REWORK is written by Jason Fried and David Heinemeir Hansson, the founders of 37 Signals. With refreshing clarity and a flutter of snark, they share their ”cookbook” – a collection of short essays about lessons they’ve learned along the way from growing their product and business. I think it’s a great book for anyone working at a young company who wants a quick read and an uber-motivating kick in the butt.

These were some of my favorite lessons from REWORK:

Workaholism:

This resonated with me. They condemn workaholics, saying that those who like to burn the midnight oil just like to feel like heroes. They throw shear hours at a problem rather than effectively searching for a solution. Workaholics claim to be perfectionists, but that just means they focus in on needless details instead of moving forward onto the next task. I know sometimes I can get caught up in details too much, and it is incredibly time-consuming. Although marketing is very detail oriented in nature I think (someone has to nit-pick about grammar in copy!) you have to learn not to fixate on the stuff that won’t move the needle. You have to learn. I have to learn.

Draw a Line in the Sand:

This how you attract superfans.  Whole Foods is an example. They sell high quality foods, and sometimes it costs more. (Ever heard someone call them Whole Paycheck?) When you don’t compromise on what your product is offering you’re going to turn some people away. However, you’re also going to earn a loyal following of evangelists who agree with you. In a somewhat similar essay, “Pick a Fight”, they explain the value of taking a stand on something, or against a competitor. Dunkin Donuts is the anti-Starbucks. Under Armour vs. Nike is another example they cite. One example I thought of was HubSpot, and how they draw a line in the sand and chug the inbound marketing KoolAid. They pick a fight against old marketing tactics and create content around why inbound marketing is the way for businesses to generate leads.

Out-teach Your Competition

This essay preaches from the gospel of inbound marketing, whether that’s intentional or not. Your competition is buying advertising and hiring salespeople. You can do the same thing, but early on, you can’t out-do them. But you can out-teach them. They point the Gary Vaynerchuk teaching people about wine with Wine Library TV as an example. This is especially critical for startups. You can’t afford to buy a Superbowl Ad, but you can blog about your industry and teach your customers, and that actually creates a greater impact than any advertisement long term.

Hire When It Hurts

This concept is the idea that you should only hire when you absolutely need that position on your team – when there is a gaping, obvious hole in your organization and the quality level is slipping because you don’t have someone there doing that work. The thing is, each person you add to the team alters the structure and culture. You can always add people, but if you grow too quickly before you are ready, you can’t eliminate positions ( !! ) without damaging morale. So only hire when you absolutely need to, and hire only after you have done that job yourself for a while so that you are able to properly manage that position.

Throughout the book, they seem to emphasize the advantages of being uncluttered. Desks, software, meetings, extra employees, extra policies – all of these things take a company away from focusing on their core, and well, getting things done.

Strangers at a Cocktail Party

When you hire the wrong people or hire too quickly, you might end up with a “strangers at a cocktail party” environment on your team. It’s a bunch of strangers in a room. This environment means that no one calls anyone out, no one gives constructive feedback or says what they mean. It’s too nicey nice. It’s too friendly. It’s too politically correct.

I couldn’t agree more. The NY Times had a great article about Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO and Mark Zuckerburg’s Work BFF. They work so well together because they are able to communicate. I’m pretty sure that not all of their conversations are rainbows and butterflies. They can probably call each other out, give each other critical feedback and say exactly what’s on their minds. “Nothing goes left unsaid” is vitally important to me, and it’s a cultural value I try to instill in my workplace relationships (and in my life in general.) One of my mentors put it this way: Transparency is freedom. Try it at the office.

Meetings are Toxic:

I. Love. This. Concept. I can’t explain this as well as they are going to. But, if there is one thing I want everyone who reads this post to realize, it’s that your next one hour meeting with ten employees didn’t just take an hour’s worth of time. It was ten hours worth of time. Also, how much are ya’ll getting paid per hour? Meetings are expensive, kids! Was that conversation actually worth it, or could two people have sat down for ten minutes to get those decisions made or that to-do list mapped out?

