Miscellany
Some things have been kicking around my inbox and my 3banana for far too long. I finally sat down, with roast potatoes and a Sapporo in hand, and a too-long to-read list.
First, Mashable reminded me why brand disasters (of all kinds) happen:
Social media disasters occur for a number of reasons, the first being that your company probably messed up. It may not have been intentional, but something, somewhere down the line, went wrong enough for someone to complain and it was enough for others to vocalize that complaint *en masse.*
Then, my colleague Dave Fleet looks at three different reasons why we hit the Facebook Like button, and what that means:
If the people liking something on Facebook then recommend the product more and buy it more, then the benefits are clear, and your challenge becomes how to continuously engage them while recruiting more people.
If people like something because they already buy and recommend the product more than other people, then Facebook becomes a useful retention mechanism for your business.
If people like something because they just like the marketing, that puts them much higher up the CRM cycle, so you then have the task of moving them further along the funnel over time.
Next on the agenda, Getting Things Done. I recently decided that I’m going to move towards processing all my tasks through my inbox. I mean everything. Emails are the obvious item, but I also want to store my tasks there, my reference material, and I want to start blogging from my email client (like so [Edit: it came out all wonky and I had to reformat]). There’s a lot still I haven’t figured out, e.g. how to migrate my 3banana notes into gmail in a useful way. But this weekend I did take some time to cross things off my ‘task list’ - I archived nearly 5,000 messages. That’s why I read this blog post about the Priority Inbox with so much interest:
If it’s actionable, I then consider: Can it be completed in 2 minutes or less? If so, I do it RIGHT THEN. If no, it’s either A.) assigned to an open project, a new project or a single-action task as is appropriate; B.) assigned to a context like “@computer”; C.) delegated to the appropriate person. If delegated, I make a note of the task, person and date of delegation on a @waiting list for later follow-up. In all cases, it’s processed appropriately to Omnifocus and then deleted.
I tried the Priority Inbox, btw, and then killed it. I’m happily at Inbox 5 without it. PS: If you’re into GTD and want to see a good list of tags to use e.g. with Evernote, I really like this post.
Last thing for the evening, Foreign Policy’s comprehensive review of the coming megacity boom in India and China.The cold, hard stats are mind-boggling.
If current trends hold, China will need 40 billion square meters of combined residential and commercial floor space over the next 20 years — equivalent to adding one New York every two years. India, on the other hand, needs to start building between 700 million and 900 million square meters of combined residential and commercial space each year — equivalent to adding more than two Mumbais or one Chicago each year.
And that’s a good night for me! Sweet dreams, tumblr.
