinderella story benefits from some graphs, this one courtesy of Kurt Vonnegut.

What Facebook Insights could benefit from however is some clearer terms.  Here are some I find the most confusing. Hopefully, my explanations help.

People Talking About This

This is a plain and simple interaction metric. It is a sum of unique users who liked, commented, or shared your post. The fun thing about this number is that it displays itself to all your page visitors right under your tabs list on the left.

Virality

First off, does anyone know how to pronounce this?

This percentage metric tells you how many people interacted with your post (liked, shared, or commented) out of how many people saw your post (either directly or through their friends.) In other words, it takes the number for ‘People Talking About This’ and divides it by the ‘Reach’ number.

Story

At first the term seems to imply that it’s a post from either you or one of your fans, but it’s not. A story is generated whenever someone interacts with your post in anyway. You can think of as what would show up in the ticker feed. As we said above, it’s also the ‘People Talking About This’ metric.

One term I was not able to get a handle on was the metric ‘Engaged Users’. Facebook says it’s a frequency of clicks on your story. This is more than just story generations, but definitely less than ‘Reach’. The interesting tidbit I found by clicking on individual posts’ ‘Engaged Users’ numbers is the number of people who have given negative feedback, usually a hiding of the post. This still left questions though because the ‘Engaged Users’ count was still higher than the sum of the negative feedback number plus ‘People Talking About This’ number.

Before I go onto which metrics I watch carefully and do happy dances over, listen to Don McMillan’s comedy sketch about Power Points. His commentary on graphs is gold. “Power Points caused the mortgage meltdown!”

The power of social media are relationships and the conversations that drive them. Therefore, I value the ‘People Talking About This’ metric, even though it’s a mouthful to say. You can get a quick idea of this from the Insights Dashboard (what you see when you first click on Insights), but you really should go its own individual graphs. There you can see…

• Demographics of people who interact with you. On Cole Butler for Sheriff‘s page I found out that even though the gender split for likes of the page is 64% female and 34% male (where’s my other 2%?), interactions are done by 58% female and 40% male. So, even though Cole has more female likes than male likes (possibly because Facebook has more female users), the males are more likely to interact.
• Side-by-side comparisons of interactions and the viral reach those interactions provided. This gives you an idea of how deeply you reach into interactive fans’ networks and how influential your fans are. I wish there was a way to overlay these two graphs.

There will be more posts about this topic, I”m sure. We haven’t talked about Edge Rank yet! Stay tuned!

Can You Repeat the Question?

I’m working on some forms and surveys for new customers. This has pushed two things to the front of my mind.

1. Asking questions is an art.
2. Social media success is largely dependent on your story-telling ability

Here are some of the questions I ask new or potential clients…

How did you get started in this field? How did your business get going?

Why Claremore? Why did you pick it as a home? Why did you base your business in it?

Tell me about your customers.

To pull in the story-telling side of this, I’ll spin you a yarn by answering one of these questions. Ask me out for coffee if you want to ask me more. 😉

How did I get into social media and think up Magic Bottle Marketing?

I got started in social media in 2008 through politics, just as an activist and volunteer. At that time I found American Majority‘s tutorials on Facebook and Twitter particularly helpful and I still point political activists new to social media to those guides. I’m ever so slowly breaking them of the ‘new media’ phrase. Social media is perfect for political campaigns. It’s immediate, agile, interactive, personable, but still capable of communicating en masse both to supporters and to the broader category of voters. It was a great introduction to the big wide world of social media.

I ‘picked’ the absolute worst time to graduate college: spring 2009. Everyone knew the recession was settling in. No one knew it was going to be a full-blown depression and that it would last through our present time. That fall and winter I found ‘a desperate band of brothers’ in social media–HR professionals, recruiters together with job seekers of every kind trying to find their way back to the American Dream.  I eventually found work (not the best work, but work) through other means. Even though social media didn’t get me hired I learned a great deal about branding from my experiences and the tutelage of some very fine people, professionally and personally. If you’re a job seeker, drop me an email and I’ll be glad to get you in touch with some of them.