(I want to run a marketing department when I grow up!)

Just… cancel your next BS meeting and watch this 17-minute video from Jason Fried about why you can’t get anything done at work instead:

As you can tell, I truly enjoyed the book and I think you’ll benefit from it to. You can buy it on Amazon here. If you’ve read the book, feel free to share your favorite lessons from it in the comments.

Let me know if this situation is unique to my experience.

You’re at a startup and it’s mostly engineers. There’s one marketing person. It’s not that you don’t heart each other, but you don’t collaborate. You feel out of the loop. You actually have no idea what the other person is working on because you don’t understand their language, so their projects don’t become real to you until you see them deployed on the website.

This was my experience for the first six and a half months of oneforty, and it boiled down to a communication issue. Product things that I knew were being worked on had titles I didn’t understand, so I didn’t understand how it could translate into action on my part. (Oh, so this fancy code thing is a sick new website feature that could be promoted in a screencast for our users? Oh, so this feature is actually kinda huge and I should do some blogger outreach about it?)

We devised an incredibly elaborate and complicated solution to this problem. Now, this may be hard to comprehend, so here is the visual map-out:

Ask more questions! Talk to each other more. Explain your projects to each other. Provide some context. In the wise words of one of my engineers, “trust me, you don’t want to hear about every piece of code I push out.” He’s right. I don’t. He doesn’t want to see all of my Tweets either. Don’t micromanage each other – just communicate.

Ever feel like you’re “on an island” at your organization? Here’s my challenge: swim away and communicate. When you’re all in the loop, you don’t feel so alone on the startup rollercoaster. And when you’re communicating things internally, you’re better able to externally communicate new features. So jump in the water. Start swimming.

By now, you may have heard of the tragic loss of Jenny-Lyn Watson, a 20-year junior at Mercyhurst College who was killed by her ex-boyfriend last month. She went home for Thanksgiving break and went missing Saturday, November 20th. A week later her body was found in a park near her home in Liverpool, NY.

The week-long search for her sparked extensive media coverage of her case. In social media, a Facebook group grew rapidly with messages from friends passing along current information about the case. The Facebook group now has over 26,000 members. A search for Jenny-Lyn Watson on Facebook turns up dozens of tribute pages, sadly, some restricted to no commenting.

Why no commenting? Well, there are trolls. There are people who write dumb shit in online forums. But I’m compassionate. I think people get angry and upset. Even if they didn’t personally know the family, maybe the situation hits close to home for them and it sparks a misplaced outburst. Is that ok? No. But I try to believe that people are good, just hurt, and not just trolls.

Even the pages that allow for commenting show that there’s trouble controlling the comments. Sometimes, they have to shut down the commenting capabilities because of disrespect.

My question to the community managers is this: What can we do to help? I’m serious. We are professionals with experience establishing and moderating online forums. Raise your hand if you are in charge managing one of these for your company:

• Twitter account
• Facebook page
• LinkedIn group
• Independently made Q&A site (Like this qHub one I run)
• Message board
• Blog comments

Did you raise your hand? This means you have experience dealing with online conversations. You have likely written community guidelines, flagged comments, done a little policing, done a little engaging in an online community that is essentially similar to a Facebook tribute page.

Maybe we could help set up the pages and manage it during the crisis period. We could write guidelines, flag comments, moderate the page, etc. Or, we could simply offer training or “on call” advice to those who wish to moderate the pages. Would it be tough work? Yes. It’s a tribute page. This is sad and awful and real and it sucks. But I had this re-occurring thought about the whole thing: I didn’t know Jenny-Lyn. However, someone that knew her very well is managing this page right now in the middle of grieving. I don’t know if the page is making his or her process any easier, and maybe a little help from someone like myself could.

In November 2008 my friend Lindsay died in a tragic accident. She was in critical condition for several days, and the fastest way to get information was through a Facebook group. It was updated much quicker than the traditional news outlets. When it came to finding news from traditional news outlets, I would see awful, hateful things written about the situation in the article comments. Much worse were the comments in community forums that popped up in a Google search. One person’s honest search for information turned into a twisted game of dodging digital landmines. Seeing how media and communication had changed during that experience is what got me involved in social media.

