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I've received some interesting comments via email about my interview with Eric Hutchinson, where he talks about losing his record deal and getting another, better record deal...with the same label!
One that just came in: "This guy must be lucky."
Thomas Jefferson had this to say about the subject...
"I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it."
So I agree. Eric Hutchinson is lucky.
Thoughts? Post 'em below...
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Here's a bonus interview with Warner Brothers artist, Eric Hutchinson. Eric talks about getting a record deal, losing it, and then getting it back again...with the same label!
Like audio interviews? Get the podcast!
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Josh Freese of Nine Inch Nails is doing an interesting promotion for his new album...
JoshFreese.com for full details...
Thoughts? Post 'em below!
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Nice viral campaign by Jack in the box...
More at HangInThereJack.com...
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No matter how many time management books you read, one of the most difficult parts is knowing how to make your own schedule. In some workplaces, the time is structured for you. In others, you have more freedom to set your schedule. Either way, you make decisions about how you do what you do and the efficiency of your effort.
Basically, creating a schedule requires that you take a realistic look at the time available and know the tasks that need to be done in that time. You have to allow enough time in your schedule to transition between tasks.
That may mean driving to a different location and dealing with traffic delays. For other tasks, you may have to gather additional research, calculate a budget or meet with a colleague. When you fail to build enough time into your schedule for transitions, then you’re likely to get behind and stay that way.
Another problem in many schedules is over-committing. You only have so many work hours available. Considering the time needed for transitions plus unexpected interruptions with real or perceived urgency, you can’t work too many critical projects back to back without over-commitment. When that happens, something is missed or everything is done half-way. That’s not good time management, that’s a train wreck happening right at your desk.
Remember to schedule time for yourself. You need a lunch break and a few minutes mid-morning and mid-afternoon to take a break. If possible, take a way outdoors or get away from your desk so refresh your mind as well as grab a coffee. You also need to include meetings and community activities related to work.
If you are a manager, then your schedule must include time to coach and motivate your employees or team members. The much applauded “open door policy” can be an invitation to distractions as many visits to your office are more casual than business related. Your schedule may need a period each day for “closed door” work time.
Unless you required to constantly monitor email, then you can schedule email checking two or three times during the work day, not every five minutes. You can also sort email into folders and schedule time for different types of email; orders, client contact, questions, employee contact, personal, other.
You may have a habit that’s common in offices to check email as soon as the envelope notice pops up on your screen. That’s letting a distraction into your workspace. Turn off the automatic notice and schedule the times during the day when you will check email.
Taking charge of your schedule is the first step to effective time management. Your schedule is the framework that tells you where you want to use your time and by reviewing the schedule, you can see if your plan was effective.
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Granted this states the obvious but it does capture the feeling about time. It’s not that you don’t like having time to get things done or time to spare. That’s not the problem. The reason that “time” evokes such strong feelings is when your calendar is so crowded that time feels more like a curse than a benefit.
The way to take away the frustration over time is to better use the hours that you have. Everyone works with the same 24 hours but some people seem to get more out of it. They certainly aren’t expanding time, that’s not possible. What they do is to use time efficiently and that’s the essence of time management.
The most challenging aspect of time management is to decide that you really do want to manage your time. If you are certain about that, then you have to decide if you are willing to make changes in your schedule and activities.
There is no cosmic shoehorn that allows you to cram 35 hours of work into a 24-hour day. When you hear that someone wants to “make more time,” forget it. There is no way to expand the hours. You simply need to make choices about how to use the hours in each day.
When you think of ways to do more in the same time period, don’t even think about cutting back on sleep. That’s a common mistake. You need seven to eight hours of sleep nightly for health, energy and to work at prime efficiency.
Working late and cutting back to five or six hours might be ok once in a week, but it’s not good to do all week then think you can catch up on the weekend. A sleep-deprived body and exhausted brain are not your best assets. You’ll get much more accomplished by getting a full night’s sleep and tackling that new client proposal or special project in the morning.
If you have more work, family and leisure activities than you can fit into a reasonable day, then you need to make some choices. Before you start to associate time management with giving up something, understand that this is not the point. You can’t manage your time until you decide what goes and what stays.
