“Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday…The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.” ~Ayn Rand

This year on Thanksgiving day I would like to express my thankfulness for my lovely bride, my family and friends, and my readers that have made this blog such a success.

I am also thankful that my wife found a good job in New Hampshire, in a great little town. One year ago today we were in Lacrosse, WI for my little sister’s wedding, in the first leg of a long journey of self-discovery and exploration. Some might call it a vacation, or a sabbatical, whatever – it was fun and brought us closer together.

I am looking forward to an even better year in 2010, as my new job as a restaurant manager develops ( I am creating some cool content for a new e-book for that industry). I am looking forward to getting more focused on some personal development, especially in being healthier. This winter is going to be awesome.

God bless all of you.

Let me start with this: I met these gentlemen in May of 2008 at SOBCon and they are two of the most knowledgeable and sincere people that I have encountered. I really didn’t know who they were or what they did, but I have sure learned a lot from them since then.

In fact, I have spent about 3 years learning about what is in this book:

You need to go to Amazon and order this book right now. It’s okay, I’ll wait.

This book is a complete course in how to do business online in today’s world. There is quite a bit of buzz about this book, it is a NY Times best-seller after all. But that is not why I want you to go out and buy it, or why I gush a little about how cool Chris and Julien are. No, the reason is that you can save yourself a lot of time and effort learning the things that I learned the hard way – reading lots and lots of blog posts and e-books and whatever else I could get my hands on.

Trust Agents – Find out what Social Media is really all about

Chris and Julien have put together a reference book and instruction manual for gaining the background and skills that you need to bring your business into the world of Web 2.0 and beyond. To quote from the introduction:

“Trust Agents is the answer to the question,”What do I do now?” It is full of actionable information, supported by research and strategies, studies, and an explanation of the thought process behind what we do on the web. We love all the great “idea” books out there, and we do have lots of ideas packed in here as starting points. In addition to these, we give you actionable tasks that you can execute.”

Ideas and actionable tasks for business

The book starts off with a couple of stories about building trust, social capital, and the state of media today (and this will probably be the only business book you read this year that has stories about mobsters and student loans). Basic Social Media Literacy, followed by an in-depth explanation of what they call the six principles of trust agents.

Now, since this is a review and not a summary, I am just going to tell you about one of these principles:

The Archimedes Effect

This is my favorite, primarily because it is about leverage, a word that lots of marketing people hate to use. Which is too bad, because – even though it may be badly overused, it is the best word to describe the effect.

“Everyone uses leverage every day: Business owners hire employees so that their business can do more; people use technology such as cars to help them get to work faster; companies have systems that allow them to be more efficient. Yet millions use the Web every day and ignore how best to use the tools at their disposal to bring the greatest benefit.”

This chapter has page after page of examples on using leverage to increase the power of your online (and offline) efforts:

• Build on one success to fuel another
• Arbitrage and Pay Per Click advertising
• Applying these principles for online gaming and business
• Building your network and strengthening relationships
• Create your own niche
• Using your time effectively – delegate
• Get creative with your business marketing, be bold
• Protect your community

If you can’t find something in this chapter to apply to your business, well, it’s likely that one of your competitors will. Guess what happens then?

Buy Trust Agents at Amazon, now.

Inspired by this post from Amber Naslund (Productivity and Time Wasters in Social Media):

We all want to be more productive and know that where we’re spending our time is worthwhile. I’m asked this question a lot and I see it of others, so I wanted to discuss, in specifics, some of my most productive activities in social media, and some of the biggest time wasters I encounter (and avoid wherever I can).

Naslund goes on to describe her job and how she uses Social Media tools for building and maintaining relationships. Her list of places where time is well spent (I would use the term invested) is very similar to my own (In the post she shares more details of what these things mean, the extras below are my own take):

• My Twitter presence.
• Attending in-person events.
• Responding to email.
• Commenting on blogs.
• Keeping up with LinkedIn.
• Content creation and sharing.
• Reading books.