So, I can’t say I know how Jenny-Lyn’s friends feel when they see the comments. But I can relate somewhat. And I’m wondering what my next steps are.

I’m new to the startup scene here in town and I’m still getting a feel for the ecosystem around here. I’m doing a lot of listening, just reading blog posts comparing us to the Valley, about our lack of swagger or lack of innovation or this or that. I’m trying to get a sense of the environment out here and learn.

My take so far? I gotta tell ya, it’s not perfect here, but seriously, Boston is awesome and I don’t think we give ourselves enough credit.

Trust me: In June 2009 I wouldn’t have moved away from my parents  - not to mention WEGMANS – to live in some overpriced shithole apartment if I didn’t love that city outside my door. (Seriously. I pay like $600 a month in rent and my shower head is held up by a hair elastic. Go figure.)

I’m going to quote Bostinnovation’s take on all the Valley vs. Boston comparisons:

“The environment we currently work in is home to a world class collegiate population, large amounts of VC and plenty of technical talent.  Surely, world-changing companies have been brought to life in less favorable conditions than our own.”

Seriously, people. Boston isn’t so bad!

I’m going to talk to you about Techrigy/Alterian. They created a social media monitoring software, SM2, out of Aaron Newman’s basement in Rochester, NY in 2006.

There are definitely innovators in Rochester, NY – but Twitter and tech and such isn’t as ubiquitous as around here. In Boston, my boss’ three-year-old daughter knows how to use an iPad. Every major company and even local businesses know their way around social media around here. It’s not like that in Rochester. Many people are still figuring it out. Not the best situation for trying to sell a social media monitoring platform, right?

The people at Techrigy didn’t waste time comparing their environment to others. They sat in the basement, and then sat in an office with no windows, and worked their butts off. And then they got acquired.

So, I’m not saying that they are Google – but they are still a startup success story and awesome.

Beantown’s doing alright! We have the tech scene and the educational institutions at our hands. There’s a lot of young energy and leadership in the community, making it a place that new people like me want to be a part of. (Follow @GreenhornBoston, @BosWomenpreneurs @DartBoston and @Bostinnovation for a start.) I would just say that yes, it’s good to stop and question these things and look at what the Valley is doing – but let’s not get too distracted by it. We’ve all got work to do. After all, if we want to “catch up” to the Valley in any way – at some point you just gotta get back to your basement and execute.

This video is getting a lot of buzz and I think it’s certainly worth a look. It’s basically a cool take on how so much of our lives are lived on Facebook – and that’s just for your average Joe, not even a social media chick like myself that does this social media stuff for a living.

People blog and talk a lot about professional and personal balance in social media, and in conferences they stand up and say to “just get over it.” They’re right, at some point we have to just get over it. Google knows no difference. Your personal and professional accounts, opinions and profiles are this big hot mess of an online presence. If you aren’t comfortable with mixing that, you probably aren’t in the right business.

That said, I just want to put it out there that it’s still hard.

It’s hard because people my age haven’t only used social media for business use. We joined Facebook before we left for college, to meet our roommates and classmates online before we moved in freshman year. We joined before “grown ups” were on there, before there were fan pages to manage and before FBML was invented. We put dumb stuff up there sometimes because we didn’t know better. Facebook was an epicenter and broadcast portal for drama. And for some, with jobs that don’t matter so much what your “personal brand” and “online presence” is – it still is.

Now I’m using Facebook as a marketing tool, and it’s a weird conflict. I login to update my business’ fan page or create an event for a Tweetup or network with other community managers in the community managers group, and “on my way to work,” I’m bombarded by a parade of other people’s life choices, aka the news feed, leaving me feeling distracted and confused. All I wanted to do was plan a damn Tweetup and move on to the next task for the day. Now I’m questioning my path to personal success!

