Today information is accumulating at an amazing rate. With the great opportunities that exist via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and all the strong individual blogs out there, how can you possibly get hold of the best information to allow your company to make more money? Social networking is great but at the end of the day we still have a responsibility to our shareholders. How do you define if the time you spend in the wonderful world of Web 2.0 is productive or not. What is your marketing web 2.0 strategy? Quite simply, if what you are doing is making you more money than it is a good use of time and if you cannot quantify the value of it then you need to spend your time on something that has impact on profit. The simple question to ask is: Did my time help me acquire a customer, grow my relationship with a customer or reduce my cost? If you cannot answer yes to at least one of these questions, move on to something that does.
Please do not get me wrong, in the fast food world we live in I certainly understand and subscribe to the importance of blogging, article marketing, etc. and the time investment that this takes. Ultimately you need to understand intrinsic value of your marketing web 2.0 strategy and how it will impact your business over time. You also need to understand what others are doing online and make a place for those ideas in your execution of an online marketing program. But I also know how easily you can get caught in the massive amount of information that is coming at you on a daily basis and lose sight of what is you end goal; money.
In addition to constantly asking the three questions outlined above, I recommend the following actions:
1.Stop letting your inbox run your day. On the average day I receive 200 e-mails that require my attention. It is easy to become tied to my inbox, but this does not maximize my productivity and profit. It is easy for me to go to Outlook to look for a piece of information to complete a task and on my way to that data I see I have a new message and get sidetracked from the reason I went to Outlook in the first place. I have now set limits on when I will check my e-mail.
2.Organize the information overflow. Receiving a lot of data at the time you need it least is useless. If you come across something interesting, save it to a folder for later reading. What you will find is if you are not willing to spend the time saving and categorizing the data is was never worth looking at in the first place and would have just gathered dust on the corner of your desk.
At the end of the day if you keep focused on your goals and driving the right results, the decisions are easy. They key is not to lose sight of the goal while data is coming at you at an alarming rate.