Oddly, a Twitter account for the program was created – and as of today, has tweeted exactly once, on August 18. The general Banff Centre Twitter account has provided some information, but has failed to recognize the #banffscience hashtag.

I don’t want to be all judge-y and prescriptive here. But people have been live tweeting conferences and events for years now, and this is the second major failure to take advantage of an opportunity for some almost-free public relations I’ve seen this week.

The Banff Centre programs aren’t cheap (in excess of C$5k)  and there aren’t a lot of scholarships available for them. Everyone I know who’s attended any kind of course or workshop put on by the Banff Centre has raved about the experience, and the instructors in this program are top notch. The programs have grown, morphed, and expanded over the course of the last twenty years, getting bigger and better and more varied. In this particular program, the enthusiasm of both the participants and the instructors is palpable (see this tweet from John Rennie, one of the instructors, and this post from one of the scholarship winner attendees).

So far I haven’t seen any mainstream media coverage of this particular program. Instead, there was a Globe and Mail article this week about the Banff Centre, in which the claim that it makes Alberta Canada’s new arts hub is made. There’s no mention of the Science Communications program at all.

So here are some suggestions (and a prescription or two):

• If you’re marketing something (and the Banff Centre most definitely is marketing its programs, courses and workshops), make a commitment to do so and follow through on it.
• If you’ve established a social media presence, don’t neglect it. Use the power of crowd sourcing in particular and social media in general to tap into prospective volunteers. Inviting bloggers and live tweeters to attend and participate and comping them in to events is probably the cheapest marketing and public relations in which you’ll ever invest.
• Seize the day by getting out in front of the hashtag. #banffscience is a great hashtag. It’s a shame the Banff Centre doesn’t seem to have to twigged to the fact that it’s being used. But if a co-ordinated social media strategy was in place, the Centre itself would have created – and used – the hashtag.

Good corporate public relations drives employee retention and attraction. It also drives program participation. Wouldn’t it be nice if some of the Science Communications participants returned to the Banff Centre to take the adventure photography course? Or if some of the folks from the creative non-fiction course took the science communications course? Unique programming only goes so far. Right now, according to the Banff Centre’s stats, 75% of program participants are Canadian. But given the strength of the Canadian dollar and the meltdown in the US economy, plus the fact that many of the program’s instructors are Americans, wouldn’t it be nice to ensure there isn’t a 25% drop off in attendance?

I don’t mean to single out the Banff Centre or its Science Communications course. An international literary festival this week also demonstrated that it doesn’t quite get the value or scope of social media either – despite a Twitter feed and two mainstream journalists in attendance, with only three events running simultaneously they were unable to provide coverage of all three events on Twitter. That’s a shame, as well as a huge opportunity missed. It’s really not all that different from the case study/customer success story tactic, in which the client pays to have a case study developed and the client’s customer reaps the benefits of participating in the case study by getting public relations it hasn’t paid for.

Live tweeting and live blogging events may not drive attendance for your current programming. But it has the potential to drive future attendance in 2012, 2013,  2014, and beyond, at a time when your local, homegrown audience may well be vanishing. Don’t discount the ‘been there, done that’ factor or the fact that the ‘staycation’ may not be here to stay. You may well find volunteers among your existing staff who are willing to live blog or live tweet events. You’re paying them anyway. Their enthusiasm for promoting, organizing, and administering the events you put on will only increase if you allow them to participate by turning them into brand ambassadors and allowing them to showcase some of the skills you may not currently be paying them to use. It could be the cheapest professional development you ever offer them. And if you cast your net more widely for volunteer live tweeters, you’ll be amazed at the coverage you get and the goodwill you create. People will be banging down your doors for the opportunity to participate, not just spectate. Increasingly bloggers are transitioning to paid online and mainstream news organizations. You could be making a media friend for life. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?

