Effective Use of my Smartphone

I often find myself in certain ruts where I don't try anything new and keep doing things the way they have been done for awhile. Then something will happen that challenges the old way and makes me look for improvement in everyday things. One such recent improvement came from the question of how effectively I am using my smartphone.

Every morning in the winter, I wake up and get ready to go skiing. I drive the 14 miles to Snowbird and ski for an hour before work. When anyone asks, this is my "gym time." That means I am using my ski boots daily and they need help drying out. I have a set of boot dryers that I use and only want them to run for a limited amount of time. I used to turn them on while I got ready for the day but decided I could use the timer on my smartphone. It is set for 50 minutes. When it goes off, I turn off the boot dryers. It is a little thing but started my mental wheels turning about how to use my smartphone more effectively.

Smartphones come loaded with a number of productivity applications and so there is no need to load up any more. Are you using those you have to their fullest potential? This morning my wife is busily working and sent me a quick text even though she is in the room above me. This is much more efficient than yelling through the house and trying to have "the original" long-distance communication.

One app I do have loaded onto my phone that I use constantly is a dictionary. I'm a pretty smart guy and figure I know the meaning to most of the words I hear in English. The reality is that there are a small number of words that I guess at the meaning based on context. Recognizing this, I have started looking up the meaning for words I am not absolutely sure of. This is tough to do in conversations but easy to do when I am reading something. Often times I will look up a word and remember something I heard from someone else and look that up too. I wouldn't say that my vocabulary is exploding, but I am finding I understand a lot more about what is being said.

Unfortunately there are a number of smartphone apps that can hinder you. I purposely don't have any social media loaded on my phone. I find it can be a distraction and keep me from actually being productive. I also don't have a lot of games on my mobile device. While they can help pass the time when you are stuck in line or waiting for an event to start, they more often keep one from doing more important things.

Using your smartphone effectively is a combination of taking advantage of its features as well as not letting it become a distraction. If you have any suggestions on what works for you, I'd be interested in your comments.

YouTube Traffic vs. Blogger Traffic

My little experiment with sharing a blog article on LinkedIn has spurred a number of questions. I talked with a couple of my buddies about it at lunch today and they provided some interesting insight. I thought you might find it interesting as well.

I wondered aloud with them as to why people would click from LinkedIn to my blog but not continue on to see any of my YouTube videos. One of them suggested that people will often keep up-to-date on their social media feeds via smartphones. Smartphones lend themselves to viewing blogs much more easily than to videos. You can read a blog on the train or quietly at your desk. Watching videos usually requires some sort of sound output and that can cut down on people's willingness to watch.

Both blogspot.com and YouTube are owned by Google and come with extensive analytics. I thought I would go through and see if my buddy's hypothesis is true. To do that I looked at the platform people use to view the content I have created. Sure enough, the overwhelming platform that people use to view my YouTube videos is the computer. My blog entry I promoted on LinkedIn is most often viewed on smartphones.

This has me rethinking my video content. There are a number of spectacular videos that don't need narration. My favorite ski videos don't have someone talking over breathtaking powder montages. They may have some pumped-up music synchronized with the movements of the skier. Perhaps I need to cut down on the amount of narration I have in my videos.

Playing with the analytics definitely gives me something to think about and ideas to try in my next videos. I have two that I am working on now and make adjustments accordingly. If you have any ideas or comments, please let me know. I am trying to get better at what I do and help from the outside is always welcome. 

Increasing Blog Traffic

Lately I have been wondering how to increase traffic to this blog. I would also like to increase traffic to my YouTube channel and so I ran a little experiment. First I have to give credit to my wife who gave me the idea. She said that I can't just post stuff. I have to share the posting with as many people as possible. When you do that via e-mail, it is called SPAM. When you do it on social media sites like Facebook, it is considered normal.

I wanted to share a business article on LinkedIn and so I looked through my most recent posts. I could have chosen a video game review but I don't think that would have been received well. LinkedIn is just not the right audience for that. I also wanted to see if I could drive traffic to my YouTube channel at the same time. So I created a simple teaser that said something like, "Thinking of ditching your career and becoming the next YouTube celebrity?" I then provided a link to my "How to Make Money on YouTube" post. It fit the criteria I wanted as being business like as well as referencing my YouTube videos all over the place.

Traffic to my blog skyrocketed compared to normal. I had five times as many regular viewers for that post on the first day and three times as many the next. Furthermore I had people contact me via LinkedIn that I hadn't communicated with in years. I have to say that the first goal of getting more viewers to read my blog was a huge success.

With everyone reading an article about YouTube I thought that there would be a huge jump in video watching as well. Surprisingly the number of views for both of my videos never increased. That seems pretty strange because I usually get quite a few views of my Goblin Valley video every day with no promotion on my part. Nope, for the past 3 days the count has remained constant.

I also thought that my LinkedIn associates would see my blog and start looking at some of the other articles I have written. Nope, the only article being viewed is the one that I referenced in my post to LinkedIn.

