How much is enough?

Ever asked yourself "Am I spending enough time on this?" Or too much?

An easy way to find out is to work out:

1) What do I expect to achieve? The simple act of goal setting will give you an accurate picture of the relative scale and importance of the task or project compared to others in your remit.

2) Time evaluation: We are looking to assess value out vs effort in; the simplest way to do this quickly is to work out how many hours you have in total. Then assess what percentage of your time will have to be expended to achieve the result.

Ideally the time % should be lower than the result % but equal is fine too. Pursuing more than the occasional effort where the % goes the other way is a quick route to late nights and under productivity.

Ringing the changes

Driving significant change within your organisation is one of the toughest things anyone can do, however as is often the case it can also be essential to the future profitability of your business.

You may often feel frustrated, isolated and like you are making no headway at all. I've listed a few things below that are helping me keep my chin up at the moment:

- Mark out your milestones or key achievements, put them somewhere in clear view and cross them off as you get through them. This will help you feel like you are making progress.
- Find a mentor (or several) to bounce ideas off or get advice from when you get to a sticky patch. This will not only increase your effectiveness as a change initiator but it makes you feel less like you are going it alone.
- Make time for your change and make time for you. It is easy in a busy job to get caught up in your day to day and not devote meaningful chunks of time to your project. It is even easier to forget to go home! We are fresher, brighter and better at making changes when we haven't been working 14 hour days for 3 months.

If anyone has any others I would love you to share them, like I said it's a tough job!

Interesting visual representation of social media tools

I found this cool Banner B2B Social Media Map on SlideShare via HubSpot and thought it was interesting as a follow on from a post I read that covered marketing as a whole as a map.

Banner B2B Social Media Map

View more presentations from Jay Ball.

KPIdiocy?

I spent this morning struggling to piece together conclusions by analysing data from 40 different spreadsheets, all containing different data sets, from which I wrote an entire essay of commentary and strategy. It took me 8 hours of straight slog, as well it should.

I then sat down to write the annual KPIs into a table; a task that should have taken 20 minutes tops given all the work I have just completed. 1.5 hours later, I'm still here with a blank table, writing my blog and not getting any closer to completing the task at hand.

Why? Because setting KPIs feels counter intuitive in modern marketing. Sure we have to have something to measure against, it helps us be effective and fair managers right? It gives us a nice neat little yardstick by which to measure our progress.

But it also feel prescriptive, formulaic and just plain wrong in a world where marketers have a million options, a thousand possible permutations of each of those options and there isn't just one right answer any more.

8 blog posts per plan anyone? One Tweet a day or 5? 3 emails to your engaged leads or 33? We can't take a one size fits all approach to event marketing any more and so KPIs have become nigh on impossible to set.

My current plan is to have a set of evaluations, rather than concrete metrics; a set of things that the marketer must show they have considered and decided to use or not.

Any bright ideas, please shout! :-)

"Edge Work" and drawing satisfaction from incremental change

Yesterday I was introduced to the concept of edge work, the idea that we work away at the edges of an issue and gradually, over time, effect significant change. There was only one problem with this concept as far as I can see, that is the marketer who introduced this idea to me clearly has far more patience and zen-like abilities than I do.

So, how do impatient people who want everything done right about yesterday in one big glorious change revolution derive satisfaction from this inching almost imperceptibly closer to the goal?

I talked to a friend about it later in the evening and they came up with a very unlikely answer. WeightWatchers.

Huh? How is a weight loss programme going to teach me to be satisfied with moving at the pace of a heavily tranquilised snail? Her answer was this:

At WeightWatchers they ask you not to try and weigh yourself every day, but to wait for the weekly group weigh-ins. The reason for this is that your weight fluctuates daily even though it is ultimately on a downward trajectory. If you look every day you see ups and downs and get demotivated with the whole effort.

By monitoring your progress over a longer period, you see it for what it really is. Progress in the right direction. To help me understand she showed me her week to week chart; the line wasn't straight (in fact sometimes it was pretty flat and sometimes moving significantly downwards) but the direction was clear.

So there you have it; set a goal, set sensible increments to check your progress against it and board the train for zen-like patience and deep satisfaction in what you have acheived. (I'll let you know how it goes!)