For some reason today it hit me how many tweets I read from the local Singaporean bloggers have become increasingly brand-focused over the last few months. And in many instances not because they are genuinely fans of the brand, but because they’re part of this programme or that outreach or whatever it is.

If Twitter (and social media) is a channel, then these brand-pushed tweets are no different from the ad in the middle of my magazine, billboard when I drive on the road or 30 second ad in the middle of my tv show. They’re disruptive and we’re back where the whole problem with traditional media began.

The problem here is twofold:

1) Agencies are lazy
I think it’s time to go beyond blogger outreach. This is a whole blog post on its own so I won’t get into it here. The other problem is

2) Bloggers allow it
I don’t even know if this is a conscious or subconscious decision, but how many bloggers are blogging about what got them started in the first place? I look at a couple of blogs who I used to follow and now the word “advertorial” is in every other post. I think we (bloggers) need to remember what got us those readers to subscribe to our blogs in the first place. What got the first 10, 50, 100, 200, 500 people to follow us on Twitter in the first place. I’m pretty sure 9/10 times the reason is not “so they could get messages from brands” and to be free walking breathing tweeting advertisements for them. As Jo from Flowing Motion put it to me today while discussing the topic: “what about your reputation?”

The whole promise about social media was that it would be a conversation. People would feel passionately (or not) about products and services and by communicating with each other, hopefully community is built and advocacy is developed. And yes, I recognise that it won’t always be organic and that sometimes a brand will reach out and we bloggers will respond, but really, let’s try to maintain some decorum of self-dignity and refuse to be the new marketing vehicles of companies because we have worked hard to build up our credibility and to be relevant to our audiences and have their trust.

Is that really worth that extra blog post just so you’ll get invited to that next event that has barely anything to do with your blog content?

You decide.

Pat has a great post with the same title: how to be a social media junkie and keep your job over on Blankanvas and it inspired me to make a post of my own, though I certainly don’t mean to compare my fresh 3-month agency life with her career!

It took me awhile to figure out that I although my work and personal life crisscross in that the subject matter happens to be the same, there would be no way to manage this on a long term basis unless I turned it into a well-oiled machine, and I finally feel like I have that routine nailed down enough to get close to full productivity at the office.

First, a little bit of what I do. I work in a 100% digital ad agency so thankfully all my client work is online. While I have my fair share as billable hours, as the resident “social media guy”  (not guru) in the team, I maintain all of BLUE’s social media presence from the BLUE blog to our twitter account to delicious, stumble upon, Facebook and the like. As with anything, maintaining these accounts and doing my billable work takes time, so this is how my typical day goes:

0745: get up, check my own Gmail for important mails I need to take note of, have a once-over my RSS feed and check in on Facebook.

0900 (ish): reach the office, clear my work email and work Gmail. This includes looking for comments on the BLUE blog, seeing who’s followed us on Twitter, approving friend requests on Facebook and anything else that might have come through those channels.

0945: check in on BLUE’s Twitter account to look for anything interesting, mentions, DMs or tweets worth re-tweeting. I make it a point to try to follow 3-5 new people daily just to expand our horizons. We deal in everything digital so everyone from design to mobile people to SEO/SEM to social media to even mainstream marketing people are all “fair game”.

1010: next I peer into my rss feed on Outlook (which is separate from my personal Google Reader feed) to look for stuff that’s relevant to the team and stuff that will help with thought leadership, case studies and the like. Where applicable I forward them to the team or bookmark them on delicious, stumble upon etc. I also make a quick scan of oursignal.com just to see what else people find interesting.

By the time all this is done it’s anywhere between 1030 to 11am and I move on to whatever tasks I have for the day. This is where it enters “anything goes” territory and things are a little flexible, but I always feel like I cleared an important part of my routine by now. And in fact given the line of work I’m in, that’s about all the routine I can expect. There was one week where I had more work than normal to do and I completely didn’t engage in this routine for a good four days. It took me a long while to dig myself out of that black hole.

As much as starting the day off is important, I like to end it with some structure too. There’s a great post on Webworker Daily called firewall your time and I try to dedicate half an hour starting at around 545 to do certain tasks:

• Achieve inbox zero (both work and Gmail) (I sometimes fail this step)
• Check ‘later’ email folder for actionable items
• Save sent emails worth saving
• Check outlook calendar and Google Calendar for appointments/events tomorrow that I might have to prepare for
• Write todo list for next day
• Review any stuff I wrote down on paper today
• Check check my tickler notes for today and tomorrow to see if there’s anything outstanding for today I need to do, or take note of for tomorrow
• Clear physical inbox (things that I have to process once goes in here: paper to recycle, trash to throw, stuff to bring home. So I don’t shuttle back and forth)
• Fill up my timesheet (daily is a must)
• Decide what to do when home, enter that into my tickler file
• Clear what I can from my Outlook RSS feeds
• Clear my desktop – limited to what I’m working on tomorrow and archiving the rest. (I usually fail this step)

After work, I clear stuff I’ve written down on my tickler file and generally do my own thing (game, catch a movie, have dinner etc) but more often than not stuff I read online is work related, so I email that to myself and make a note of what action I should take the next day.

So that’s what I do to keep myself same, get my social media ‘fix’ and keep my job (so far) all at the same time. How about you?

ps: Interestingly enough, almost exactly a year ago Pat and I did a similar ‘day in the life’ post talking about the brands we would come into contact with and use throughout the day. Read about her brand timeline and mine if you’re so inclined. (Caveat: I was in Canada at the time of that post, so Canadian brands will probably be overly represented)

Is the company that is clueless about social media, which is equally harmful for the fresh grads looking for jobs thinking they actually found one that’s social media-related.

I’ve had enough of this social media “guru” bashing (for the record, I don’t consider myself one of them). I’ll take the opposite point of view, a view i was particularly familiar with until about three months ago:

How about all these companies who think they want to be involved and throw around catchphrases like join the conversation but have no clue whatsoever what they should be doing? Yeah you know the kind I’m talking about. Those who want to know how many Facebook friends you have so that they can use you to invite some of them to their “influencer events” or readily dump you the awesome job of “setting up a Facebook group” (while Facebook is blocked by their firewall).

Those are both true stories by the way.

The fact here is there’s a gap. A gap which both sides are readily willing to exploit. I’m not agreeing with either but let’s face it, companies who hire the social media “gurus” aren’t really victims here. They get them because they’re equally eager and greedy at the chance to jump into this and will hire anyone, qualified or not, and don’t bother to do their research.

Think about it. The social media “gurus” lure companies in with the false promises of solving their social media problems and take their money, the companies lure job applicants with real talent with the false promises of a chance to work in real social media and take a piece of their soul. Either way someone is getting conned.

It’s a match made in heaven.

As I type this, there’s a live concert going on on YouTube (yes, YouTube) by U2.

I’m by no means a fan of U2 (don’t kill me) but there are a few interesting things about how this is done.

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