I’m amazed at how often I have to remind authors and publishers (well ok I don’t have to remind them all but when it’s a book I’m involved in promoting or even just one I want to see do well, I can’t help myself) to cover off the basics.

The online book buying and recommendation process is not the same as the in-store buying experience, and while it’s got some advantages (instant gratification when you’re buying an ebook, for instance; no trek to the store or waiting for a special order to come in the case of pbooks), it’s also got some disadvantages. The inability to browse the entire book tops the list for me – while I’m a fairly conventional in-store browser easily hooked or turned off by the first page and I certainly never look at the last page of a book when considering buying it, I do flip through the book and my eye is often caught by a phrase or a paragraph that influences my decision to buy. Cover, paper colour, quality and show-through as well as typography influence me. I rarely buy books I think are ugly. When buying online though, I’ll let content override style if content’s available. If not, you’ve probably lost the sale.

Far too often though I notice publishers (whether traditional or self publishers) haven’t taken advantage of the ‘look inside’ feature on Amazon’s various sites. Borders offers a Google preview feature. At Barnes and Noble it’s ‘see inside.’ Chapters Indigo and Waterstones don’t offer this feature, and I can only hope they’ve got something in the works. And then there’s the matter of coverless books on Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing. So – here’s the pre-release checklist. If anyone can think of anything I’ve forgotten, please chime in in the comment section and I’ll update the list.

Authors: even though it may not seem like your job, you need to be engaged with your own product. If you notice your book is listed but the listing isn’t complete, get on the phone to your publisher, sic your agent on your publisher – just make it happen.

Pre-release checklist for authors and publishers

Publishers

1. As soon as the book you’re about to release is finalized, get the cover up on online booksellers’ sites.
2. Apply immediately to activate the ‘look inside’ (or whatever it’s called) feature everywhere you possibly can. People need to be able to browse online and without this feature, they’re dependent on reviews and on previous experiences with the author. If it’s a first novel they haven’t got the latter. And not all reviews are good. It can take a few days for this feature to ‘propagate’ – or whatever the heck it’s called in the online tech world. Don’t delay – and don’t start publicizing the release until it’s up and running. Some people may find it anyway, but you don’t have to make matters worse by promoting a book people can’t begin to judge for themselves.
3. Get the book listed on the three major book social networking sites, Goodreads, LibraryThing and Shelfari. Make sure a cover image is uploaded for each edition (hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback) and for each geographic region (people may not recognize the book if only the UK or only the US or only the Australian cover is posted).
4. Make sure you add both 10-digit and 13-digit ISBN numbers (having a copy of the book in front of you is helpful for this).
5. If you’ve invested in a trailer for the book you’re releasing, create a YouTube channel either for your publishing company or for the book and get content up there. You may want to put comment moderation on YouTube – it’s not your grandma’s social networking playground and it’s better to never let comments appear than it is let them get up there and then delete them.
6. Organize giveways on the book social networking sites for at least some of your titles. Don’t be stingy, especially with first books by unknown authors. In order for word of mouth to work, you’ve got to get mouths moving.
7. ASK people to add reviews to online book selling and book networking sites. They may do it if you don’t ask but they’re more likely to do it if you remind them to. This is one area in which the online book selling sites have an amazing advantage over bricks and mortar stores – take advantage of it, because it’s the one real advantages you’ve got over the three dimensional in store buying experience.