I learned a lot with this little experiment. From now on, when I create a business post, I will make sure to post it to LinkedIn. It will help drive traffic to at least one article. It also beats doing nothing. Now if I could only figure out how to drive millions of views to my YouTube channel.

Be Careful What You Like

This morning I got up early and thought I would play Rocksmith on my PS4 to help me get in some guitar practice before work. Imagine my surprise when I turned on my PS4  and saw that I had liked the movie "Let's Talk About Sex." I've never even seen the movie but the title might make some question my taste in movies.

So how did I "Like" a movie I have never seen? Well it is quite a funny story. Someone turned on a PlayStation 4 that I have logged into before (there are a lot of them), signed in as me, found a movie with a shocking name, and selected the thumbs-up icon indicating that I liked the movie. It is a funny practical joke and I know who did it. Yes, I will be sure to get back at the person in an equally harmless way. However it brings up an important point: how do you un-like something on social media?

When I saw my movie recommendation on the What's New part of the PS4 interface, I immediately jumped in and un-liked the movie. Unfortunately that didn't do anything and the What's New section on the PS4 still registered that I liked the movie. Next I figured I would like another movie. Keeping with the theme of liking movies I haven't seen, I liked "Rogue Elements." It is a skiing movie I have yet to see but contains some skiers my kids grew up skiing with on the Snowbird Ski Team. Now the What's New section says that I like 2 movies and lists them both. I hoped that the new like would overshadow the old one but that didn't happen.

Rather than waste any more time on it, I figured I would let it stand. Now I wonder what the recommendation engine is going to do with the 2 likes for movies I have never seen. Perhaps the next time I log into my PlayStation I will be inundated with ads for ski porn (the link goes to Urban Dictionary . . . not a website that would be unsafe for work).

Smartphone App Review: Snocru

I was skiing at Snowbird this past weekend with my oldest son and he showed me a really fun smartphone application called Snocru. I have never really thought there was much of a use for an app while skiing as the mere act of using a smartphone means you have to pull off your glove and your fingers get cold. My son proved me wrong with this one.

We got to the top of the chair where my son quickly removed his phone, took off his glove, started the app, replaced his glove, and we started skiing. We got to the bottom of the run, got on another chair and my son pulled out his phone. It had mapped our run an interactive trail map. It also told him his top speed. A typical GPS app can do that and so I wasn't too impressed. Then my son's phone started buzzing.

Snocru is another one of those social media apps that allow you to interact with other skiers at the same area. People that we didn't know saw that our top speed was just a hair under 60 miles per hour (actually 59.6). It triggered some thresholds on their phones and my son received a number of invitations to ski with others on the hill. If my son was skiing alone, he could have accepted the invitations and been kept from having to ski all by himself. Sometimes I like to ski alone but it is generally more fun to ski with others and Snocru is great for introducing you to new skiers of your same ability.

Now for the downside. GPS functions are required to plot your course on the mountain and they eat up a lot of your phone's battery. So this is one of those apps that will suck power from your phone at an alarming rate. I also find that a GPS is good at speed calculations on flat ground but are significantly off when going up and down hills. Do I believe we were skiing at 60 miles per hour? Not really as we weren't going that fast. At least it didn't seem like it. I could be wrong though.

Snocru is available for both Android and iPhones.

Instagram and Social Media

I know it sounds kind of weird when I say that I am not a big fan of social media. It probably sounds even more strange when I write it in a blog as a blog is a form of social media. There are a number of different social media tools though and it is some of those other tools that I think are unworthy of my time.

One of the Monday morning regulars that I fly with from Salt Lake City to the Bay Area was telling me about how his daughter's weekend was ruined by Instagram. I am not much of a photographer and don't feel the need to post pictures of my various events for people to see and so I must confess that I disliked Instagram even before I heard his story.

My friend's preteen daughter was busy this weekend with soccer games and missed out on getting an invite to a party. The next day she checked into Instagram and saw all sorts of pictures of her friends having a good time without her. It was devastating to her self-esteem. My friend had to sit down with his daughter and comfort her. I didn't get the details of what he said but he did mention that social media has gotten out of control. I agree with him. My takeaway from his story was that his daughter got out of the house and actually did something worthy of her time by playing soccer.

While I may think that social media tools like Instagram and Facebook are a waste of time, there are some benefits they do provide. Last Friday we were at work watching the Mavericks Invitational that came about because of Twitter.  My understanding is that on Monday the weather was predicted to be perfect for the event on Friday and so everyone leveraged Twitter to organize the event and get the competitors in place.

I think the important thing to remember with social media is true with anything we find desirable: moderation. While a jelly doughnut tastes good, too many of them will have you looking like the Michelin man. Furthermore you may think you were the life of the party and want everyone to bask in your glory but reality is you probably look like a dork . . . and if you have been eating all of the hors d'oeuvres, the Michelin man too.