…in which I am included.
Thank you to the folks who nominated me, and to the BI reporter who compiled the list – Megan Rose Dickey – for including me.
Author Archives: s_m_i
Panel: How Tech Is Changing the Way Women Work
Video: So you want to be a non-technical product manager?
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Social Media and the Devolution of Friendship: Part II » Cyborgology
Add this theme to the list of blog-posts-in-my-brain.
In short, “sharing” has become a lot easier and a lot more efficient, but “being shared with” has become much more time-consuming, demanding, and inefficient (especially if we don’t ignore most of our friends most of the time). Given this, expecting our friends to keep up with our social media content isn’t expecting them to meet us halfway; it’s asking them to take on the lion’s share of staying in touch with us. Our jobs (in this role) have gotten easier; our friends’ jobs have gotten harder.
The Product is the Byproduct
There’s a blog post in my brain about the difference between your company and your product, and this tremendous deck by Zach Holman articulates a lot of what I’ve been thinking:
“A great product [is] the byproduct of the environment you build at your company. This environment may actually be harder to build than the product itself, but you’ll be left with a better everything by the end of it.”
Extra nerd points for the production footnote, Zach.
Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong
Just look at that graph. On the one hand, you have all the social networks that you know. They’re about 43.5 percent of our social traffic. On the other, you have this previously unmeasured darknet that’s delivering 56.5 percent of people to individual stories. This is not a niche phenomenon! It’s more than 2.5x Facebook’s impact on the site.
Day after day, this continues to be true, though the individual numbers vary a lot, say, during a Reddit spike or if one of our stories gets sent out on a very big email list or what have you. Day after day, though, dark social is nearly always our top referral source.
Your users know when you’re only pretending to be personal
I really like BestVendor, a site that “helps you find the best work apps to get things done”. Recently, they launched their List-A-Thon feature, a way for users to create their own lists of the tools they use. (There’s a Galavant List. Of course.)
So when their co-founder and head of product Ben Zhuk weighed in on my list with a question about Quicksilver vs Alfred, I was impressed and delighted. Impressed, because it means their team is actively and sincerely engaging with their community of users. And delighted, because a fellow product person liked my GTD toolkit enough to let me know.
But then I got an email from Veronica de Souza, community manager at BestVendor with the subject line: “I loved your BestVendor list!”
And I thought, momentarily, wow.
Until I read the rest of the email:
Hey Stacy!
Thank you so much for your awesome list. As you know, your list is part of the BestVendor List-A-Thon. If you need a refresher of the details, click here. You can check the standings at any time by going to the List-A-Thon tab. The best part is that you can update and add to your list at any time!
Make sure you share your list with your networks to get the most views. You’re just a few views away from winning $1500 or an iPhone 5!
How should you promote your list? Tons of ways! Here are a few ideas to get started:
- Tweet it, share it on Facebook & LinkedIn or shout it from a rooftop!
- Blog about your list, the “making of” it, how you curated it and why it’s great.
- Send an email blast to a relevant audience.
- Submit your list to social content hubs like Reddit, HackerNews, Digg, etc.
- Comment on other lists and give feedback
And I was neither impressed nor delighted. Because, Veronica, not only do you not love my list, I’m willing to wager that you’ve never even looked at it. I’m actually pretty sure you sent the very same email to all of the users who created lists. And that you don’t love any of them.
Don’t get me wrong – email is a powerful communications medium, and mass email campaigns are a necessary component of doing business on the internet. And even though email marketing is so often a mass medium, it’s possible to make your campaigns feel more personal (or at the very least, more intelligently targeted).
But insincerity masquerading as personalization, however well-intentioned, is jarring. I don’t need you to love my list, Veronica. And I appreciated the cute puppy gif you included in the original email. But you didn’t need to lie to me – “thanks for sharing your BestVendor list” would have sufficed.
UPDATE: Veronica responded in the comments. Well done, BestVendor team:
Hey Stacy,
My use of the word “love” in the List-A-Thon email was probably a poor choice. Community Managers make mistakes sometimes
That being said, I personally DO read every single list that is submitted to BestVendor. I can speak for the entire team when I say that our interactions with people on the site are 100% genuine. So any “like” or comment you receive from us on a list (or on any other post throughout the site) is genuine.
The email that you received was sent to those who had been the first to enter the List-A-Thon. I didn’t want them to forget about the contest and I wanted to remind them that lists can be updated and edited at any time. But you’re right, “love” was unnecessary, and I value your feedback.
Thanks!
Veronica from BestVendor
Getting things done the Galavant way
I’m a huge fan of lifehacking, by which I mean “I am completely overscheduled and need more hours in my day, so in lieu of a Time-Turner I’m going to need to be as efficient as possible”. I sometimes call this life in beta.
My preferred tools and techniques have evolved over the years – I used to be full-on hipster PDA, for example.
