Moving with Young Children, 101

If you take natural disaster, divorce, death, and illness out of the equation, moving is hell. Moving with kids, especially those of the small type, is double hell. However, there are ways to get through it without losing your sanity, your marriage, and your overall sense of parental control. How do I know? I've done it now several times. Here is my rap sheet of credibility to offer tips on moving, with a timeline of the moves that I have gone through in my life:

1. 1977: Dallas to Denver with my brother and sister and a very large moving van.
2. 1986: Denver to Santa Barbara for college.
3. 1990, Summer: Santa Barbara to Denver after graduation.
4. 1990, Fall: Denver to San Diego.
5. 1991, Winter: San Diego back to Denver (broke)
6. 1991, July: Washington DC for graduate school.
7. 1992, September: Washington DC to Denver (broke)
8. 1996: Denver to Minneapolis (work relocation)
9. 1998: Minneapolis to San Francisco (fell in love, new job)
10. 2001: San Francisco to Boulder (husband gets new job)
11. 2003: Boulder to SF (husband loses job, finds new one)
12. 2004: SF to Seattle, baby in tow (this time, I get the new job)
13. 2005: Seattle to SF (2nd baby born, husband gets recruited back to the Bay)
14. 2009: SF to Golden, CO (leaving the rat race behind)

And here I am, 13 moves later, and I'm less than halfway through my projected lifespan. By far, the last three moves involving children were the hardest, yet also the most enlightening. Moving has taught us to be flexible and adaptive— and sometimes that means ice cream treats twice in one day to keep the kids calm.

Here are my 15 golden rules of moving with young kids:

1. Don't do it, unless you really really really need to do it.
2. Start planning and preparing for your move at least six weeks in advance… and for the love of God, make a list. And divide it with the spouse.
3. If you're moving to another neighborhood/city/state, make sure to inform the schools as early as possible of your kids’ departure so that you get back whatever deposit you put down (if private). Despite this, we still didn't get ours back, so expect disappointment. (Thank you so much, Serendipity Preschool in San Mateo, California, where I sent two of my children and parted with many thousands of dollars in tuition.)
4. Get bids from at least two recommended movers, preferably three. If your favorite mover can't get to the price that you want, ask them to throw in something for free like insurance, hotel vouchers, one month of free shopping at Whole Foods, a $500 gift card to Nordy’s…..
5. Ask for help. I'm sure that grandma and grandpa would love to come out and watch the kids while you pack boxes for the weekend.
6. If you are packing your own stuff, spread the grueling chore out over a couple of weekends. Trust me: you'll spend countless hours throwing out and sorting all sorts of crap you won't believe that you own.
7. Schedule two trash/recycling pickups: 2 weeks before your move and the second one the day after the movers leave.
8. If you can recycle or give away unwanted items, do it. You won't believe what people will want these days. If you don't have enough items for a garage sale, team up with a friend.
9. If you are moving out of state, reserve a hotel for three nights prior to the morning that you take off. Why? Night one will be the night before the movers load up your house, and nothing will be outside of a box. If you're like me, a clean comfortable hotel room is well worth the price after that hell. Night two, the movers have emptied your house, the kids are crying wondering where their toys are, you're feeling disconnected from your entire life, and that clean hotel room with a bottle of wine will be a welcome sight. Night three: you've just completed cleaning your empty house and yard, said goodbye to friends, and thus, need one last restful night’s sleep before the hideous drive across the desert/plains/mountains/swamp.
10. If you're driving to your new home for any considerable duration (i.e. more than two hours) do the following: go to Target, purchase several items from the dollar section, several arts and crafts kits, and many bags of unhealthy treats. Distribute them appropriately within your vehicles for easy access.
11. Remember, when you're on the road, there are no rules for eating: the more sugar, caffeine, salty food, the better. This goes for everyone in the family including the dog.
12. If you will be driving two cars with your spouse, please, please, separate the children. You'll thank me later.
13. If you don't have a portable DVD player by now for the kids, open up the rusty wallet and go buy one. It will be the best $150 (or less, perhaps) you’ve ever spent.
14. Don't skimp on hotels on the road. In places like Elko, Nevada, the best digs will still cost you half of any B-grade hotel in a big city. Get one with a swimming pool: the kiddies will have lots of energy to expend at the end of the 10-hour day in the car and they’ll fall blissfully into bed no later than midnight.
15. Get your buns up early when you have a long drive day ahead. The kids will still be groggy and you’ll have 1 hour of peace as a result.