Authors

1. Get a decent photo of yourself taken and experiment with converting it to black and white if it’s a colour photo. Choose one you can live with for a while. While it would be nice to have an official photo shoot done, you may not be able to afford this. If you can take a decent self portrait, do it (you’d be amazed how much more interest self portraits generate on flickr than portraits do – presentation of self is fascinating to many). Make a deal with a decent photographer – amateur or pro – to ensure you don’t show up as an egg on Twitter or a big blank on Amazon and Goodreads. It matters. I know Julian Barnes is never going to propose to me. But I buy or read all his books and it isn’t just because he’s an amazing author. It’s also because, based on his photo, he’s someone I’d love to have a conversation with.
2. While your book’s being edited, make sure you’ve created author profiles on every online site that will be selling your book. That means multiple Amazon profiles – you’ll have to create them for .co, .com, .ca, .au. Don’t reinvent the wheel: use the same profile. This may make the process seem less onerous.
3. Repeat step 2 for Goodreads, LibraryThing and Shelfari.
4. Claim your books on the book social networking sites listed in step 3.
5. If you’ve got a blog or a web site, add the blog feed to the book social networking sites listed in step 3 and push your blog content to these sites.
6. Add your blog feed to your Facebook page as well and do status updates with new posts as well.
7. Get someone to take photos of the launch if you’re having one. The photos shouldn’t all be of you – get photos taken of people enjoying themselves at your reading/launch. Video works here too. Then post the photos to your Facebook page, tweet a few of them, blog about the experience (Were you terrified? Did you have fun? Were you artfully keeping your legs crossed so no one would see the run in your pantyhose? How many times did you check to see if your fly was open? Did someone ask a question that startled you, or made you think about the book you wrote or a character you created in a different light?)
8. Post news about your book – dates it will be available, translation rights sold, foreign rights sold, upcoming interviews, great reviews, interviews that have appeared or that you’re about to do, readings, signings, festivals you’re attending on Facebook and Twitter and the book social networking sites.
9. Create events when you’re making appearances on Goodreads and LibraryThing – or nag your publisher or publicist or your spouse if s/he’s willing to help – to do so.

What have I missed? Let me know in the comments and I’ll update the post.

Sorry about the subtitles, but English audio’s still available. Please let me know if the link stops working.

Here’s the interview.

One way or the other, the process of writing and publishing a novel is a marathon rather than a sprint, and it inevitably spans more than a year for most. The many slips that can occur between cup and lip in the course of writing a novel and being able to share it with readers include writer’s block (natch), rejection by agents and/or publishers, and a very slow time-to-market cycle: the book may be finished ahead of schedule, but if your publisher can’t afford to print and promote it in 2011, you’re looking at yet another delay of between six and 12 months.

Even if you, as an author, experience none of these delays and can juggle promotion of your 2010 novel as you’re plugging away at the one to be published in 2011, using a blog as the base of your social media pyramid has so many advantages I’m surprised there are writers without blogs. I wanted to highlight three very different authors’ blogs to give novelists some idea of the vastly different approaches they can take to blogging.

William Gibson’s Blog

Gibson’s blog was the first author blog I discovered. I used to see him on the streets of Vancouver’s Kitsilano, tall and slightly stooped. I always respected his privacy too much to accost him. What would I have said to him anyway? ‘I respect you so very much as a thinker and am delighted you to chose to leave the US for Canada so we can claim you as one of our own?’ (Would he understand that I admire his thinking more than his writing, in much the same way I prefer Iain Banks when he writes as Iain Banks rather than Iain M. Banks, i.e. that I struggle a bit with sci fi, although I’ve tried, I really have?) Although he blogs only intermittently when he’s in the throes of writing, his content is fascinating. Here’s a great post on quantum teleportation, artificial intelligence, the ‘after us, the deluge’ school of sci fi writing – with some gems about what he learned as an undergraduate. You can also find him on Twitter.

Amy King’s Blog

I’m not at all familiar with Amy (A.S.) King‘s work (she writes young adult fiction, and I believe I passed – or bypassed – that stage of life 40 or so years ago – in fact, I’m not sure the genre actually existed when I was 12-18), but found her on Twitter recently when this feisty post was retweeted by several folks I follow. What’s interesting about this post (and I hope to see more of this kind of post by Amy in future), is that she raises many issues relating to copyright and how it affects sales – issues about which writers, publishers, and readers need to think long and hard. Many of her posts announce contests, giveaways, and publicity dates for her forthcoming novel, Please Ignore Vera Dietz (October 12, 2010 US release date). All her posts give you insight into a writer’s life. If you’re a fan of her work, what better way to keep folks engaged while waiting for a new release?

