We’re slowly heading to the end of this year 2016, and the digital landscape keeps on evolving. From social networks to chat apps, via livestreaming, there’s quite a large choice for sharing your voice.
You’re probably already convinced by the benefits of being digitally engaged, from reputation building to crowd learning for supporting your professional goals.
However, we should also keep an eye on what could create imbalance. Information overload is one of them. Being interrupted by repetitive notifications, while working on multiple and important projects, is an additional one.
The aim isn’t to stop any digital activities but to better integrate them into our strategic goals and daily lives.
Moving from ‘connected’ to ‘effective’. You may hear the common following:
- Listening to conversations
- Engaging in communities
- Creating and/or curating content and sharing it all through the right channels
- Developing advocates
Those are important activities to:
- stay top of mind (regarding the different audiences we target)
- be aware of all key events in the world (or within specific industries)
- spread the word about our ideas
However, ‘fear of missing out’ is not always a leverage, as it maintains screen time at too high level.
Then, being (hyper)connected and visible is a first stage. The second one would be to look for effectiveness and stay aligned with our strategic goals, because we want ‘digital’ to be part of our direction. We want to avoid the ‘digital for the sake of digital’ trap. Other priorities demand important time resources and we have a direct influence on allocation.
By bringing effectiveness to the conversation, we could make sure that we save room for other non-digital important activities. The purpose is to stay focused on our goals while being ‘sufficiently’ connected.
Injecting focus into digital presence. You may have followed your instinct or sequentially crafted a first version of your digital presence supporting your professional goals. Though, nothing’s fixed and there’s a need to revisit it frequently enough throughout the year, in order to list:
- What really works and what doesn’t (based on pre-defined success indicators)
- What else could be developed or explored
- What should be reduced or immediately stopped
- What to update from initial plans
Becoming an effectiveness geek. The idea is to have a more holistic approach, because a lack of effectiveness in one or several areas could negatively impact other ones. So, when we talk about priority management, it shouldn’t only be seen from the ‘work’ lens. By adopting a multidimensional view like this, we better understand that we have a much larger diversity of priorities to deal with. Again, how digital presence fits into this? How goals are being served by it?
In addition to that, routines are also very interesting to study. What’s repeatedly done produces outcomes. What the most effective people do?
The Habit Advantage is something to consider. From a corporate perspective, we use to call it ‘rituals’. What could we learn from this and bring to the professional level?
*This article expresses my own opinions and doesn’t represent my employer’s views.
Photo Credit: Croydon girl via Compfight cc
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