That’s it. Those are my golden rules. I hope they work for you. And just remember: this too shall pass. Before you know it, you'll be in your new home/city, happily unpacked and sipping a glass of Pinot Noir on your back deck while the kids play peacefully and your husband cooks a lovely dinner of grilled salmon and fresh veggies from the garden. Or something like that.

Social media strategy on a small marketing budget

I have been experimenting with social media in my own business, in earnest, for a couple of years. I started with Linkedin for networking and frequently use the question-and-answer tool. One year ago I added Facebook, and six months ago, I started this blog and my Twitter account. I've quickly learned that all of these tools can be painfully time-consuming— particularly the last two. On the other hand, I do believe that at some point, they'll pay off for my business in ways I can’t predict now.

In the meantime, this experiment shows prospects and colleagues that I am investing in new media, which is fast becoming a critical source of information and knowledge-sharing for people in the business world. Since I am in the information business, I've got to use these tools or else, fall behind the times. Increasingly, clients are asking me to advise them on social media practices for promoting their message and building their business.

A small high-tech client I'm working with wants to dip its toes deeper into social media. The marketing chief has set up a Twitter account, which he has been posting news and observations to infrequently, and the company is about to launch a new Web site. Here's the challenge: we have an already constrained budget for PR activities, which means I will only have a few extra hours at most to spend on social media per week.

Yes, the tools are free, but time is not: whoever told you that social media is a cheap and easy way to promote your business is lying through their teeth.

From my own personal experience and the anecdotes of others, it can take 1-2 hours per day to achieve any significant marketing goals with these tools. My client doesn't have the budget to pay me those extra hours on top of all the other programs we have running.

Despite that barrier, I'm eager to get started but I'm also worried: How can we be efficient with the few hours that we have to spend? Automated tools for managing social media are now plentiful— so I know that incorporating these tools will be part of our strategy.

Here's my bare-bones social media plan for the client:

Purpose:

--To position [COMPANY] as an influencer and thought leader in prominent online media communities.
--To buttress and support PR and marketing efforts.
--To generate new marketing and sales prospects, potential partners, and community supporters aka viral friends.
--To gain useful insight into social media conversations around [XYZ] technology, to fuel media relations strategies, contacts and opportunities.

I. Twitter: Guidelines and Tools

There's no “right way” to use Twitter but increasingly, standards are arising about how corporations are using Twitter and some best practices are emerging. As a marketing and public relations tool, corporate Twitter accounts are focusing on striking a balance between self-promotional posts and educational/non-promotional conversations, and re-tweeting of others’ posts which relate to industry trends. Some guidelines that I have read suggest a 60% to 40% ratio of non-promotional to promotional tweets.


Useful links and tools for getting started:

Twitter Bible

Resource Super List

Twellow is a directory of public Twitter accounts, with hundreds of categories and search features to help you find people who matter to you.

Twitter Tips: How to Find Experts in Your Industry

Tweetscan. A great search engine for twitter to see what people are twitting about you, your blog, brand, company, product etc.

TweetMarks. This will help your bookmark your twits, keeping all of the links you share organized.

TweetDeck tips (TweetDeck is an excellent dashboard/browser for twitter that I use as my primary interface into Twitter. I love it.)

Twollo to automatically follow the people who are discussing the things I am interested in.

Twaitter allows you to schedule your tweets at specific times.