I don’t think that having separate personal and professional Facebook is the answer. Having two separate accounts would almost further distance the professional/personal sides and intensify the identity crisis, I think. Plus, in my case, it’s probably too late for that. It probably comes down to having more self-assurance and comparing myself less to people I don’t know anymore, filtering them out of my news feed even.

Anyone else struggle with this, even if we’re not supposed to admit that we struggle with this?

I’m feeling nostalgic these days. With my second Inbound Marketing Summit wrapped up, and experiencing my first time at Blog World in Vegas in October, I’m entering November and that means it’s my Twitterversary again. Two years. Damn.

And it’s yet another blog for me. You may notice that janetaronica.com now has a new home on WordPress.org, a new (and anticipated to be evolving) look, and compiled content from three of my blogging ventures over the past two years. Yes, three… Things don’t look perfect on this blog right now and that’s ok. Startup life has taught me that sometimes “done” is better than perfect, and you iterate your product from there. I’m happy to have my domain name and my content here, my Tweet button and Facebook like button installed so you can share it with your friends. There’s a way to subscribe to my content. I’ll add the extra stuff as I go along, but I’m no longer waiting around for myself to figure that stuff out before I blog. It’s a blog. Blogging comes first.

I haven’t done things perfectly in social media. Here’s what I’d do if I started today:

I’d start a blog on WordPress.com. I’d buy my domain name from the beginning and buy whatever amount of money they charge these days for domain re-direction. I’d use the *simplest* theme possible. I would not. I REPEAT: I would not fuss and muss over the look and feel of my blog. I would just start blogging.

A mistake I made in blogging is wasting a lot of time on the look/feel of my blogs and getting frustrated with coding stuff I didn’t understand. I wasted time I could’ve spent writing screwing around with HTML and whatchamacallit and getting no where with it. I’d get the content right before I worried about headers, colors, widgets etc.

Social Health Nut is an example of this. I fussed around so much trying to figure out how I wanted that thing to look that by the time it looked the way I wanted it to, I realized I didn’t even know what I wanted to blog about. So I didn’t blog. #fail

You have to scale. What is priority when it comes to customizing your blog? What matters most? When you are JUST starting, this matters most:

• Tweet Button and Facebook Like Button (so people can share your content)
• RSS button (so people can subscribe to your content)

After I got a good six months of blog-at-least-once-a-week content under my belt, THEN I would move my content over to WordPress.org. There are far more theme options and customizations available with plugins from what I can see so far. Paying for Bluehost and having their customer service people there to bail me out when I jack up my .php stuff is well worth it. You can’t get any help like that when paying WordPress.com for rights to customize the CSS over there.

Another option? Just do a Posterous blog. It’s a very simple blogging platform, you can just email your posts to [email protected] and they show up on your site. It’s a change to focus on the content without the distractions of all that other garbage.

Also, remember: You don’t have to do a WordPress blog.

It’s the content that matters, not the platform.

Steve Rubel uses Posterous.

Seth Godin, David Armano, Julia Roy and Greg Verdino all use TypePad.

Hipster Puppies uses Tumblr. Oh, wait…

You get my point. Just start blogging. Not sure what to write about? Talk about how you’re not sure what to write about because you’re just learning about social media. “I’m new to social media and I read this article today and this is what I thought of it.” That’s a legitimate blog post! And my God, this SMD community would find that sort of stuff refreshing coming from someone new to the space, I think. Just start blogging. Go. Go, go go.

And just start Tweeting. That’s what I did two years ago and I’d do it all again. I literally just started asking people how they got their PR jobs in Boston and Tweeted blog posts I read and commented on and found interesting. I still do that, only now I’m asking about advice when it comes to community management and Tweeting/commenting on blog posts related to that. Remember that “don’t talk to strangers” advice you got as a kid? That doesn’t apply to Twitter. Talk to strangers. Lots of them.

Getting on Twitter and blogging changed my life. It changed my career direction and introduced me to amazing friends, mentors and people. It’s been a wild two years. There are things I could have done better, yes. But there is nothing that I would do differently.

