Angela Crocker, Author at Angela Crocker

Establish Your Response Time

03.16.2016 by Angela Crocker // Leave a Comment

Digital Cleanse Day 16:

Establish Your Response Time

Establishing your response time is key to a sane digital life. As you’re reading a post in my digital cleanse series, I think it’s safe to assume you want more calm than chaos.

Let’s say you have four active social media accounts: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. In addition to posting your own content, you’ll need to reply and follow up with your friends, fans, and followers. In order to do that effectively, you need to have a system for monitoring mentions and replies as well as a firm grasp on your response time.

Monitoring social media mentions and replies

Everyone has their own preferences for monitoring social accounts. Some keep four active tabs open in a browser, one for each social network. Others use a social media dashboard such as AgoraPulse or Hootsuite. Still others prefer to have mobile apps on their home screens and notifications turned on. (Those folks should read my earlier digital cleanse post – turn off notifications.) Whatever your preference, be consistent about monitoring social media. Schedule time in your calendar if that helps you.

Response time: How fast is fast enough?

How fast you reply may depend on whether you are dealing with a personal interaction or a business response. Personal interactions can happen in your leisure time or during your bus commute. Friends and family understand that you may be at work and unavailable much of the day. Business responses are different. In some cases, the client expects an instant reply. In other cases, you’ve got a bit of time but how fast is fast enough?

If you respond instantly, you must have a workflow that can tolerate constant interruptions. Is your topic time sensitive? Flight delays and traffic updates are only useful in real time.

If you respond within a few hours, this may be perfectly reasonable to your clients. They know you’re busy working for them (or other clients) and they want you to be focused and doing a great job.

If you respond within a day, I think that’s the outside limit for an acceptable response for business purposes. Respond within one business day, if that makes sense for your business.

If you respond within a week, your client may be glad to hear from you but they won’t feel particularly special or important. Is that the kind of relationship you want to cultivate?

If you only respond when you remember to check, when you have time, or when you feel like it, I suggest you need to rethink being in business. Looking after your customers has to be a priority.

Worst of all is no response at all. How does that make your clients feel? Will they want to do business with you? Of course not. You are at risk of losing a customer to a competitor.

What’s your response time going to be?

I encourage you to make a decision on your response time and be consistent with it. Fans and followers will grow accustomed to hearing from you at certain intervals. In my own work, I choose to respond within a few hours. Each weekday, I schedule social media time for early morning, just after lunch and evening. At minimum, I’ll respond three times a day. Admittedly, weekend response times are less structured as I integrate my work into family time.

Respond to everything?

One last thing: Social media is about conversation and building relationships. It’s about being present and part of what’s happening. Respond to as many people as you can. And know that it’s okay when the conversation fizzles out. Face-to-face conversations do that, too.

More on the 30-day #digitalcleanse tomorrow. Hope to see you then!

(If you missed yesterday’s installment, take a couple extra minutes to explore Banish Reply All.)

Note: This post was updated May 15, 2020.

Banish Reply All

03.15.2016 by Angela Crocker // 1 Comment

Digital Cleanse Day 15:

Banish Reply All

“Reply All” drives me batty. In general, I think email is a great communications tool. Easy to create. Quick to send. Simple to reply. But “reply all” makes me hate my inbox. I’m sure you can relate.

For example

Let’s say you have three projects on the go each with with 6 team members. If just one project manager sends an email to their team asking each person for input and every team member sends their response as “reply all” then you have 5 new messages. If everyone responds just once to all five of those messages you have 25 more messages. Suddenly you’ve got 30 new messages to read. But wait, you’ve got three projects on the go so you now have 90 messages. Multiple reply threads means the information is now fragmented. Worse is when someone hijacks the thread to ask one person a question about something unrelated adding still more email. And may the Gods help you catch up, if you happen to be offline when a “reply all” conversation hits your inbox.

Consequences

This fire hose of messages can overflow your inbox. Even worse, it can bury genuine messages. You waste time wading through multiple copies of the same messages looking for the one tidbit of new information. Sometimes you just archive the whole thread unread. It’s just too hard to find the new info. Sadly that means key pieces of information can be lost. Not good for you, the project or the team.

Why do people still reply all?