CoTweet enables multiple people to update just one Twitter account. A permissions console allows you to set up accounts for the team members you want updating the Twitter feed.

Twitter measurement

This is no hard science yet but some of the metrics include: number of followers, number of mentions or retweets, individual tweet performance, clicks per day, and clicks by geographic location. Fortunately, there are many free or low-cost automated tools that collect data for you and graph it. Recommendations for an initial metrics program:

--Number of followers and percentage of increase month to month.
--Number of mentions, replies, and retweets per month.
--Individual tweet performance: graphing how particular posts perform in terms of responses and mentions. This will be, ideally, an invaluable tool for PR/marketing efforts.
--Responses from media, customers, or other key constituents on Twitter to press releases and other news. We will track any contacts that come to us from Twitter.


Resources for analytics:

Eight excellent tools to extract insights from Twitter streams
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/80437


1. Hootsuite— This is another twitter client which also includes statistics tools.
2. Twitalyzer provides activities analysis of any Twitter user, based on social media success yardsticks. Its metrics include (a) Influence score, which is basically your popularity score on Twitter (b) signal-to-noise ratio (c) one’s propensity to ‘retweet’ or pass along others’ tweets (d) velocity - the rate one’s updates on Twitter and (e) clout - based on how many times one is cited in tweets.
3. Twist offers trends of keywords or product name, based on what Twitter users are tweeting about. You can see frequency of a keyword or product name being mentioned over a period of a week or a month and display them on a graph.
4. Tweetstats is useful to reveal tweeting behavior of any Twitter users. It consolidates and collates Twitter activity data and presents them in colorful graphs. Its Tweet Timeline is probably the most interesting, as it shows month-by-month total tweets since your joined Twitter.
5. Twitterfriends focuses on conversation and information aspects of Twitter users’ behaviors. Two key metrics are Conversational Quotient (CQ) and Links Quotient (LQ). CQ measures how many tweets were replied whereas LQ measures how many tweets contained links.
6. Thummit Quickrate This web application identifies latest buzzwords, actors, movies, brands, products, etc. (called ‘topics’) and combines them with conversations from Twitter. It does sentiment analysis to determine whether each Twitter update is Thumms up (positive), neutral or Thumms down (negative).


II. Twitter: Schedule and Content plan

1. Budget/Time: Minimum 1 hour per week (ideally, 2 hours) to maintain Twitter account. Below is what I believe to be a useful breakdown of time spent for .5 hour on social media, which I found from another marketer:

1. Sign up for an account at TweetLater (or another tweet scheduling tool).
2. Spend 10-15 minutes every day finding industry articles, news you find interesting, and thought leadership pieces that have nothing to do with you or your business and set those up to be distributed throughout the day. A good rule of thumb is that 60 percent of your tweets should not be self-serving. I set up my tweets 30 minutes apart.
3. Spend 10 minutes every day setting up your “self-serving” tweets - these are links to your blog, white papers the company has written, any articles written about you or that quote you, Webinars or podcasts you’re hosting, etc. A good rule of thumb is these should be only 40 percent of your tweets and you should space them out so they don’t come out all at once.
4. Spend 10 minutes going through your groups on TweetDeck and find things to RT (retweet) for your followers. This expands your follower base, shows that you listen, and provides great influence.


2. Content plan:

Post a minimum of 10 tweets per week consisting of:

--Tweets and retweets of related tech and industry news
--Company press releases (retweet 2-3 x over two weeks)
--Case studies and company media coverage (retweet 2-3 x over two weeks)
--General observations on company happenings or industry events
--Conference/event news
--Blog/site articles

The automated tweet scheduling tools allow you to develop an editorial calendar of tweets so that you can plan ahead and schedule when tweets post and how often. One rule of thumb that I have uncovered is to schedule your posts at intervals throughout the day, instead of all at once.


III. Blog

Ideally, we would launch a blog at the same time as our Twitter strategy. Given resources, this may not be possible, but a best practice is to not begin a blogging program until we are able and ready to commit to weekly posting. (Increasingly, there are services which automatically update Twitter with blog postings.)

