A Day In The Life Of A Social Media Marketer

The Day Begins Late At Night

Well my day often starts late the night before. Depending on whether I am home or out, before I finally get to lay my pretty little head to sleep I am perusing the web setting up the next days work stream. I may have blog posts to finish or begin. I may be confirming or rescheduling calls. I’ll check the stats and comments of any blogs I administer. And I definitely check into Twitter facebook and a few other social networks to see what’s brewing.

I’ll often click on stories that interest me but which I won’t have a chance to read until the morning. This is where tabbed browsing means a lot to me. I can click on a few stories, close the browser and then when I reload in the morning, my stories come up first thing.

First Things First

When I wake up I immediately turn on CNN. Then I just as quickly shut it off. Cable news sucks. Unless there is a natural disaster of biblical proportions, some awful terrorist attack or something else of significance that could drive the news and effect the “hum” and “rhythm” of the day, I usually leave the TV off for the rest of the day.

After my initial caffeination I’ll settle in front of two computers, a laptop to my left for skype and conference calls and my PC which has the benefit of a wonderfully large widescreen monitor.

A quick perusal of email over my first cigarette let’s me know if there is any urgent overnight client communications that need to be addressed. Then comes Twitter and my RSS  feeds. Twitter mentions get replied to while I scan my lists in Tweetdeck to determine the pace and activity levels of various groups I follow. Social media marketers and bloggers, artists, graphic designers, traditional and new media journalists. Then I quickly segue into Google Reader where ill scan the activity of over 1200 websites, blogs, newspapers, magazines and the like.

More Coffee

After this initial burst of work, I’ve usually scheduled things so that I have a few hours to develop new business, write, do some light housework, turn on the music and get creative. Also, there is coffee, and a lot of it. I make a fresh pot of coffee, usually Stumptown, in my French Press and then start guzzling. My legs start shaking, and my fingers simply try to keep pace with the thoughts in my mind.

This is usually when I start writing, either polishing up blog posts from the day before, or beginning new ones. I have a variety of research sources, from several open books, some poetry, news articles and of course, those valuable RSS feeds that I mentioned. Twitter is perhaps the most lucrative of these resources as I’ve set things up in such a way that I get a wide variety of intellectual stimulation in the form of conversations, hashtag searches and links.

More Coffee

Gulp! Ok, so by now I am excited because I’ve usually finished a blog post and am waiting for reactions and comments. I find it important to be around immediately after posts are published so that I can thank people for retweets and respond to comments as soon as possible. And because of all the coffee and cigarettes, I usually lose feeling in several extremities. Whatever music I am listening to has progressively gotten louder and louder. It’s basically a mad house. I start to get turned on by the information overload.

I also check in with each and every client. If I haven’t heard from them, I do something useful. I keep To Do lists for my clients with regards to content creation, tech initiatives (web design, etc) and send daily updates about where we stand on different issues. If I have other roles, such as checking in with sales, traffic and promotions or press outreach I’ll do some work on that front to make sure our strategies are getting the proper attention.

I Need Cigarettes

So I leave the house for awhile to either meet with clients, new business contacts, friends or recent acquaintances. Because I am out and about so much, and because I never stop talking and meeting people, I get a lot of requests. But clients always come first. I like to be in front of my clients as much as possible. Email and phone is great, but for truly creative brainstorming and problem solving, nothing beats face to face. If I’m not meeting with clients than I am usually meeting someone new. I LOVE meeting new people. I get a ton of requests for lunches, coffees, dinners and drinks. In fact, I really can only get to about a quarter of the people who ask, but I try to do my best. I love work, and its nice to be able to mix work and pleasure.

After running around town, checking in on friends and business owners around town, I usually find myself back home in the late afternoon. Enough to check in on the interwebs, double-check dinner and night time activities and run to either the yoga studio or the gym. I cannot, absolutely CANNOT, work out in the morning. It takes food, coffee, cigarettes and several hours of intellectual awake time before I can even think about exercising. But I exercise almost every day. It is that important to my creative process that I schedule some time to get physical. Yes I just said that. Physical, Physical….

At this point, I’ve usually worked about 6 hours. But my workday continues before, during and after wherever I might be for dinner. Rarely am I too inebriated after dinner, (I happen to be a light drinker, 2 glasses of wine is a lot for me) to come home, settle in and do several more hours of work. All in all, I do about 10-12 hours of work every day, though some of that work might be done on subways, at bars, in smoke breaks, even at the gym. I’ve set up a variety of channels through which to communicate and stream information to my various social networks. I’ll do a follow-up post soon on the exact tools I use.

Image Source: 2.0T XWD on Flickr