What would the first week in January be without a post about New Years resolutions?  Mine aren’t of the “get to the gym” variety. Instead, my plan for 2010 is to use the web – especially Social Media – more effectively.

In part this means learning to avoid what Penelope Trunk calls The 4 Lies About Social Media. (In her post these are more “myths” or “mistakes” than lies. I don’t know why she calls them lies but being provocative is a good way to get noticed. It helps your Google page rank, too. Hence the title of this post, which originally was just “New Years Resolutions” – and another resolution: to get better at writing for search engines.)

In my quest to improve my social media skills this year I am very fortunate to be surrounded by a team of well connected and highly creative colleagues. I want to make it clear that my skills (and deficits) are my own; Zavee, collectively, is poised for the leadership you expect of us. Another way of putting it is, my real New Years resolution is to become as smart as my staff! With that caveat in mind, here are some of my Web-related resolutions for 2010:

1. Take better advantage of Linkedin. Penelope says that Linkedin is a great scorecard for the size of one’s network but it’s a “lie” to say that it’s useful for building a network. The scorecard aspect is useful (e.g., for employers who want to learn about how connected a job candidate is).  However, Linkedin is not for conversations, so it is not a good way to build a network. I see her point about conversations – it may be the only thing you can’t do on Linkedin. On the other hand, Linkedin provides many opportunities to get found, get noticed and get followed. Unfortunately, I haven’t really figured out how to use Linkedin efficiently and proactively – how best to use features such as starting discussions and asking questions. Fortunately, my marketing people don’t have that problem. So my personal resolution is to follow their guidance so I can understand Linkedin better and use it more effectively.


Happy New Year!

2. Build our brand with Twitter. Penelope says that networks require conversations but it’s a “lie” that Twitter is the place to have them. She says Twitter is better for finding and following people with similar ideas and interests. We do use Twitter to keep up with tweets about Social Media, loyalty marketing and other topics that interest us, and tools such as TweetDeck and HootSuite make it easy to manage different accounts, searches and lists. However, I know that I have a lot to learn about creating a presence on Twitter and achieving the kind of scale that will enable us to use Twitter to leverage the Zavee brand. Fortunately, our community manager has a great deal of experience with Twitter. My New Years resolution is to learn from her how to build a brand with Twitter.
3. Make Zavee Thinking more relevant. Penelope says that blogs are networking tools, not personal journals, and I certainly agree. I think I’ve been disciplined in how and what we write about on this blog.  I write from the small business perspective, whether I am posting about trends and concepts or about tools and techniques. For 2010, however, I intend to focus a bit more on practical solutions for merchants, including by posting about how merchants can get the most out of Zavee. Even this post, which is superficially about me, is really about how I can better be the “lead blocker” for merchants who are trying to make progress with unfamiliar tools and concepts.
4. Use our Facebook fan page to help build our member community. Penelope’s fourth “lie” is that social media is no place for business. In fact, businesses are finding new and interesting ways to use social media all the time, and social media channels are constantly developing business-oriented tools and features. One example is Facebook’s fan page. We have one, and we want it to be the destination for our Zavee community. One way to do this is to use Facebook to extend the content we can deliver on the Zavee site. Facebook is great for managing events and user-generated content, both of which are important to us.  We will have more to say over the next few months about our member community and how Facebook fits into our strategy. For now, we’ll just say that our final resolution for 2010 is to build our community as we build our business, which includes being smart about Facebook.

See? Nothing too difficult there! Maybe I have time to hit the gym.