Purpose:

--To position [Company] as an influencer and thought leader in prominent online media communities and with fellow bloggers.
--To buttress and support PR and marketing efforts, and as an educational vehicle for customers and prospects.
--To showcase speeches and thought leadership from company execs, and guest bloggers from the [industry] community.
--To engage in conversations with and generate feedback from customers, prospects, partners, and supporters.

Schedule: 1 posting/week. (300- 500 words)
Time commitment: 2-3 hours per week.


Challenges: Budget and resources for producing regular content. One strategy to counteract: cultivate relationships with guest bloggers to help mitigate the time spent creating original content. Strategy two: Re-post blogs on foundational topics.

Is it possible to gain value from social media by spending only a couple of hours per week? I'm not sure, but I'm determined to find out. I would love to find out how others who work for themselves or small companies are handling the time-sink issue. I have to keep reminding myself: social media is just another suite of tools to build a brand and engage customers and the broader community. It's not magic. At the end of the day, the message has to be crystal clear and targeted— no matter the tools that we use.

Ultimately, marketers and communicators need to figure out how to integrate these tools into our regular marketing and sales and customer service activities, without taking valuable time away from the physical time a.k.a. "personal touch" and attention we still need to offer customers and partners. I fear that were all getting too digital and are forgetting how to communicate in person and over the phone. What's the right balance?

Until next time, I'll be here, frazzled as always and trying to figure this all out.

Ode to Friends

In these trying times, many of us have been forced to get rid of the extraneous activities in our lives. It pains me, for instance, when I can't exercise as much as I would like. Or, when I can’t work on my creative writing projects. (Actually, when have I done that since having kids?) And reading: the book is central to my genetic makeup. Yet when it comes down to it, here's what I can't and won't give up (aside from work of course): a minimal amount of rest and some semblance of a healthy lifestyle, time with my family, and my friends.

Maintaining friendships is especially paramount if you work from home. Otherwise, you'll find yourself having lengthy, and potentially embarrassing, conversations with the UPS person, the grocery store clerk, the Starbucks clerk, and when no one else is available… the dog.

On July 31st, we left the Bay Area for Colorado. Both locales are beautiful, unique places—no doubt. Both offer ample opportunities for outdoor fun. Now that I no longer live in California I'll miss easy access to the ocean, wine country, and the mild Mediterranean climate. Sometimes, I will even miss access to Silicon Valley, the heartbeat of the technology world in which I work. (Although admittedly, I'm happy to be out of the fray right now).

But what I ruminated about as we drove across the desert toward the Rocky Mountains was how much I will miss my closest friends in the Bay: some of these are women whom I've known since college and others are women whom I have had the pleasure of knowing through my daughters’ schools over the past couple of years. These are friends whom I have cried with, exercised with, laughed with, and sent text messages and Facebook updates all hours of the day and night for critical updates such as: "Why can’t I be patient with my kids for one hour of the day…. I can't find my car keys, again…. I need a cocktail…"

Spending time developing relationships with my friends is truly a “value-add” use of my time, even when I have absolutely none of it to spare. No matter where I am, and no matter where they are, my friends keep me grounded in life and help me to realize that I am not alone, I am loved, and that there's so much beauty in the world to experience. My friends help me realize my potential, and have given me so many gifts: perspective, insights, laughter, spirituality, motivation, love, caring and support. Without them I would be in a perpetual state of inanition. My husband and children are my rock—I’d be devastated without them—yet my friends help me to feel truly whole.

Some of my friends I talk to infrequently, such as my dear high school pal Janel, who lives in New York City and has a decidedly different schedule than me, the suburbian mom. Yet we chatted for 30 minutes as I drove on desolate highways through Nevada, and now that I am reconnected with her, I am complete again.

I will have to make some new friends now that we are living in a different town. It may take a while, but from experience, it will be worth every moment spent in the effort.