Even then it’s not about giving up something. You can alternate some activities. For example, if you like to play golf but rush through the course to take the children fishing, then play golf two weekends and set up an all day fishing adventure on the other two weekends. This way you can enjoy both leisure pursuits without being so frantic that the fun is taken out of having fun.
Time management isn’t just about finding more ways to cram in more work. Effective time management also helps you find time for leisure or even to sit around and do nothing. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? Imagine if you had time to lounge by the pool, read a novel instead of a company report or ride your bike around the park.
That’s not a fantasy or something that you put off until retirement. Having time for yourself is possible, if you are willing to apply time management techniques to your busy life.
Just get out the eraser because you have to start by trimming back to a manageable amount of activity to fit into a 10-12 hour day with 8 hours to sleep. That leaves 4 to 6 hours to spend each day. If you take away worry time and zoning out in front of the television, you have just found time. Now it’s up to you to manage that time.
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NOTE: This is part ten of a ten part series on Twitter. If you want to see firsthand how I use Twitter for promotion, follow me at twitter.com/davidhooper. Also take a look at Twitter for Musicians: The Complete Guide.
"Hi, do you want to be my friend?" Thousands of people ask each other this on Twitter every day by following someone. The first thing most people do when one of these requests shows up in their inbox is check out the profile of the person asking. Because unscrupulous marketers find a way to spam any electronic program available these days, and abuse the flow of information by sending unsolicited requests through automated programs, you need to take the time to check out their profile, rather than blindly following everyone who follows you first.
When a person begins to follow you on Twitter, try to get a feel for them. Who are they? Do you share common interests? Is there something there that could turn them into a client at some point? These are all good questions, but you must remember- they are asking the same thing about you when you follow them.
Your Twitter profile is a snapshot of who you are. It’s a quick 5-10 second glimpse into your world so someone can get to know you better. When you create an account with Twitter, you can chose from one of the pre-made backgrounds or you can use one of the many free Twitter-related tools to custom design your own. If you are really serious about branding yourself or your business on Twitter, and have a few bucks to spare, you can opt to have your Twitter profile custom made by a professional, just like a website.
Here are a few tips to think about when designing your Twitter profile.
• Keep it neat – Too many items on the page, just like a website, distract the viewer’s eyes from the content of the profile. Keep it simple and say what you need to say.
• Keep it consistent – Make sure your profile, and the wording in it, is directly in line with your brand, marketing campaign and other areas of your business you want to emphasize.
• Keep it short – Remember, you only have a few seconds to show off what you have before someone makes a decision whether or not they want to follow you back or follow you at all. Keep your point short and sweet.
• Keep it useful – What do you offer? How can they contact you? Where can they find samples? Make sure your Twitter profile is as useful as possible. People don’t like to hunt for information.
• Keep it interesting – Give your viewers a reason to talk to you. Ask them a question, make a controversial statement, do something small to get them into a conversation with you so you can determine their needs.
• Include links to your websites or even a freebie they could download.
Twitter is a useful tool for any business, especially a music business, but without a proper profile, the business has no identity. Make sure you take the necessary time to design a useful, branded and interesting profile so when you ask someone to be your friend; they don’t have to think twice. There are many other ways to pump up your Twitter profile, but if you follow the six steps above, you will be on a good path to developing a healthy brand.
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NOTE: This is part nine of a ten part series on Twitter. If you want to see firsthand how I use Twitter for promotion, follow me at twitter.com/davidhooper. Also take a look at Twitter for Musicians: The Complete Guide.
If you are using Twitter to market and promote your business, you're likely concerned about how much time you spend on the website every day. It's a bit of a catch-22 situation. In order to get the most out of your networking efforts, you need to carry on conversations with people and do more than just pop in long enough to make a comment and move on. However, if you spend all your time on Twitter working on building relationships, your business isn't going to be around long. So what's an entrepreneur to do?
No problem. There are several desktop applications you can utilize to communicate via Twitter without having to stay on the website all day. These handy little programs all work in similar ways, but some seem to be more popular than others.
