Way back in January, I made a promise to myself (and you, I guess) to blog at least three times a week. Well, that didn’t happen. A lot of other things did happen, like an increased use on my part of other kinds of social media, like Twitter and Facebook. I’ve even played around a bit with Tumblr. The upshot of all this is that I’ve managed to increase my presence on the intertubes to a certain degree, but this blog has paid the price. Now I know that there’s a chorus of pundits who say that the blog format is dead, and it may well be. Still, I’m not ready to give up on it, especially in regards to how it functions as part of a complete social media strategy. So here I am, making another promise to blog more. But this time I’m going to raise the stakes a bit and commit myself to a fistful of other social media strategies.

So here’s the deal. I’ve decided to take the “Pastor’s 10 Minute Jump Start Guide to Social Media” by Chris Forbes seriously and commit myself to doing the 10 daily practices he suggests everyday throughout the month of July. What’s more, I’m going to turn myself into a social media lab rat and actually test what effect Forbes’s plan has on my social media presence. And to do that, I have to take a few measurements. So here’s a snapshot of my current social media health:

  • Phil’s Little Blog on the Prairie has averaged 52 hits per day during the first six months of 2011, with an average of 1558.5 hits per month. My average number of posts per month is 10.83. I currently have 12 subscribers and have had 37 shares of my posts.
  • @psdlund on Twitter currently is following 452 tweeters and has 308 followers. I have made roughly 2,518 tweets, the vast majority of them in the last six months.
  • On Facebook, psdlund has 359 friends.
  • My Klout score currently stands at 55, an increase of +7 in the last 30 days.

Now, to test the efficacy of the Forbes plan, I’m going to do exactly what he suggests for the next 31 days. I’m going to:

  • Participate by finding “at least four ways to participate each day” in my social networks, “and only comment or respond with sincere participation”
  • Network by doing my “research and find [one or two] new people to follow each day”
  • Share by taking “some time each day to share something, at least twice, with those in [my] networks” and
  • Create by sending tweets, updating my status, posting candid shots, “or other original content.” And “about three times per week, write a blog post and link to individuals and pages in [my] networks.”

On July 31, I’ll take another snapshot of my social media statistics and see whether or not attending to these four areas has made a difference.

N.B. The heavy duty social media participation will begin on July 2 do to the Social Media Silence – Solidarity Action proposed by “Somos Georgia/We Are Georgia” I’ll be honoring. Also, I still plan on taking a weekly internet/mobile web sabbath on as many Sundays in July as possible.

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