Heather McCormack’s Blog

A newbie blogger with her first novel just barely under her belt, I was lucky enough to find Heather’s first post, again via Twitter. In case you’re not reading every one of my Twitter updates, I’ll repeat (paraphrased slightly) what I said about her inaugural post there: Authors, this is what I mean when I say ‘blog about your writing process and your inspiration.’ In Heather’s post she talks about inspiration, influences, the necessity to exorcise a demon or two through writing, what set her off on the novelist’s path. That’s what folks want to know. We all know that choosing to write fiction isn’t the most practical career choice. What readers want to know is how – and why – you choose to face down the odds.

Those odds may include not only trying to find an agent, get a novel finished, get published, make a decision about your book’s cover. They may also include other aspects of writing – how to make the transition from short story writer to novelist, journalist or essayist to book author (fiction or non-fiction), or from non-fiction writer to fiction writer. The audience for Margaret Atwood’s book on debt is not the same for her novels. Nor is her poetry audience identical to her literary criticism audience. Nor have all the loyal readers of her contemporary – or her historical fiction novels Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin – necessarily been fans of her more recent futuristic fiction (the same can inevitably be said of Doris Lessing on the contemporary novel/sci fi front). Roll on the Venn diagrams showing there is an overlap in a single author’s various fan bases – I don’t doubt for a moment there is. But by using the categories features on blogs, you can immediately direct readers to the posts that interest them most. You can also expand your potential readership base by being genuine about your own heroes, as Heather does when she talks about Greil Marcus.

Will all Greil Marcus fans become Heather McCormack readers/book purchasers? It’s doubtful. Some might – and by adding a Greil Marcus tag to a blog post Heather would/could (has? I confess I haven’t checked) make it that much easier for his fans to find – and connect with – her. I’ve never forgotten it was J.D. Salinger in Catcher in the Rye who sent me down the path of discovery to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native.

These are only three examples of (non-client) authors with highly individual approaches to blogging. I know there are many, many more. What are your favourite author blogs? Who are the authors whose blogs you love (almost) more than their work? And who’s doing a spectacularly bad job of author blogging? And who’s not blogging who should be?

Andrew’s right – Twitter in particular and social media in general are such overwhelming and customizable experiences that it’s really bewildering when you first try to get involved and leverage it for business goals. One of the things I really enjoy about working with authors, (aside from the fact that you can count on them to do some of the writing for you – because let’s face it, public relations is about writing compelling copy in exactly the right way – and then tweaking it and repurposing it and coming up with yet another catchy angle that will help you reach another segment of your target audience) – where was I? Oh yes – while authors (not the ones I work with!) may sometimes be a bit off in the EQ department, they’re rarely slouches when it comes to IQ.

This means that if they’ll listen, they learn. Before you know it, they’re teaching you things. I’ve learned a lot about how to behave on Twitter from Stuart Clark, and I used him as a shining example when I was working with Andrew on his initial Twitter training, namely:

• Thank people for retweets (RTs) and for follow Friday (#ff) recommendations.
• Always check your @messages. Engage with the people who are seeking to engage with you. Always be gracious. Don’t get involved in gossipy and churlish pissing matches.
• Let people on Twitter get a little glimpse of who you are as a person, not just an author flogging a book – let your passions show a little bit.

So I’m delighted to pass on a couple of great posts that Andrew found and tweeted re authors and social media.

The first is Holly Robinson’s Huffington Post article on a writer’s first year with social media.

The second is Penny Sansivieri’s Twitter primer (also a HuffPo post).