Couple of months ago all of these threads came together with other experiences—-a swimming hole as a friend suggestion, the arrival of Google+, a social media workshop where I knew everything covered, a nudge from a friend—and clicked together into Magic Bottle Marketing.

The Awkward Stage

Downtown Claremore

The awkward stage usually refers to the pimple-riddened years where we’re uncomfortably stuck between being a child and being an adult. Personally, I didn’t find my teen years all that miserable, but I think the phrase still has some merit. It’s hard to be inbetween two spots, neither here nor there. This applies to more than just adolescent development. I would humbly put forth that the city of Claremore is in an awkward stage. We are not a small town anymore, but it’s hard to be big 30 minutes away from Tulsa.

1. Claremore is not a small town anymore.

You can always go look up technical definitions on the U.S. Census website and I’ll throw a number out there: 2010 census has Claremore pegged at 18,581. Let’s talk about how it feels as a citizen and a business owner. Claremore has two high schools, 3 junior highs, and 7 elementary schools. Claremore has 3 grocery stores, 5 hardware stores, and 4 Subways. Small towns don’t even have QuikTrips and we’re getting a 2nd (which will be a QT Kitchen and significantly closer to my house than the current one. I’m excited!) Claremore has been hit by the national economic situation and that shows in our busineses that cater to middle-class luxuries. The bowling alley has shut down. We had 5 coffee shops in 2009 and in 3 years we’ve dwindled to one. However, the population size is still there that those type of businesses need–we’re all just poorer than we were before.

My alternate life that I don’t allow on this blog is politics. I can tell you that Claremore is a major player in the 2nd Congressional District and our state reps and senators are important and in leadership positions in Oklahoma City. We’re not in the political player leagues of Tulsa, Edmond, Bixby, or Oklahoma City, but we are in the top 10.

Think about how it feels living here.  How often do you run into someone you know at the store? Do you have to consider traffic in your driving plans? When you travel in the state do people know where Claremore is? Not often, yes, and yes, respectively.

We need to break out of the small-town way of thinking! Claremore leadership and citizens need to quit fighting change for nostalgia’s sake and let big things happen. Trains causing a traffic standstill might be ok in Chelsea, but the situation in Claremore is unacceptable! The city is pursuing some solutions, but they have been set back by grant rejections and they might even be pursuing the wrong solution to start with. Local businesses like the hospital and Pixley’s have put their own benefit ahead of the town’s progress when competitors like St. John’s and Lowe’s tried to move in and the city council aquiesced to their selfish ideas. Thankfully, St. John’s and Lowe’s found ways around (St. John’s settled outside of town in North Park community and I’ve heard that Lowe’s bought land secretly from the Chevrolet dealership), but how many other businesses are we missing out on because of similar behavior? Also, did you notice that neither Pixley’s or the hospital have suffered terribly since? Their hissy fit was pure fear of competition and had nothing to do with self-survival.

2. Claremore is not yet a big town

Claremore is simply not there yet. We only have one movie theater and it’s small. We only have one coffee shop, as I said earlier. We have no nightlife. We have no music scene. We work in Tulsa and drive to Owasso to shop. It’s rather frightening to be so dependent for livelihood and lifestyle on places where you have no voice in the proceedings. I don’t have a magic plan to grow our city. Decades of brilliant minds have been tossing around concepts like suburbs and bedroom communities and still haven’t come up with a best-practice list. I do believe though that Claremore citizens are the best people to solve Claremore’s problems.

In the world of marketing and social media I find myself saying over and over ‘Claremore is not Tulsa!’ Claremore is unique and the relationships are quite different from a big metro. A marketing agency from Tulsa is not going to understand that. Your customers will feel like you’re trying to shock and awe them with high-falutin’ ways. If they’re the least bit aware they’ll know that it’s better to keep money close and not to keep giving it to Tulsa. On the other hand, Claremore is modern enough that businesses need the technological tools of  social media, mobile advertising, and smart ads,unlike the rural towns around us. Magic Bottle Marketing can help you balance these two and navigate this awkward in-between scene. I’m excited to get to work with you!

