blogging: 4th quarter craziness

This is a humbling post to write. The Oneicity blog has been quiet for a month. You probably thought we’d been abducted by aliens, bought out by some big corporation or something equally unexpected and bizarre. Alas, not so. We experienced something we always advise our clients to anticipate–we were buried in 4th Quarter Craziness. Our “4th Quarter Craziness” began in August and completely buried us in September (of course, our busy 4th Quarter is really the 3rd Quarter because we’re busy working to create wonderful 4th Quarters for our clients).

Since you last heard from us, we’ve:

• added two new clients (yea!)
• started 2 zillion new projects
• held 3 client meetings
• responded to several exciting new business requests
• finished some much needed backend website changes
• traveled to Texas, California, Oregon and North Carolina
• completed an international social media marketing certification
• partially moved into a new office space
• lost a cat (found him “trapped” on the neighbor’s deck-don’t get me started about that)
• lost a dog (found him scamming the late shift guys at McDonalds-don’t get Hoots started on Jake)
• undergone collarbone X-Rays (one of the kids, no break but a “cool” sling)
• entertained visiting family
• attended 4 “starting a new school year” conferences
• traveled to see family

You get the picture. No whining on our part, just a big dose of reality. The busyness forced us to concentrate on family and clients. That wasn’t our best plan. The best plan is taking care of family, clients and maintaining our online presence. Alas, we didn’t see the tsunami coming soon enough. Sorry for disappearing like that. We hope you’ll understand and learn from our experience (we’re determined to share the journey with you–good and bad). We’re a small organization,  just like many of you are. So just like you, we have to anticipate the crunches, except this time we didn’t.

Here are our takeaways for maintaining an online presence in crazy times:

1. Stock up in slack times. We didn’t have enough blog “inventory” to see us through when we didn’t have any time or brain cells left to write. I can almost guarantee that you can never have enough blogs written ahead of time.
2. Don’t be afraid to blog short. I (we) have a tendency to write longer blogs. Frankly, that’s a bad habit which kills you when you have no time. Candidly, we’d have been better off blogging a little rather than none.
3. Involve other people. We have been doing interviews with writers and other professionals we respect. If you stock up on those, you’ll like that a lot when you’re exhausted and can’t imagine having a cogent thought (although I’ve never limited myself to cogent thoughts).

More tomorrow as we ramp the machine back up to speed. Hang on, we’ve been busy learning, producing and thinking, the FUN ride continues.

Also, it’s Good Job Monday, so we’re giving a shout-out to Mike Stelzner, the man behind this year’s phenomenal Social Media Success Summit and the author of Writing White Papers. Today Mike launched Social Media Examiner, an online magazine, full of content-rich articles and videos. It’s designed to help you discover how to best use social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to find prospects and generate more brand awareness. Awesome job, Mike! We loved taking part in the Social Media Success Summit and cannot wait to see all that comes from the new online magazine!

So what about you? How do you deal with your crazy 4th Quarter? What steps do you take to avoid getting buried by the busy season? And, what are your favorite new social media resources? As always, love to hear what you think.

Steve Thomas
Partner, Oneicity

(photo credit: lucyfrench123)