I have a confession to make that may seem odd to you: I’m an introvert.

“Heh, good luck being a community manager gig, kid,” is what some are going to think.

“May want to re-think that marketing career,” is what some are going to think.

And that’s fine. Trust me, I’ll find my way. I always do.

I never fancied myself an introvert until recently. First, I love one-on-one conversations. I love deep conversations. I’m an open book, not hesitant to freely and comfortably share what’s good and what’s not so good with me. I also like public speaking and Powerpoint presentations. I feel natural in leadership roles where I am standing in the front of a room and running a group discussion.

I would say I was a fast adopter of Twitter, a platform inherently different from Facebook and Myspace, which are based on networking with shared connections, vs. communicating with strangers. But I discount this as evidence of extrovertism, as the safety of a computer screen and my openness on Twitter possibly proves myself as an example of the opposite.
 

The oddest aspect of my supposed introvertism is that I’d describe myself as bubbly, spunky, sassy… I like making people laugh. It doesn’t take me long to feel comfortable acting that way around people.

There’s the middle space of human interaction that scares the shit out of me, between one-on-one conversations, hanging with people I know and public speaking enlies the thing I really suck at: mingling. 

I hate mingling! God, UGH! a;lwekra[0inag This is just one of those things I am terrible at.

Mingling makes me really nervous, and one would think that by 23 I would have this down, right? After college parties and weekends at bars I’d have this together, right? Well, no. I’m a chick. Usually chicks just show up at bars with their groups of girlfriends, get a vodka diet and people mingle their way over to you. 

It doesn’t work that way at conferences. You have to just hang out and meet people. I’m so bad at this. I get really nervous and self-conscious. I don’t know what to say, how to introduce myself, how to approach people… But it’s weird: if you want to specifically meet for coffee or lunch or just chat one-on-one somewhere away from the crowd – I’m down! 

I’m worried my crappy networking skills will hold me back. It’s not arrogance, just raw passion and drive that speaks when I say things like “I’m getting a hammer” and busting through the glass ceiling that still exists in PR, marketing, entrepreneurism and tech. I really want to do something with this life.

I’m a dreamer. I spend a ton of my free time – my beloved Janet time (which I thrive on, I’m serious, I’m an introvert) – thinking about stuff. I think about the intersections of the internet, law and social media, contemplating the tragic experiences of Tyler Clementi, the Catsouras family and others. I think a lot about how we can use social media to find missing children. I’m just a dreamer off in my own world, contemplating what’s next. Don’t interrupt me with a phone call, because if I’m able to find my damn phone and answer it, I’ll probably be awkward on the phone. (I had a well-meaning boss tell me that once.) 

So what do I do from here? First, I’m giving up on mingling. 

Seriously. I’m not forcing myself to do this anymore. Every time I try, I’m just awkward, nervous, and I feel worse about myself because of it. I’m worried I make a bad impression. Screw mingling. I’m networking my way.

I need to make more coffee dates. I need to plan ahead before I go to these conferences and see who’s going to be there and make a plan to meet up with people for lunch on those days. When I can’t do that and there is absolutely no way around “mingling” type situations, I need to do use my “buddy system” and bring a friend to mingle in the crowd with, to ease the pain if you will.

At the end of the day, of course I have to mingle. Sort of. I’m a community manager. Part of my job is to love the crap out of my brand in public. Fake it til you make it, so the saying goes. Fake that confidence until it becomes real I suppose. 

But really, truly, I think my networking story is going to be about quality vs. quantity. Maybe I won’t meet ten new people at Inbound Marketing Summit – I’ll have coffee with two. And that’s fine. I don’t need to make a collage of business cards on my bedroom wall of people who’s faces I can’t remember. I’m building that inner circle. Those people I IM in the middle of the day on Gchat just to Gchat. Those people I grab drinks with. Those LinkedIn contacts I’ll actually contact if I or someone I know is looking for a job or advice. But I don’t email them – I text them. The thing is, those two people know ten other people, one of whom may want to meet for coffee at the next minglefest.