How I invest my time in Social Media

• Twitter presence. I love Twitter, because I get to talk to people that I know from all over the world about this and that. Many of these folks I met at conferences (see the next bullet) and they have amazing things to say, things that I can learn from every day. You can see my list of people that I follow here (hdbbstephen on Twitter), and you may notice that there are only about 500 of them. I find it difficult to participate in conversations or catch the good information that comes from these folks if I follow many more than that. The good news is that many of these people share awesome links to other Twitter people that I don’t follow, so that the best of the best information still gets through. I also use Twitter for reaching out to new clients and readers for this site, but that is another post!
• Attending in-person events. My favorites are Social Media conferences and Chamber of Commerce events. I love the networking and learning opportunities that come out of them. I am actually planning a pretty cool project involving my local Chamber and some hyper-local news opportunities (stay tuned).
• Reading/Responding to email. This is vital to my business, especially in the website construction and maintenance part, where responsiveness and customer service are part of my differentiation strategy (slow response from website designers is a frequent complaint). Also, I no longer use a RSS feed reader for keeping up with news and other blogs. I only subscribe via e-mail – and these updates are filtered into a special folder in Thunderbird. This way I can catch up on blog reading at my convenience, whether I am online or not.
• Commenting on blogs. This is a fantastic method for reaching out to a larger audience, creating opportunities for guest-posting and larger discussions of topics, and drawing traffic to your own site/community. When you are able to enhance a discussion or provide more information on a topic it shows that you know what you are talking about, an attractive feature for web-surfers. I use this technique in conjunction with reading the e-mails in my “Feed” folder – when I see an interesting post that I can make a contribution to I can click over and leave a comment.
• Keeping up with LinkedIn. I know that I need to be better about this, LinkedIn is such a powerful tool. Unlike other social networking platforms it has very little spam or distracting foolishness. I love to watch how people use the Q&A feature.
• Content creation and sharing. Again, I need to do more writing [those pesky clients are keeping me busy! ], especially about the business development part – a lot of time lately is being invested in my new e-book on Productivity: Today, Tomorrow, or Later. I am also part of the Work.Life.Creativity forum community, which is a lot of fun – creativity is definitely an area in which I want to invest more time.
• Reading books. One of the best investments that you can make is in reading books. Actual books with pages. Yes, really. Oh, I suppose that printing out a PDF of an e-book works too, because I like to take notes while I read, even write in the margins. Reading and learning is, for me, one of the most effective methods – I tend to do a little less well with audio and video content (it may have something to do with my ADD…).

I know that the original post contained time-wasters, but I am not going to dwell on those (I think that we all know what they are for ourselves!) What are some things that you invest your time in for effective, productive work? Leave a comment.

Christine Major sent out a reminder:

In case you need to be reminded, the Portsmouth TweetUp at the Gas Light Co. is tomorrow night starting at 6:30! Woo hoo!

I am really excited to see and meet everyone at what will be a great event.

The weather for tomorrow night at this time is still a bit iffy and I choose not to pay attention to any forecasts that say it is going to rain. But the event will happen rain or shine because The Gas Light has made arrangements for us to go to the upstairs club if we cannot go on the outdoor deck, but let’s not think about that. Think only dry thoughts.

Don’t forget that there will be pizza there provided by JitterGram and MicroArts. We have a limited amount of pizza that will be coming out througout the night so hopefully everyone will get some.

We will also be raffling off a $50 GC to Gas Light Co and another $50 gift card to Sullivan Tire. We also have several tour passes for New England Curiosities to raffle off while you are there and some t-shirts I have lying around my house that I am not wearing anymore (ok, maybe not that).

I will be handing out Pokens that were donated by @startpoken to the 5 winners who played along with me on Twitter the other night. http://www.startpoken.com/ – if you are interested in checking out a poken you can see me. I will let you play with my poken

I am looking forward to meeting everyone, and pushing (gently, of course) the Social Media Club – New Hampshire.