I did it. I took a full week vacation with my wife. Ten days to be exact. Although I took measures to make sure I was staying active in social media there was a failure especially with Garious. Either way the experiment was a success and a couple of tools helped me recognize the impact of being unwired for ten days.
Klout vacation impact
When I left home on the 8th day of June my Empire Avenue stock was valued over 60. Upon my return I tracked the largest number of sales since I began and my value had fallen to 48. Sure, it’s “just a game”. Oddly this game gives some of the best real-time tracking of influence and activity of any other free tool on the web.
More importantly, perhaps, was the very obvious drop in my Klout report. The image says a lot. What it says is if you do not stay active and regular you will see a negative change in your engagement scores which are, at least to some degree, accurate reflections of your social impact.
How to avoid and compensate
My intention was to have scheduled blog posts and a few automated tweets to keep others engaged and to check my streams when I had connectivity. In fact I purchased a Xoom just for this purpose. Unfortunately, or in the case of vacation, cell service is somewhat spotty in the mountains of Alaska once you get about 50 miles out of populated areas.
I signed up for an account on Garious and carefully crafted about 50 tweets for every purpose from notifying friends about upcoming Social Media Edge radio shows, reminding them about upcoming events like next month’s webinar, and even saying happy birthday to a couple of friends whose birthdays fall in those date ranges. The failure is yet unknown as I have only just returned. None of the Garious posts were sent out.
Foursquare also failed. While I was checking in at various spots in Alaska the posts, although they went to Foursquare, did not post to Twitter or Facebook. I mention this only because you may be planning a similar trip and caution you not to rely on Foursquare for continued engagement. In fact this happened not only in the Pacific Northwest but in Destin Florida earlier in the month when I would check in but never received points for checking in because Foursquare and the map always disagreed on my geographic location. In other words Foursquare would say I was not at the location I was checking in.
WordPress performed flawlessly and posted the pre-scheduled blog posts right on time. Pre-scheduling posts is a highly used technique by virtually everyone I know who depends on steady readership for their blog to stay connected.
Why is this important?
If you are in a business which requires you to keep your connections informed and engaged even a gap of one week, as plainly pictured in the Klout image, can mean a negative trend in your engagement scores. Scores are simply a reflection of actual performance and a way to measure and respond.
