You might have read last week about the PRapalooza on Blogtalkradio. During that episode I interviewed pros in the new media space Danny Brown, Gini Dietrich and Shonali Burke. In the course of the interview I had some prepared questions for the panel, the aim of those questions was to take advantage of the collective thought leadership of the group. One of those questions was:
If you could only spend one our per week on the Internet what would you do in that hour?
The responses of the panel were varied but speak volumes to where many of the pros spend their time. Here is a index of the time the panelists would spend based and where they would spend it as a % of the single hour allotment.
| Panelist | Listen Plt. | Blogging | Youtube | Amplify | Flickr | Email Mktg | |||
| Danny Brown | 50% | 13% | 13% | 17% | 8% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| Shonali Burke | 0% | 17% | 0% | 50% | 0% | 25% | 8% | 0% | 0% |
| Gini Dietrich | 0% | 33% | 8% | 50% | 8% | 0% | 8% | 0% | 0% |
As you can see the panelists had varied responses based largely on their strategy but there were some clear trends:
This panel clearly believes that blogging and twitter are the two most important places overall to spend their time. I was also personally satisfied to see Amplify on Shonali’s list, no it was not a sponsored placement but I am to Amplify what iJustine is to Apple after all! It was also interesting to see how little time the panel would spend on Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube. Are there any surprises in this data for you?
The panel was then asked the same question but in the context of their clients:
If your clients could only spend one our per week on the Internet what would you suggest they do in that hour?
This is when things got a little interesting and much more focussed, here is the index per panelist for their client activity:
| Panelist | Listen Plt. | Blogging | Youtube | Amplify | Flickr | Email Mktg | |||
| Danny Brown | 0% | 50% | 0% | 50% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| Shonali Burke | 0% | 33% | 0% | 50% | 8% | 0% | 0% | 8% | 0% |
| Gini Dietrich | 0% | 0% | 0% | 40% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 60% |
As initially noted this activity is far more focussed, it becomes more evident when you average the figures out:
Not only does this panel believe that their clients should be more focussed they believed blogging and Twitter were even more important for their customers to participate. We also learned that based on the market they represent the time spent would vary greatly – Gini Dietrich’s clients are middle market and she felt that Email marketing was very critical to success.
My Allocation
I had obviously more time to think about it than the panelists did, but I tried to do the exercise quickly and decided to add this right as I was finishing the post:
| Listen Plt. | Blogging | Youtube | Amplify | Flickr | Email Mktg | ||||
| Joe Hackman | 0% | 17% | 8% | 33% | 8% | 17% | 17% | 0% | 0% |
| Joes Clients | 0% | 25% | 0% | 33% | 0% | 25% | 17% | 0% | 0% |
I am probably more diluted than most people I do a lot of things but if it came down to only having an hour this is a pretty good estimation of what I would do with that hour. I’ve remained committed to Facebook because I think it is a excellent long term play. I am also very committed to maintaining a presence on Amplify.
For my clients I also recommended a more focussed approach but since I do see Amplify as a sort of hybrid between blogging and Twitter. I encourage my clients to use Amplify as a means to produce content on their blogs quickly and easily and as a place to start making connections. You can connect much faster on Amplify than you can anywhere else on the Internet in my experience. Those relationships carry over to your blogs, Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere.
Question: How would you allocate your hour?
In early September I saw a post by Mari Smith about a social analytics website called Twentyfeet.com. In typical Mari fashion she described why she liked the site and her list included the fact that Giraffe’s are among her favorite animals. When you first visit twentyfeet.com you will see how the Giraffe branding works, it’s very creative and revolves around the measuring of your web activity, primarily new media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. Since the Giraffe is the tallest land animal on the planet reaching as high as “Twenty Feet” in height, see where they are going with that? I immediately signed up and thought from the onset that this was going to be a useful site for me, but I had much to learn about the real value of the site. That of course takes time but I think this article will help you cut through that learning curve a little.
