Samuel - Work Smarter with Social Media : a Guide to Managing Evernote, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Your Email.

This book is your chance to take back control of your working lifenot from the Internet, but with it.

Each year, we spend a larger and larger portion of our lives online. Americans now spend more than twenty-three hours a week on email, social media, and other online communications. Social media users spend an average of more than three hours a day on social networks. And a third of working Internet users say that the Internet, email, and cell phones increase the total amount of time they spend working.

Ironically, the tools that allow us to do all that online work often compound the problem of digital overload. In addition to following the latest news on Twitter, building our networks on LinkedIn, and staying on top of our colleagues correspondence, we have to invest time in learning how to use an ever-growing number of social media management apps and online productivity systems. Not only do we have to keep up with social media itself, we have to keep up with the tools that promise to help us keep up!

This book is your way out of the keeping up trap. It puts the focus back on your professional priorities and goals, and helps you identify the online tools and practices that help you achieve them. By introducing you to the tools that offer the greatest benefit to most professionals and helping you to use them more efficiently, it ensures that the time you spend online makes you more focused and effective, instead of more distracted and overloaded.

This book will show you how to use the tools that I get asked about the most and that offer the biggest payoff (and satisfaction), from people whove learned how to use them consistently and effectively:

• Evernote or another digital note-taking system to stay focused on the work that matters most, so you maximize your professional impact.
• LinkedIn to strengthen the professional relationships that have the biggest impact on your growth and opportunities.
• Twitter and HootSuite to stay on top ofand engage withthe most important news in your industry and field.
• Email rules and filters so that you spend less time on email triage and more time on the messages that move your work forward.

For each of these, Ill share the tools and practices that offer the biggest payoff for professionals. Many of the practices I outline are widely used by tech-savvy people who are comfortable using and customizing new software tools; many more are practices Ive personally developed or customized so that my work and priorities drive the way I use technology, instead of vice versa.

You dont have to do everything in this book in order to get more out of the time you spend online: you can pick and choose the pieces that seem as if theyll be most useful to you and adopt additional pieces over time. And because I show you how these different tools can fit together, you can be confident that each piece you layer on will work well with the systems youve already got in place.

In fact, when I sit down with a friend or colleague, I often show them one piece of this toolkit: a way they can use Evernote, HootSuite, or LinkedIn to simplify one aspect of their working lives. Thats what we did when we initially published these individual chapters on each of these tools. But what I really want to be able to do is give them an integrated road map of how to use the half-dozen essential tools that have the biggest impact on professional capacity and effectiveness. This full book is what youd get if you sat down with me for a day or two so that we could set you up with the kind of digital toolkit and work flow that maximizes the value of todays online tools.

You may already be using one or more of the tools in this book, or you may have heard of them but never taken the time to sit down and put them to use. This book is particularly aimed at:

• People who want to try (or retry) these tools. If youve heard about one of them but never tried itor you tried it and it just didnt takethis book is your on ramp. Even people whove tried and abandoned tools like Evernote tell me that this approach has helped them finally figure out how to use online tools to make their work a lot more effective and efficient.
• People who want to get more out of the tools in this book. Even if you already use LinkedIn, HootSuite, or Gmails filters, the approach and tips I provide will help you use them more effectively.
• Anyone who struggles with digital overload. If you feel overwhelmed by the ever-growing volume of information and must-try networks, this book will help you figure out which tools and approaches will help you get on top of your work, instead of becoming one more thing to keep up with.

This book isnt a comprehensive manual for using each of these tools. Plenty of those exist, and they provide a much broader look at the many ways you can use each tool. Rather, this book is focused on helping you work more effectively, so it pulls out those features of each tool that let you get your work done better, faster. Nor is it an exhaustive guide to every digital tool or social network you might use in your professional lifethats too long a list! These are the ones for which there seems to be the biggest pain point or largest gap between what people could do with the tool and what they are doing with that tool, plus a large base of people struggling with that gap.

Its also not a guide to becoming a social media celebrity. While it will help you establish and manage your presence on LinkedIn and Twitter, it is not a guide to building your personal brand on social. If thats what youre after, I suggest you check out Dan Schawbels Me 2.0 or Erik Deckers and Kyle Lacys Branding Yourself.

Its not a complete guide to social media or social media marketing from an organizational perspective; its about how you personally can use these digital tools to make your own work life better.