As for Stuart? Well – as he’s about to make the transition from non-fiction to fiction author with the first of his three novels about astronomy and science giants, he too is reading and sharing more information about not just astronomy and cosmology, but is also beginning to engage with fiction readers, by sharing this review of Juli Zeh’s novel about two competitive physicists, Dark Matter.

The best thing about working with writers? Establishing goals that support marketing objectives is a dawdle. It’s not about building brand awareness or shifting public opinion. It’s about selling books. And by selling I mean sharing. Because readers are passionate people with an insatiable desire for their next fix. And it had better be quality stuff. Writers are the folks who supply that demand, either through content creation or content sharing. I’m so glad they exist. I’m even more glad I get to work with some of them.

DeNel found me via a guest post I’d done on Kimberly Walsh’s East Coast by Choice blog and a comment I’d left on her own blog, where she’d reviewed Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, The Lacuna. She took at look at my blog and got in touch via email to ask me to do a guest lecture to her class. Once we worked out the time and date logistics (since my East Coast sojourn was back in 1973 and I was pretty sure she didn’t have budget to fly me to Halifax), I stopped procrastinating about needing a computer with more juice, bought a refurbished iMac, and mastered Skype for once and for all.

My first test run on Skype taught me a valuable lesson: makeup required for Skype video because even north light produces glare, and I didn’t want to look like a burn victim with unhealed skin grafts (no offense intended). That meant an earlier start for me, but that’s ok – I didn’t want to scare people or rattle myself (although I have to say, the great advantage of doing an in-person talk is that you don’t have to look at yourself while you’re doing it – at least not after the rehearsing-in-front-of-a-mirror segment of the procedure is over).

DeNel and I agreed to try to keep the experience as technologically simple as possible. I emailed her the link to the presentation I planned to use (which I’d found on my friend Allen Gibson’s blog) so she could run the PowerPoint and I could focus on trying to make sense.

Here it is:

Marta Kagan

As follow up, I sent DeNel an email recommending a few books for her students, namely:

The New Rules of Marketing & PR – David Meerman Scott
The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media – Paul Gillin
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies – Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook – Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo

I also sent a link to Mhairi Petrovic’s web site, which I mentioned in my talk. Her blog (here’s the feed so you can subscribe) is a classic example of how to position yourself as a thought leader in a particular space (social media marketing – I rely on Mhairi’s posts to ensure I have at least a passing acquaintance with what’s happening in that hyper-evolutionary field).

I spoke briefly about the need to customize social media strategies, particularly in the context of small businesses and a recent post I’d read that questioned the value of social media for small businesses in particular. One student challenged me on this (rightly so!), based on her internship work experience with a local Halifax bakery (I’m hoping she’ll remind me of the name of the bakery in the comments section), which gave me a chance to talk about the importance of geolocation services for location-specific businesses, regardless of whether they’re seeking to expand to other cities or franchise. I also mentioned the stellar job Sarah Petegree of Bray’s Cottage Pork Pies is doing with combined social media and traditional PR strategies. I should also have mentioned another UK company, Wiggly Wigglers. The Marketing Profs case study I read was the first I’d come across that talked actual dollars and ROI for social media marketing vs traditional advertising spend (afraid that one is paid content so I can’t link to it here). From what I can remember, ad spend was cut by more than 85% and sales increased by more than 300%.

We talked very briefly about measurement of social media efforts – a vast subject in and of itself, and I suggested a customized approach to that as well, but one that kept an eye on some sort of bottom line – if not sales, then at least hits/web traffic/app download increases – something relatively tangible.

I also talked about the folly of attempting to do all your customer service via social media in general and Twitter in particular, and how disastrous that could be. Within five minutes of finishing the lecture, I came across this fantastic post from Radian 6 about how they manage connecting and engaging with customers online. Hint: by working both smart and hard at it.

For more social media smarts, here’s a video everyone needs to see, Social Media Revolution 2. As for the motivation for this post? Partly great content that needed to be consolidated in one linkable spot, but mostly because DeNel told me she’d assigned one of her students to monitor my blog. Time to generate some more content then!