Here’s my GTD toolkit circa September 2012, ranked in order of measurably-improve-my-(perceived)-productivity.
Software:
- Quicksilver - this is by far my favourite application launcher for OS X and it’s consistently the first application I install on any new Mac. Use this constantly. (Free)
- Divvy – Found via this post on Reddit, Divvy is the single best window management tool for OS X. Use it about once every 10 minutes. At least. ($)
- Google Apps – Google organizes my life. I’ve been a Gmail user since 2004 (when Blogger users received invitations to the beta), and a Google Apps user since at least 2008. I won’t tell you how many email addresses I have. But it’s a lot. I use Google Apps for calendaring, document collaboration, email hosting and analytics for my domains.
- Asana - I use this for everything – at work for project management, at home for grocery lists and travel planning.
- iDoneThis – I started using iDoneThis in July 2011 (from my first entry: ‘wrestled inbox back into submission’). At the time, the iDT team were alpha-testing what has become their primary product: iDoneThis for teams (then called ‘WeDoneThis’). I use iDoneThis to keep track not just of “what I did today”, but also what I ate, whether I had a migraine, what time I woke up. It’s part #gtd, part quantified self. ($)
- Alfred – I confess to being late to the Alfred train – I used it on and off while Quicksilver was on a development hiatus – but after reading this post on how to integrate iDoneThis and Alfred I coughed up the GBP 30 for a Mega Supporter license. Don’t be a free user, etc. (Free, $ for the advanced feature set)
- Fantastical – Holy calendar management, Batman. Fantastical allows you to use natural language to enter calendar events (like “breakfast next Tuesday at 8am with Brianne at Ground Support); it syncs with iCal, BusyCal, Entourage, or Outlook (and by extension, iCloud and Google Calendar). Use this hourly. ($)
- Evernote – Recipes, yoga poses, notes from classes I’ve attended, pages ripped from magazines and newspapers, receipts, bills, travel itineraries - Evernote is my go-to digital filing system. (Free, $ for features like offline notebooks and searchable PDFs)
- BusyCal – Because iCal is terrible, terrible piece of software. Even without the skeuomorphism. I rarely ever have to open BusyCal – because Fantastical is just that good – but when I do, I’m able to seamlessly manage my (embarrassingly large number of) Google Calendars which span two different Google Apps accounts.
- DropBox – DropBox makes it automagical to access and sync files across all my devices, or from wherever I am. And I never have to travel with external harddrives again. (Free, $. Referral link)
- CrashPlan – After one catastrophic hard drive failure and a subsequent roommate-formatting-my-iPod incident, I converted to the way of the backup. My backups have backups. TimeMachine + CrashPlan + multiple external drives = peace of mind.
- Lastpass – Even though I’ve been increasingly been moving to the xkcd approach to password management, Lastpass is a brilliant, useful tool. (Free, $ for premium features like mobile access)
- Pinboard – I was a long, long time Delicious user. And then – that whole thing. And that other thing. Cue swift switch to Pinboard, which is a brilliant service. The archiving feature is well worth the paid upgrade. ($)
- Instapaper – Flirted with Read it Later (long before it was Pocket) and Readability. Subscribed to Instapaper and paid for the app when there was still a free option available. No regrets. (Free, $)
- IFTTT – The glue of the internet. IFTTT makes my phone ring when I get an email with certain terms in the subject line or body. It sends articles I like in Instapaper to my Pinboard archive. It’s awesome. (Free)
- MailChimp - I switched to MailChimp from TinyLetter (which was acquired by…MailChimp) for the Galavant Times newsletter. Easy to use, full featured. (Free, $)
- Shoeboxed - Paperless life, activate. Every month or so I gather up my receipts, assorted business cards, hand-written notes and other paper-based odds and ends and mail them to Shoeboxed. Shoeboxed scans all those documents and allows me to download the scans to Evernote or in the case of business cards, export the collected contact details to a CSV. ($)
- Week Cal – Because calendars on the iPhone don’t have to suck. ($)
- Tweetbot – RIP Tweetie. Long live Tweetboot – brilliant on the iPhone, tremendous on the iPad. ($)
- Lift – Foursquare for habits. Simple, elegant. (Free)
Hardware / Offline:
11″ Macbook Air – The best laptop I have ever owned, bar none.
iPad 3 – Great for my ploughing through my Instapaper backlog. And catching up on Tumblr.
Kindle – The basic, ad-supported $79 edition.
iPhone – 4S, via many Blackberries and preceded by an HTC Sensation.
Sennheiser HD 380 Pro – Money well spent (as recommended by Marco Arment).
Doxie – A lightweight scanner with solid software and seamless Evernote integration.
Moo – Gorgeous, cost-effective business cards and stickers. ($, referral link)
How to pitch a tech blogger | Mark M Hendrickson
From 2010, still relevant.