Do you Retweet every Tweet that interests you? Do you @reply someone every time you have a reaction to something he or she Tweets?

Recent statistics from social media analytics firm Sysomos report that 71% of Tweets garner no reaction whatsoever. This means no Retweets and no @replies. Sysomos’ statistics are the findings after studying 1.2 billion over the course of two months. The report also reveals that of the 23% of Tweets that do produce an @reply, 85% of those only produce a single @reply.  Just 6% of Tweets get a Retweet.

Mashable jumped on the story, and one of the commenters summarized much of my reaction: No @reply or Retweet does not imply falling on deaf ears. Not all information warrents a share or a response.

I know that Sysomos is just crunching the numbers as they saw them, but I don’t think the research paints a picture of what is really going on on Twitter. A few things:

• What about direct messages?

Sometimes, I’ll get into a conversation about making specific plans to meet up with someone on Twitter. I stop @replying that person and I send a direct message.

Sometimes, I just don’t feel that whatever I have to say is educational, informative, generic, or funny enough to share with the 1,800 or so people who follow me. Those Tweets people were sending didn’t go unnoticed or unreplied to, they were just private interactions via direct message.

• @replies and Retweets aren’t the only means for impact

Did you know you can favorite Tweets? Not that many people do this, but I do know some people who use the “favoriting” option as a way to bookmark Tweets for later. They do this with Tweets of articles they want to read later, for example, and keep track of it using a tool like Favstar.fm. Paper.li allows you to read Tweets in a newspaper-like format. Ever see those Tweets like “the Janet Aronica daily is out”? That’s someone publishing the links they found from their friend’s Tweets that day. Now, they may not have directly Retweeted that individual’s specific Tweet that hour or replied to that person’s Tweet right then.

My point is that just because it’s not in the form of an @reply or a Retweet, that doesn’t mean someone didn’t find a Tweet useful, funny, informative, etc. Also, how many times a day do you see a Tweet and just think “wow” but you are too busy at the time to actually type out a reaction to it? Again, that Tweet didn’t fall on deaf ears, it just didn’t garner a public reaction out of you.

• There’s a lot of “pointless” babble out there

I wonder how much of the 1.2 billion Tweets were just garbage. There’s a lot of junk on Twitter. My company has an “OH” account that’s just Tweets of funny things we say at the office. We’re the only ones who follow it. It’s basically an inside joke to us. (I’m sorry, social media gods, it’s pointless crap but it’s funny to us. ) It’s not meant to be @replied or Retweeted, but the 50 or so Tweets we’ve sent from it could’ve been a part of that 1.2 billion Tweets. I recently saw someone Tweeting about how she had started an anonymous Twitter “diet” account so she could Tweet about everything she ate and how she felt about it to help herself keep on track.

It’s 2010 and we still have that itch we had in high school when all we wanted was to put up a really great away message on AIM. We want to rant, snark and cry. We want to be heard but we don’t want to be held accountable, and I actually think there are a lot of Twitter accounts out reflecting this, but they’re anonymous. It’s your Live Journal, served up 140 characters at a time. Is it pointless? Well, it’s not supposed to garner an @reply or a Retweet, they are just thoughts.

I suppose the argument can be made that in order for a Tweet to really have legs, in order for it to resonate it needs to be shared publicly. However, I think that if you’re a marketer and you’re looking at this stuff, don’t read it as “Twitter is a waste if almost 3/4 doesn’t produce a public reaction.” What I’m going to look at is, how do my company’s account’s followers want to interact with me and share my content other than @replies and Retweets? How are you going to apply this to your marketing?

I'm re-posting this article from TechCrunch because one of my top goals in life is to chase my crazy daydreams. Because at one point, Twitter was somebody's crazy daydream and Michael Arrington said that was stupid. At one point, somebody thought selling shoes online wouldn't work. But somebody kept pursuing that and we have Zappos. And even if it wasn't a company, maybe it was another idea. Maybe somebody thought the OldSpice social media campaign was a bad idea or that no one would buy iPads.