
John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing posted up a work flow he dubbed his Social Media System. It’s a really good read and several other great bloggers like Chris Brogan and Amber Naslund have done the same. All three are great looks at how they get things done. John encourage people to do the same so here I go.
The Tools
FireFox – Tabbed browsing and customization at it’s best. I use Google Chrome for somethings but you can’t beat FireFox’s massive line up of plug-ins.
TweetDeck – The multiple columns of TweetDeck make it so easy to sort and follow people that without it Twitter gets difficult to manage at times.
Foobar 2000 – I have to have music. I got nuts when it’s totally silent and I don’t get any work done. Foobar is a light weight player and unlike iTunes it actually plays all of my music.
Gmail – I have several (5) gmail accounts I manage for either myself, Shuaism, RoyalAnts, or ShuaConsluting so I have them open all day.
HTC G1 – I love having all of my gmail accounts and docs synced to my phone. Plus full web browsing capability just plain rocks.
The Setup
I usually get up between 7 – 8 am and after brewing some coffee and taking the dogs out I settle in for some work. I open 2 FireFox windows, TweetDeck, and Foobar. I have two bookmark folders labeled Work and Work2, I open one in each of the FireFox windows and get to work.
Work has FaceBook, LinkedIn, CampFire and WetPaint loaded in them and I use them to communicate and work. I’ll check LinkedIn about 2x a day, and FaceBook about 3x a day to see what’s happening in groups and if there’s anything interesting or some work to try and get.
Work2 has each of my google accounts loaded to a tab, Google Reader, and Business Exchange open. This is where I go for research or to take a reading break.
The Workflow
Once I get this up and running (takes about 5 minutes) I scan TweetDeck for anything interesting or someone I want to say hi to.
Check email for anything urgent or that I didn’t get to yesterday and take care of it.
Go to school (I’m working on my Masters cert in Internet Marketing online, I’ll be done in a couple of months).
After that I scan a couple blogs and look for blogging ideas.
Spend an hour or so blogging or getting future posts ready (like ones for the GSMM series).
Hop in to FaceBook and LinkedIn for a quick look and check my Twitter and Google Alerts in Google Reader.
Look for consulting gigs, send out inquiries, and work.
While I have all of this going I work on my projects and build my knowledge base with research. This is all a constant process and when I’m not at my computer I use my G1 like crazy. After seeing it put out in writing it seems to me that my work flow could use some work, it’s more like a work rush than a work flow.
I can see areas where I could use more structure and some more planning. Maybe I don’t need to check somethings as much as I do and focus more in some other areas. This was a great exercise, I learned a lot about what I do, how about you? Do you feel there’s value in writing down your system and examining it?
Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters






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