Strokes Moustache…

Grand Coulee Dam is the largest dam in the United States and in the top 5 largest dams of the world. It is the largest electric power-producing facility in the United States. The short list of things to do around it include…

• laser light show projected onto the mile-long screen of the dam’s spillway.
• tour of the dam
• swimming, jet skies, inter-tubing, water skiing, etc. on Lake Roosevelt
• hiking Steamboat Rock
• waterfall hunting and viewing near Banks Lake

I lived in Grand Coulee for 9 brief months and then 30 minutes away in Wilbur for 4 years. All of the towns in the area were used to and took good care of the thousands of tourists these sights drew. My family eagerly absorbed every piece of information we could and took in every sight we could. We were just so excited to get to live near such a famous place! As we shared our giddy delight we were surprised to learn that some natives had never done what we were doing. They had every opportunity to experience something amazing, but because it was near them and they were used to it they didn’t consider it amazing.

I have to confess that I have committed the same sin against my new home, Northeast Oklahoma. I have never had lunch at the Pink House. 2011, my 10th year in Oklahoma, was the first year I went to the Gilcrease Art Museum. This is unacceptable. Therefore, I’m setting the goal of being a tourist in my neck of the woods. I’m going to Google things. I’m going to ask all the obvious, stupid questions I can think of. I’m going to ask for directions and recommendations. I’m going to photograph all the sights I’ve driven past without a thought before. Mostly, I’m going to stroke my moustache and scheme.

Schemer specifically and social media generally is what is motivating this great resolution. I’ve mentioned this local phenomenon before.

It’s interesting how social media has made my life both more global and more local. I communicate with people all over the world based on common interests, but then I’m inspired to actually live out those interests locally. Someday, dire warnings about replacing social life with social media will sound as outrageous people who claimed homeschoolers wouldn’t know how to function in society.

My excitement about Schemer is growing. I like being on the bleeding edge of things (gives a false sense of importance—gotta feed the ego) and Schemer is definitely new. Like most newly-launched Google products it’s invite only. Let me know if you want one. I haven’t found any Claremore schemes besides my own. There are few in Tulsa and Oklahoma City but not many. I get to be the trendsetter for Oklahoma Schemes!

Schemer still needs a lot of work. Schemes need to be linked to search results in Google Places. Sharing to Google+ is a basic sorely missing, but I would like to see integration to other social networks. Conspirators will need to ‘synchronize watches’ which means integration with Google Calendar. Once a scheme is completed there needs to be a way to add photos of the fun time had by all. These should have a special album on Google+ just like mobile uploads and photos from posts do. I have more ideas but I think I will save them for a Google+ post. Look for it there!

Are You Having Fun?

We added a family member recently. No, not Jarita. An Xbox. It has captured our hearts quickly and is already part of our routines. However, there is a learning curve, and while you’re climbing it the sound effects sound like this.

“NOO!!! Argh. Die. Die. Die……AHHHH! Where did he come from?! Oh, I died…….I’m out of ammo again!……Not that way! I didn’t say that way! The other way! Come on!”

I haven’t been allowed to capture any of the facial expressions yet. They’re quite amusing.

When the tension gets too high someone not sucked into the game (which is usually me) asks the person in torment “Are you still having fun? Because it’s a game. If you’re not having fun you should quit for now.” Sometimes just the reminder to have fun is enough for the gamer to start having fun again and sometimes they let someone else have a turn.

Business owners, when it comes to social media are you having fun?

First, let me try to convince you it’s fun.

When a customers walk into your store don’t you get a little excited? When you stock a new product aren’t you imagining in your head how your customers are going to react to it? When you land a contract aren’t you pumped to go to town on it? Of course! You love what you do and do what you love! You don’t find customer service a drag and consider store hours a chore. Social media is another way to communicate with customers. It’s a way to share your new product. It lets you communicate your excitement and methods as you tackle that new job. What’s not to have fun with?!

Still don’t feel the fun? Then give me the controller!

I really do love social media. When I’ve been working on something for Magic Bottle Marketing for too long and need to regroup my thoughts I just switch to personal or political social media. I’ve never gotten tired of social media. You can hand the controller to me anytime!

I don’t want you to get the wrong idea and think I’m juvenile with what I do. I know that social media for businesses is not entertainment. It is money-serious and that’s pretty serious. My clients are my job and not a game. But I sure do have a lot of fun with it!