So why do people abuse the reply all button? Everyone wants to be perceived as a contributing member of the team. They share their two cents worth to demonstrate that contribution. In some cases, team members are focused on only one or two small projects. They don’t get a lot of email so they don’t see the same volume that reply all creates for people involved in many projects. I’ve also seen people wanting to mitigate their own risk. If they didn’t acknowledge the email it didn’t happen.

A related problem may be the overuse of carbon copy (CC). Yes, you want to be inclusive. But many its possible to be over inclusive. What do you think?

What can we do about it?

Education is the first step. If everyone needs your information then use reply all with my blessing. But remember that everyone needs to know the location of the meeting, only the organizer needs to know your request for a gluten-free bun.

A better solution is to move your team into a different communication tool. Maybe a Facebook or LinkedIn group would work for your team? Or an internal instant messaging service? Or a project collaboration tool like Basecamp or Slack? Please explore the options and banish reply all.

More on the 30 day #digitalcleanse tomorrow. Hope to see you then!

(If you missed yesterday’s installment, take a couple extra minutes to explore Figure out Your 3P. For links to the complete Digital Cleanse series, click here.)

Figure Out Your 3P

03.14.2016 by Angela Crocker // Leave a Comment

Digital Cleanse Day 14:

Figure Out Your 3P

Your 3P is my solution to one of the most common social media objections. People worry about sharing too much online and the resulting loss of privacy. I understand the concern.

If you’re using social media in your private life, nothing obligates you to share on a social network. What stays offline, stays private. It’s your choice to share with family and friends or to interact with others who share your hobby. What you share is your choice. However, if you are using social networks for business purposes, you’re going to have to share something. I recommend you divide yourself into three parts, your 3P. These parts are professional, personal and private.

Professional

Your professional part is fully public. You share expertise, experience, anecdotes, details about your job and information about any products or services you work with. Sharing about your professional life can help your brand with sales and marketing. It can also position you for your next job or entrepreneurial venture. What you share publicly helps establish credibility, cultivate a network and demonstrate authority.

Personal

To be successful online in business, you also need to share another part of yourself that I call the personal part, the next third of your 3P. Your personal part might include a love of hockey, a passion for rescue dogs and commitment to tennis. This is the part that humanizes you. It makes you a complete person not just a selling machine. It allows you to establish rapport and garner trust.

You share to find mutual interests as a lead into in-depth conversations. Your willingness to share more than just sales messages and marketing banter make you a whole person. This is really important. Who you are and how you related to people has to be more than shop talk. You can’t be all about business all the time.

Through your online posts, comments and interactions you must blend your professional part with your personal part. Remember this is SOCIAL networking, even if it’s conducted digitally, you are still interacting with real people. The personal things you share can make it more enjoyable to do business together.

Private

The private part of yourself stays offline. You decide to keep details of your hemorrhoids, money troubles and off-color humor private. Politics and religion are often kept private, too, just like at a dinner party with the extended family. If you’re not sure what to keep private, ask yourself two questions:

What do you want to hide from your Mom?
What would embarrass you if it appeared on the front page of a newspaper?

The answers to those two questions make up your private life. If you want to keep it private, keep it offline. You choose. If you don’t share it, it’s not online. You are in control. (Well, almost in control. Remember that others can quote your contentious comments and share photos or videos of other embarrassing moments.)

Divide and Blend

How to express the divide and the blend between the professional, personal and private parts of your life, is entirely up to you. Every person’s answer will be unique. As an example, here’s a snapshot of my 3P breakdown:

Professional: communicator, writer, instructional designer, teacher, speaker
Personal: parent, home owner, Star Wars fan, doodles with fine art supplies
Private: asthmatic, struggled with postpartum depression
[Although, I have now made these private parts into personal parts in the interests of illustrating the 3P.]

Share only what you’re comfortable sharing. Don’t create an artificial self online. I’d rather you shared a minimal amount and were true to yourself. Faking it will not get you anywhere online or in life. Authenticity is the nobler path.

More on the 30 day #digitalcleanse tomorrow. Hope to see you then!

(If you missed yesterday’s installment, take a couple extra minutes to explore Schedule Digital Tasks and Digital Fun. For links to the complete Digital Cleanse series, click here.)