One of the most popular Twitter applications is Tweet Deck. Tweet Deck offers the flexibility of using columns to break down your tweets into categories. You can set up groups of followers and label them, so only those particular tweets appear in that column. By default, Tweet Deck gives you three columns. One is for your Friends - meaning all the people you follow. One is for your @replies and will show every message using your user name preceded by the @ sign. The third default column for Twitter is the Direct Messages column, which shows all of the private messages you both send and receive.
You can choose to add new columns simply by clicking on the icons found at the top of the Tweet Deck page. When you click on the group button, for example, a new column is created as well as a list of your followers. You simply check off which followers you want to add to your group, give the group a name and voila! You now have a column exclusively for tweets from your chosen followers.
You can also add search columns to Tweet Deck. With the search column, you type in your keyword and you're off and running. Every time someone tweets with that keyword, it will show up in your column- whether you are following that person or not.
Tweet Deck is great for breaking your Twitter stream down into manageable chunks of tweets. When you are following hundreds or even thousands of people, it can be easy to miss the message sent out by your particular favorites. With the groups function, this is no longer an issue. It's easy to add new people to your group with Tweet Deck as well. When you see a tweet you like, click at the bottom of the little window the tweet is in. This will take you to a temporary column holding their profile. At the bottom of their profile, you have the option to follow them and to add them to a group.
Tweet Deck minimizes to your system tray and sends up a little pop up window to the upper right hand corner of your screen when you receive new tweets. You can set it to make a little chirp to notify you or you can turn the sound off.
Tweet Deck is a nifty little desktop application to help you stay in touch with all your Tweeple, without having to spend your day on the website filtering through messages you don’t need or want to see.
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NOTE: This is part eight of a ten part series on Twitter. If you want to see firsthand how I use Twitter for promotion, follow me at twitter.com/davidhooper. Also take a look at Twitter for Musicians: The Complete Guide.
As more and more people (to the tune of 2.5 million users a month) are using Twitter to develop social and business networks, more and more software geeks are getting in on the fun by developing analyzers and statistics tools, among other applications, to help show your status and to enhance your Twitter mojo. While some of these tools are just for fun, others are taken rather seriously by people who interpret the data to find new ways to build their following and influence.
Here's the low down on a few of the more popular tools being used to analyze a person's Twitter activity.
1. Tweet Later – Tweet Later lets you set up a tweet or a series of tweets and schedule them for broadcast later. While this flies in the face of the interactive nature of Twitter, many people find it convenient for times they want to announce something at times they will be unable to do so manually. Tweet Later will also let you automatically follow anyone who follows you and you can even automatically send a welcome message to your new followers.
2. Social Too - Social Too will also give you the option of automatically following people who follow you as well as send them a welcome. Social Too sends you an email each morning with a list of all the people who followed or un-followed you the previous day.
3. Tweet Beep is a service that sends you an alert whenever your chosen keywords are mentioned. You can use Tweet Beep to monitor when your name, your brand or your competition is mentioned. Tweet Beep can also keep an eye on how often your URL is mentioned, even if it's used in a shortened URL.
4. URL Shortening Services - Because Twitter limits you to only 140 characters per tweet, posting a link to your website can be troublesome. There are several services, such as budurl.com or tinyurl.com that let you type in the URL of any site and will then shorten it into a clickable URL that uses fewer characters.
5. Tweet Stats is a hub for analysis of Twitter trends. Tweet Stats will show you a graph of your tweets per hour and per month. You can see which days you tweet the most in a Tweet timeline and you can also see your reply statistics.
6. Twitter Counter is a widget you can add to your profile, blog or Website. It provides the quantity of your followers by week, month and quarter. Twitter Counter will also predict the future number of your followers based on your average gains/losses.
7. Twitter Grader is a very popular stat tool on Twitter. Twitter Grader looks at the number of your followers, the power of your network, the frequency of your updates and the completeness of your profile and gives you a percentile score.
These are just a few of the services designed to help you use Twitter as productively as possible. While they can all provide you with useful information, it's important to remember that they can all have incorrect data available to them as well. So ultimately, let the effectiveness of your Twitter time be determined by the interaction you have with others and the results you get with you business.
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