Focus Friday: Write it down. Seriously, write it down.

by, Guest Blogger, Sean Donnelly, account coordinator, Text 100 Global Public Relations

Monitoring and engaging with customers on a wide variety of social media platforms is no longer a nice-to-do, it’s a mandatory communications function for any business. Often times, there are some great opportunities to engage with customers and enhance their perception of your brand, and in turn, their followers’ perceptions of your brand.

While it’s difficult enough for most of us to maintain focus on our daily workload, juggling in some well-disciplined social media monitoring can seem daunting. However, it IS doable and the payoffs are great. Whether it’s helping a customer with their multifunction printer or answering a question about a Xerox service offering, it’s been super rewarding to identify an opportunity for engagement and see the process through to a happy ending.

One of the biggest challenges in monitoring social media is weeding through the sheer mass of conversation that happens each day around an enormous company a la Xerox.

As different topics to listen in on pop up, it’s important that we stay zeroed in on our core objectives. The simplest of principles from David Allen’s book, “Getting Things Done” can really help here: write it down. I always have a running list of the pressing issues I have to monitor conversation around in addition to the items I search for regularly. I do this almost obsessively, but the more I write down, the clearer my mind. The clearer my mind, the more focused I can be.

These ideas are pretty universal and obviously don’t just apply to social media monitoring.

To emphasize the power of writing things down, try this:

• Think of the top three projects (at home, work or both) that are bugging you the most and write them down on a piece of paper.
• Now, jot down the very first actionable step toward finishing this project. I’m talking everything from “Pick out paint color for dining room” to “email Henry to reschedule call”.

Now look at your paper. Feel any better about what you have on your plate? I bet you do. It’s actionable, and you’re focused.

__________________________

The content shared in this blog post is the author’s opinion and does not necessarily reflect the views of Xerox.