9:35 redux

It's a day later.  Oddly it's 9:35 again.

Skate Fast and Stop

Seth Godin writes a blog (and short books) that are simple and insightful.  He seems to write to many of us. Today's post was about going as fast a you can and stopping abruptly when needed.  He uses a hockey player metaphor.  Executives operate in a similar fashion.

Hockey team have three rotating lines as I recall.  Executives are 'on' all the time.  Spouses, friends and significant others have trouble with this.  It's part of the game. The cows need milking.  Get done what needs be done.  We're all operating with a limited amount of time.

Today was hectic.  There was lots of small business activity, the hands on type.  Behind the scenes I've been working web site revisions and turning the screws on social media.  Our small business is in a relatively high SES (social economic status) and income suburb.  Ironically it's not very dense.  While in a large metropolitan area our suburb lays along an interstate corridor flanked by open areas, industrial parks and more or less dormant space.  Our major clients are not neighborhood people but business lunch people in the area M-F.

We've noticed that Facebook and Twitter activity is heaviest in the 9-4 time frame, M-F.  Weekends and holidays people must not be at work and have more important things to do than socialize digitally.

Providing meaningful content, leveraging content other than that which you create and keeping and acquiring media followers is a challenge.  Of course it's even more of a challenge to use social media as bait to get them into a brick and mortar location.

Before I forget...the real issue in Seth Godin's post is that when you exit make it clean and fast.  Everyone leaves sometime. Don't dawdle. Make a clean break.  My break was as clean as one can be physically.  Getting re-established in a new venue has been interesting and less quick.

So today in the web space I was working on our web site.  I use www.mydomain.com for most domain name registrations, pointers, email, etc.  www.wix.com has a complete range of services for creating decent web site, most of which can be done with dragging and dropping rather than hard coding.  Several utilities are in play to associate Facebook and Twitter. Today has been effort in Pinterst.

Now having said that I think that the number of people really using social media is pretty overrated.  Advertisers are finding that out that eighty percent of 'hits' are actually via bots, automated servers.  If you look at the Amazon turk options it appears that there is a lot of near-slave labor also creating pseudo-hits.

Communicating with customer is tough. They want to know when they want to know and they don't think everything you have to say is all that cool or interesting.

Seth Godin is also one who encourages brevity.  Long blog posts (like this one) have people dropping like flies.

Minnpost had a great story in a recent day.  I follow Minnpost on Facebook and would have normally

missed this.  Too many topics, not people, are followed and it's as massive as the internet.  One of my Facebook friends has blocked all political posts, negative people, etc., returning Facebook to a friendly place.  Personally I'd like to block anything showing cat pictures.  The last two paragraphs could have stood on their own:

"It was a godsend for this prodigal son to see up close and personal how each of us have been participants in the same human comedy, sharing a plethora of trials and tribulations, triumphs and tragedies. Along this haphazard pilgrimage, all we really have is each other. To the remaining members of the class of 1963, a heartfelt thank you for sharing the early morning and late evening of my brief, but eventful, sojourn on this earth.
Don’t be a stranger."

It was a timely reminder that it's not all that important to be that important.

(Note:  It's 10:17...43 more minutes of creative opportunity)