As the fairly new Social Media Director for Urban Influence, I have responsibilities to both clients and to our own brand. Basically, as social media practitioners, we are the 24-hour Headline News across many platforms. To keep on top of these priorities and keep up with such a fast-moving discipline, it’s important to start your mornings with some daily rituals.  Here are mine.

1. Take care of your clients and your brand

As most of us know, when you’re responsible for your clients’ accounts, you should be monitoring their accounts all weekend through your favorite social media tool. At this time, I monitor all my accounts through HootSuite.  So, once I get into the office Monday morning, there should not be a whole lot of clean-up to do. I scan all the mentions in HootSuite and make appropriate replies/thank-yous as needed. I also forward any customer issues to the appropriate client support personnel to get feedback and post those responses.

I then focus on the content schedule for the week ahead and check in with clients to see if there is any late breaking news. I also survey our own studio to see if their is anything of interest and remind them they have accounts in HootSuite and to post items of importance on our networks.

I also will go into Google Reader and Blog Search. In Google Reader, I review the top 10 blogs I pre-picked for clients and if there is anything of import to our clients’ followers and plan posts. In Google Blog Search, I enter brand names and key search terms and survey what other news may be of interest to our clients’ followers.  Posts are then prepared for the day.

2. Take care of your expertise. Read tons!

The social media landscape changes fast! Sometimes daily. In our real-time based world, social media personnel must keep up with all the news happening in the space.  The advantages to daily in-depth reading are numerous:  honing your expertise in the discipline, keeping up to date, advising clients on new campaigns that actually show ROI, etc.  Here is my list of publications, I check in with daily (and probably more than that).

1. Mashable.com – Just two years ago this was a little known blog who was a cute cousin to TechCrunch.com and Engadget.com. With the rise of social media, it is now the top spot to catch up on anything social.
2. ReadWriteWeb.com – This blog has great writers that give me a more in-depth perspective of the top stories on Mashable.
3. TheNextWeb.com – This blog is Mashable-lite, but I love the layout. Easy to read.
4. SocialMediaExplorer.com – Jason Falls is an early adopter of social media and his writing style is straight-forward, entertaining, and he has a great skeptical eye.
5. Techipedia.com – Tamar Weinberg, also an early adopter, writes wonderful how-to articles and has great insight on new platforms entering the fray such as Google+.
6. JeffBullas.com – tons of great lists and how-to articles.
7. BrianSolis.com – As a principal at Altimeter, a research-based advising firm, he presents great numbers behind his assertions about the social sphere.
8. SocialMediaToday.com – this is more of a social media professionals community. Tons of articles on many subjects.

3. Take care of the future. Research new tools.

As I mentioned, I’m a HootSuite devotee. However, I have not been pleased with the changes in HootSuite’s cost structure in the past year.  There’s no question that HootSuite deserves to make money, but it seems like every additional feature in HootSuite Pro costs money.  Of course, I could jump to HootSuite Enterprise and dish out $1499/mo, but I cannot justify that cost at this time.  Therefore, it is always important to join Free trials of new platforms entering the market.  As new options come on the market, it is important to test them all. I am currently test-driving the following:

1. SproutSocial – I really like the graphical approach of this tool to highlight analytics. Their reports are easy for clients to understand.
2. Google+ – Business pages have not launched yet, but I’m in the fray and preparing our clients for that day.

Lunch  – Back to #1

Okay, enough about me. What are your social media rituals?