{"id":3779,"date":"2012-01-07T17:49:07","date_gmt":"2012-01-07T17:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/?p=3779"},"modified":"2012-01-09T03:18:44","modified_gmt":"2012-01-09T03:18:44","slug":"a-year-to-finish-well-5-tips-to-make-it-happen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/2012\/01\/a-year-to-finish-well-5-tips-to-make-it-happen\/","title":{"rendered":"A Year to Finish Well: 5 Tips to Make It Happen in 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Entrepreneurs by nature are performance driven. We have no guarantees of long-term employment, retainers, or even work into next week. What drives us is the desire to do great work\u2014and to keep good clients. To be independent and successful.<\/p>\n

A significant event for me in 2011 awakened fresh clarity in my business. My father died in May, at the age of 90, and as our entire family surrounded his hospital bed, I was struck by the preciousness of time. It\u2019s the ultimate non-renewable resource.<\/span><\/p>\n

I spend a fair amount of time reading and working with clients in the energy industry\u2014energy services, renewables, and LEED. One of my sons works in the lumber industry\u2014renewables. Timber is harvested and new trees are planted. Unlike the email sign-offs that tell the recipient, \u201cSave a tree, don\u2019t print this,\u201d trees are<\/em> renewable. Time is not. America is spending billions on discovering the next best affordable and renewable energy resource. And we\u2019ll find it. But we won\u2019t find more time.<\/p>\n

Holding my father\u2019s hand, I recalled the time he spent with us four children, the time he spent with his grandchildren, the hikes, the beach trips, the hymns he sang, the letters he wrote to our boys while they were at church camp, Boy Scout camp, and wrestling camp. He never hurried us.\u00a0 As a business owner, he understood the value and price of time.<\/p>\n

Knowing where we spend our time is critical to business success (and marriage and family success). Looking forward, here are 5 tips to help us finish well in 2012. They may add value to your work too.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Be clear on 2012\u2019s endgame, and write it down.<\/strong> Where do you want to be this year with your business, clients, and employees? Who do you want published and sourced? What are your fresh angles for media attention? What type of blog post will attract a new client? What skills do you need to hone to take your business to the next level? Have you defined your next level?<\/li>\n
  2. Establish personal relationships with business leaders and the media<\/strong>. For me, this means flying to seminars and conferences to meet face-to-face. And it\u2019s a significant investment to attend the best seminars. At the Ragan Social Media Summit in Las Vegas last February, the information was aggregated on Twitter with the #RaganSM hashtag, but the relationships established, the interviews and videos I shot<\/a>, the emails I exchanged, the sources I met<\/a>, and the opportunities to work together are priceless. Twitter led me to Mark Ragan<\/a>, but meeting him could never be captured in 140 characters.<\/li>\n
  3. <\/strong>Make good social media connections for yourself and your clients.<\/strong> Quality time spent on Twitter can be incredibly resource-rich when you\u2019re learning from industry experts, asking research questions, and following successful campaigns.\u00a0 Don\u2019t be afraid to reach out and ask for a phone call or a Go-To Meeting. While working on a marketing campaign, I was following The Ford Story closely. From Twitter, I met Chris Baccus<\/a>, who was digital strategist at time of creation of The Ford Story. (Chris has since left the agency world to head up AT&T\u2019s social media.) We had a phone conversation, and he answered several questions on how I could leverage the same idea on a smaller scale. There was no case study or white paper on this concept. And to look for one would have been a waste of valuable time. Thanks to my Twitter connections, I was able to reach out directly to the campaign leader. That\u2019s priceless.<\/li>\n
  4. Take time to understand your profitability<\/strong>. How do you make money\u2014writing, strategizing, creating content, tweeting, hosting events, managing social media, pitching media? Once you clarify this, commit to reducing the amount of phone calls, meetings, tweets, and lunch dates that steal time from your real talents and productivity. Ask your colleagues for help and accountability with this.<\/li>\n
  5. Take time to write an opinion editorial and submit for print publication<\/strong>. That\u2019s 800 words of your own influence. Newspapers are dead you say? The Wall Street Journal<\/em> remains number 1 in average weekday circulation with 2.1 million readers as of November 2011<\/a>.\u00a0 You can take yourself or your client to new marketing and public relations levels with a strong, focused op-ed. And then supersize it on social media using trackable links. One op-ed can even become the foundation for an entire marketing strategy and yield serious return on time and return on influence. \u00a0Once the op-ed is printed, break it down into social media bites and add an illustration or video component to post on a blog.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n

    In my last moments with my dad, I was reminded that there are no do-overs. \u00a0I have challenged myself to contemplate my business purpose and how I spend the moments that make up my workdays. In every project, every tweet, every blog post, every opinion editorial, I want to finish well!<\/p>\n

    Anne D Gallaher<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Entrepreneurs by nature are performance driven. We have no guarantees of long-term employment, retainers, or even work into next week. What drives us is the desire to do great work\u2014and to keep good clients. To be independent and successful. A significant event for me in 2011 awakened fresh clarity in my business. My father died … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[137,60],"tags":[1499,1556,388,792,1555,660,556,1557],"class_list":["post-3779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-posts","category-annedgallaher","tag-choice","tag-deliberate","tag-goals","tag-love","tag-non-renewable","tag-planning","tag-time","tag-waste"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3779"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3797,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3779\/revisions\/3797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}