To today’s MSVU students: you were a great crowd. Hope to hear from you in the comments below. C’mon. Try it. You’ll like it. See that big RSS feed button? Click on it, it won’t bite. Ultimately it will make your lives easier.

It’s so very clear when you engage with social media that we’re all members of many tribes. I’d love to see graphic illustration of tribes and how we connect with folks on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. based on our interests. Haven’t seen the app for that yet, although I’m betting there’s already one in the works.

‘I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy,’ says Alexie’s protagonist, Junior, ‘but I was not alone in my loneliness…. I realized that sure, I was a Spokane Indian. I belonged to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of American immigrants. And to the tribe of basketball players. And to the tribe of bookworms.

And the tribe of cartoonists.
And the tribe of chronic masturbators.
And the tribe of teenage boys.
And the tribe of small-town kids.
And the tribe of Pacific Northwesterners.
And the tribe of tortilla chips-and-salsa lovers.
And the tribe of poverty.
And the tribe of funeral go-ers.
And the tribe of beloved sons.
And the tribe of boys who really missed their best friends.’

‘It was a huge realization,’ concludes Junior. ‘And that’s when I knew that I was going to be okay.’

Whenever I think of this passage I immediately want to start listing tribes to which I belong. So I thought I’d give it a shot. Feel free to list some tribes to which you belong in the comments.

I’m a member of

the bookworm tribe
the feminist tribe
the WASP tribe
the Echo tribe
the PR tribe
the writer tribe
the social media tribe
the quilting tribe
the Canadian tribe
the Southern Alberta tribe (at the moment, anyway)
the Anglophile tribe
the Austen lovers tribe
the foreign film lovers tribe (my one regret about not having cable is the inability to get a dose of Bollywood once a week – don’t ask me why, I can’t explain it)
the Fitzgerald lovers tribe
the Salinger lovers tribe
the Eric Rohmer and Wim Wenders lovers tribe
the ‘why?’ girls’ tribe
the knitters’ tribe
the quilters’ tribe
the Six Feet Under tribe
the fast-talking Easterner tribe

That’s all I can think of at the moment. How about you?

While I don’t agree entirely with the analysis by Jeremiah Owyang, former Forrester analyst, now Altimeter Group partner, I couldn’t agree with him more when he says Twitter is ‘being treated like a chat room’ by most marketers, ‘not a marketing platform.’ I do think the SWOT portion in particular is less than comprehensive, and I’d like to quibble about the line re ‘Usage by tech savvy, media, and celebs.’

Why quibble about that? (At this point something I’d written got lost between drafts; I’ve tried to reconstruct it in the rest of this paragraph. Just, you know, to make sense!) It’s not that I disagree that – I’m going to call them geeks, not the ‘tech savvy’ because if you own a computer for personal use you’re tech savvy, media and celebs have the largest number of followers, tweet the most and make the greatest use of Twitter. It’s just that I don’t necessarily think they make the best use of Twitter. Most media outlets still automate their tweets, don’t interact with their followers, and don’t get that it’s an interactive medium. Ditto many celebrities. And the geeks – well – again – there’s a lot of navel gazing and infighting amongst Twitter’s earliest adopters and most vehement proponents. And Twitter’s growth isn’t coming from these people; it’s coming from the non-geeks who are beginning to realize social media presents an opportunity. (That’s not quite what I said the first time but it’s what I was trying to say – and where did it go to anyway – between-draft limbo?)

Twitter’s greatest strength is actually the power it gives the user to customize her/his own experience with the medium. Trending topics notwithstanding (you don’t have to even glance at them), what makes it a brilliant platform is the fact that it allows you to listen to and connect with only the interesting people at the party and pay no attention whatsoever to the egregious bores, the time wasters, the hysterics, the gawkers and the ambulance-chasers (no, I don’t mean personal injury lawyers, I mean the people who thrive on fomenting controversy/scandal/gossip).