Of course, there’s another reason folks have to drop the Xbox controller: time. Social media isn’t as time consuming as some forms of marketing, but it takes time. Probably the biggest time sucker is the most important part: creation of quality content. I’m hoping my blog writing time will decrease as I get better at it, but I know it will always be  a hefty piece of my week. It’s an investment that’s absolutely worth it, but to continue the investment motif, there’s no shame in hiring a broker. Just because you don’t have time to do social media for your business doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be done. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but if you have tried to take your business social without taking the time and effort to do it right don’t think it’s useless. It’s not the oven’s fault you didn’t follow the cake recipe.

Drop me a line or give me a ring so I can be (double checks her analogies) your fun, baking broker!

Let Me Count the Ways

Apparently, I’m not the only person who occasionally neglects other parts of her life for the chance to do something social online. I will not reveal my sources to protect the guilty. However, I’m not going to chide all of you and myself for this. I’m not saying we don’t deserve some scolding, but I prefer to think creatively.

First off, let me say that I want to find that staircase with several musical friends and play Fur Elise on it! Then, I want us to count the ways we love social media.

1. Friends–if we tried to spend as much time face-to-face with our friends as we do with them on social media it wouldn’t work. Social media, particularly mobile social media, lets you have your friends with you all the time even when it wouldn’t be feasible for that to happen physically.
2. Interactive–Why is a piano more fun than an escalator? One reason is that it reacts to us. You step on it and it makes a noise! We thrive off of interactions and social media lets everything be interactive, even things that are usually static such as eating, running on a treadmill, and even waiting in line.
3. Recorded–perhaps it’s just ego, but we all love to have a record of what we do. This is a big feature of the new Facebook timeline.
4. Commentary–not only can we record what we do we can provide commentary for what everyone else does!
5. Global–this isn’t a feature of every social media platform, but it is of quite a few. It’s one of the reasons I love Flickr and Google+ so much and one of the bonuses of Twitter.

All 5 of these things make social media fun. As the video showed us, people will almost always choose fun even if it’s more effort. So, how can we take these features of social media and make them features of things we procrastinate doing? I’m not asking how we can we put housecleaning, exercise, and bill payments on social media, but how can we make these activities friendly, interactive, recorded, commentative, or global? (Yes, I just made up the word ‘commentative’.) How can we make our unwanted tasks fun?

Let’s take Exercise first.

Recording exercise generates excitement about the activity. It motivates  you to hit the gym just so you can record it! Also, you can keep track of your progress and reward it! Means of recording exercise are pretty well known and they do help significantly. I prefer iOS apps that combine food diary with exercise log. Please post links to your favorite books and apps for recording exercise.

I think we Americans think too statically about exercise. A treadmill may not sound like fun to you so you hop on Facebook instead, but what about swing dancing? Swing dancing is done with other people and is very friendly and interactive, like social media. Does horseback riding in the beautiful outdoors sound better than the lap pool? It’s interactive and challenging and all around fun for some! Beats Twitter any day! Besides we can tell Twitter about it afterwords.

Last, how can exercise be global? I practice a style of Okinawan karate. Just my dojo’s organization has schools in Taiwan, the Philippines, Guatemala, Texas, and all over Oklahoma! There’s an even bigger world when I look outside my organization to other karate kai. Another way exercise can be global is through flash mobs on global holidays!

Come on! Who doesn’t want to do that?!

Next, let’s hit Cleaning.

I have started taking a picture of my desk every time I clean it. I usually then post it to Flickr or Facebook. Then everyone compliments me and says I did a good job. What did I do? I recorded it and opened it up for commentary!

My aunt for many years cleaned her kitchen while talking to her best local friend on the phone who was doing the same thing. A friend makes any task more enjoyable, whether you have them over to help or race each other in separate locations.

Can cleaning be global? Have you ever heard of spring cleaning? That’s an entire hemisphere doing the same thing as you! How many other people are putting away Christmas lights on January 1st? Just search for it on Twitter and find out!

What are you procrastinating doing right now by hanging out online instead? Brainstorm here how to make it fun and then maybe we’ll all go do it!