Five Steps To Dealing With The Relentless Pace Of Marketing

Editor's Note: The following is an insightful, well-written essay authored and posted earlier this week by Todd Defren, principal of SHIFT Communications, and one of the world's most highly-respected public relations (PR) bloggers and social media experts. Defren's writings can be found on his blog, PR Squared, which is also required reading on The CMAC blogroll below. I enjoyed and agreed with this commentary so much that I am reprinting it here for all of you, my esteemed readers.
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The advent of social media has not only made the marketer’s role more strategic and complicated, it’s also made it much more BUSY. Our client was waxing nostalgic for the days when “getting ink” was the big mark of success.

Now it’s:

1. Get ink.
2. Track and engage influencers ranging from Scoble to a momblogger to a Facebook group admin.
3. Escalate customer service issues found online before they become a mess on Twitter or Google.
4. Develop fresh, compelling content, every single week (or every single day!) for the social media outposts including the corporate blog, the YouTube Channel, the Facebook Page, the Twitter stream, LinkedIn Answers, Slideshare, etc.
5. Keep tabs on competitive content.

“There are days when I just want to chuck it all,” the marketer said. “The job has become relentless, the requirements for content are voracious. Every day you see someone ELSE post something brilliant and buzzworthy — and you’re jealous and afraid — but then that bit of content is buried under something ELSE even better … So you realize that even the brightest bit of content you create has, at best, a 2–week shelf life, and by then you’d better be thinking about your Next Big Thing …”

Sound familiar? (Tired, yet?)

The cruelest part of this story is that this client contact wasn’t even 30–years-old yet! Despite their youth they were already exhausted.

This is a dilemma for every marketer, every PR agency, everyone. We recently lost a great employee because she had “crisped” from the pace. It’s understandable. I haven’t blogged in almost 2 weeks (due to a brief vacation and a busy schedule), and I’ve literally been in a near-panic about it, as I watch my friends like Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, David Armano, Valeria Maltoni, Jason Falls, etc. blog their booties off, with great content all along the way.

What to do?

When faced with overwhelming to-do’s, I find it best to break things down into the smallest parts possible. This doesn’t necessarily make the job easier in the end, but it does help to re-focus the mind on what’s important.

First: decide on your goals. Is your goal to be the coolest & most popular? Is your goal to be known as a thought leader in your industry? Is your goal to boost SEO for search terms related to your space? If you don’t figure this out, you’ll drive yourself nuts because lacking a plan, your ego will take over and drive you mad.

Second: ask for help. The voracious Interwebs should not be faced alone, not forever. For my part, I have initiated a series of casual conversations with friends and colleagues to enlist their aid in planning (and developing) “what’s next,” both for this blog and for SHIFT’s other digital embassies.

Third: set a reasonable pace. There will always be someone smarter, more prolific, and more popular than you or your company. Don’t fall prey to the need to compete on the speed of content creation; instead, set a pace that you know won’t drive you bonkers.

Fourth: “under-promise and over-deliver.” For example, promise youself you’ll write “One good blog post per week” (sounds reasonable), and if you write a second or (gasp!) a third post — you’ve over-exceeded a reasonable goal by 300 percent! Granted, this is related to “pace” but it extends to other areas such as measurement (see below), commenting on external blogs, developing a new series of Facebook quizzes, etc.

Fifth: measure. You’ll probably have to do this for your boss, anyway, but even if you don’t, set some reasonable metrics that you’re sure you can readily and easily track. There are tons of tools, both free (Google Analytics, Facebook Insights) and not-so-free (Sysomos, Radian6) that can give you a grasp on how you’re doing. Write those goals down and track your progress.

I hope this helped you. (It helped me!) Remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. A marathon takes training, endurance, and sticktoitiveness. Mostly sticktoitiveness.