Your Twitter experience will undoubtedly be entirely different from mine, and that’s the beauty of it. I follow a diverse and fascinating group of: global media outlets and journalists; scientists; quilters; authors; Vancouverites; local folk; PR, marketing and social media types; publishers; museums; people I know in real life; people I don’t know in real life; people I’d like to know in real life, and people I probably wouldn’t care to meet. At one point I was following people on Twitter so I could keep my eye on them for competitive intelligence reasons. I’m not doing that any more. Life is too short.

I should also point out that I’m an extremely fast reader (although I retain little), and that I assimilate information well via print and text. My aural comprehension is almost nil. But I actually got through an average of 2500 pages of reading a week in third year university as an English major. I know there are other people like me.

One of the best points in the analysis cited is the boilerplate: ‘Everyone has a morning ritual…I invest two hours reading, thinking and blogging each morning. I hope this helps you cut through the noise – if it was helpful, please pass it on, email to colleagues, tweet it, and blog about it.’

This may well not be your idea of a morning ritual (it wouldn’t be most people’s – long hot showers and gallons of coffee would probably be more like it; getting yourself, your children, and your pets cleaned, dressed, fed and dispatched is usually part of the equation too).

Social media is probably not your area of expertise. If it isn’t – and if you haven’t got the time or the will to adequately research it – it can be bewildering, pointless, ineffective and exhausting. This great post by Mhairi Petrovic of Outsmarts lists some of the pitfalls of social media and provides some great suggestions on how to avoid them.

Of these tips, I’d have to say ‘develop a strategy’ is the most important. I’d also add: hire a consultant to help you develop your strategy. Unless you don’t value your own time at all, getting caught up in the never-ending party on your computer is going to leave you short on sleep, frustrated, lacking in perspective, and probably no closer to achieving your agreed-upon goals. No consultant worth his/her salt is going to pretend they can help you achieve an impossible goal – or fail to tell you when your expectations are unreasonable.

This week on Twitter I’ve watched a major UK cell phone provider make a horrific mess of customer service by over-reliance on Twitter as a way to deliver customer service. I’ve also seen two major media outlets deal ineffectively with a spammer and watched friends who did something good get their feelings hurt and become embroiled in a small but pointless controversy that’s undoubtedly interfered with their productivity today.

Time is time and money is money. I’ve always contended that since time is the one truly non-sustainable and non-renewable resource we’ve got, my time is as valuable to me as yours is to you, regardless of our respective incomes or hourly rates. While Mrs. McCooeye, Grade 8, was right when she wrote on my report card, ‘Ruth would get more out of Reading Club if she put more into it,’ there was a presumption on her part that I wanted to get something out of it. I didn’t. I just wanted to read. But if you’re investing your personal or your corporate time (and your organization’s resources) in social media, you’d better want to get something out of it, i.e. have a goal. At the very least you should make sure you’re not doing harm to yourself or your organization via social media.

How can you find the right consultant? Ask people you know who’ve used one. Check their blogs, their Twitter feeds, and their LinkedIn profiles. See if you like what they have to say about their areas of expertise and if you like the way they conduct themselves in the public mediums in which they engage. Ask a consultant you’re considering using if you can talk to or email some of her/his clients. Try to get some idea of how the consultant works best – and if your organization/project fits in with the consultant’s interests and expertise. Compatibility matters almost as much as expertise. Put in the front end time to find the right consultant so you can work smarter rather than harder.

I know that last sentence may seem not only counter-intuitive (consultants are supposed to be vying for your business, not the other way around, right?) but wrong-headed. If your budget is big enough, the detailed RFP route may still be the way to go. It’s a process I no longer participate in, because I’m not willing to spend a week’s time researching and writing a proposal, and I’m neither interested in nor equipped to work with large companies on megaprojects. But that’s just me.