“By recording your goals and dreams on paper, you set in motion the process of becoming the person you most want to be.”

-Mark Victor Hansen

One of the mantras of goal-setting is that if a goal isn’t written down, it’s just a dream. So, as is popular across the blogosphere, I’m writing my social media goals down here.

First, let me say a little something about the rationale behind these goals. I’ve found that as social media has become my job and career, it has become more difficult to manage. I’m no longer doing it just for the fun of it, and I have a lot more riding on my social media success. Furthermore, I’ve learned a lot about social media in the past year, and I want to make sure I’m living according to my knowledge. So without any further ado, here are my 2010 social media resolutions:

• LinkedIn – In the past, I’ve done some work with LinkedIn, including completing my profile, working to get recommendations, and doing some networking. This year, I’d like to use LinkedIn much more effectively. In order to do so, I will spend an hour every week:
  • Updating my status
  • Finding new groups to join
  • Participating in discussions in groups I’m already a member of
  • Answering some questions in the Q&A section
  • Seeking out new contacts.
• Facebook – I have to admit that I’ve been conspicuously absent on Facebook recently. One of the reasons is that I’ve adopted other methods of communication, and much of what drew me to Facebook has evaporated at this point, but the hypocrisy of being a social media guy who doesn’t use Facebook is somewhat galling, so I’m going to reengineer my Facebook presence and get involved again by making sure that I log in every day to do Facebooky things like
  • Updating my status
  • Writing on my friends’ walls
  • Finding groups to network and exchange information with
  • Checking on some of the pages I’ve started (and maybe even start some new pages).
• Twitter – I’m on Twitter a lot, I just need better consistency. I want to:
  • Tweet at 3 new people
  • Drop at least 3 useful links
  • Retweet at least 3 awesome tweets every day (outside of my normal tweeting)

I have to admit that it feels a bit lame to put a solid number on this, but I think that if I want to improve the quality of my Twitterstream, this is how I’ll do it.

• Blog – This is the area I’m most excited about, because blogging is where I got my start in social media, and it’s still the area that I enjoy the most (although you wouldn’t know it by the number of posts lately). I want to become a much better blogger, and in order to do so, I’m going to
  • Write one post every day, even if I don’t post it. I mostly just want to get into the rhythm of writing every day.
  • Publish at least twice every week, pulling from the body of content I’m creating in my daily post writing.
  • Comment on two blogs every day in order to be a better blogosphere citizen (blogozen?).
  • Finish working on my blog theme by adding Facebook Connect, better sharing and commenting functionality, and an awesome footer.
• Misc. – I’m going to do something groundbreaking this year, I’m just not quite sure what it’s going to be yet. Vague? Yes. Unrealistic? Possibly. But what’s the point of goals if you don’t have something exciting to drive towards? I’ll be taking more time to flesh this goal out, deciding what constitutes “groundbreaking” and how I plan on achieving it.

About the conference (from the conference website):

Digital Marketing World Fall 2009 will sum up the cutting-edge information and skills you need to master the latest, most successful digital marketing techniques out there. You’ll be amazed by how much you can digest in a six hour period! Some of the concepts brought to you by respected thought leaders and experts in the industry include:

• Integrating social media into your marketing mix
• Creating High-Performance Landing Pages for Demand Generation
• Engaging and nurturing sales prospects through email
• Building valuable content for your customer community
• Link building to boost your site traffic
• Building customer loyalty on the social web
• Twitter success stories