The practice of yoga just might be the trick to get you feeling good about where you are and where you need to go in 2012. This once esoteric activity, now found at nearly every gym in the United States, is well known for its calming properties. Focus, balance, and strength are also core principles of yoga that can easily be transferred to the work on your plate.

I’ve recently written about how to keep your body as fit as your business. Here I explain how yoga can nourish your body and mind so that you’re in peak form to rock your business.

And since I am a social media marketer, I’d be remiss if I didn’t speak about how to incorporate yoga practices while pointing and clicking online. In this article, I explain how the yoga principle of namaste can help your friends and colleagues on Twitter and LinkedIn.

How do you incorporate mind-body principles to your work or social media interaction? How might you do it in the near future?

Photo: Flickr

But with January around the corner — typically a slow month for most businesses (except for gyms and weight loss companies) — it’s imperative to keep your brand top of mind. Here are some ways that you can spread good cheer to your social media connections all while reminding them of who you are and what makes you special.

Give some insight into what your company does during the holiday season. Your fans will see your human side and those from abroad might be intrigued or delighted by American holiday customs in the workplace. Photos work well here. Burt’s Bees had a Tacky Sweater Contest at their offices and posted a rather “colorful” photo of the winners. Wildfire Interactive posted a picture of their holiday collection of toys for needy children.

Does your market stay put over holiday break? Do they visit family? Set out on wild adventures? Take the pulse of your community — either with a regular question, a fill-in-the-blank question, or a Facebook Question — and find out. Fans will appreciate that you’re interested in their lives. And you can use the information you gather to determine how often you should post during this period.

We here in the United States are big on New Year’s resolutions. How about a resolution to make your Facebook page or Twitter stream more helpful to your fans and followers? A great way to make your messaging more useful is to find out what folks want. Again, ask away here.

The dawn of the New Year is also an opportune time to reflect on what your company has done and what it plans to do the following year. For a year in review, compile a list of your Top 10 products, services, or projects of 2011. If you’d rather have it more page-oriented, list your Top 10 tweets/posts with an emphasis on your brand, if possible. To celebrate the year ahead, give fans a sneak peek into what your company plans to do in 2012.

You can also send a simple message along the lines of, “As this year ends, we want to share our gratitude for your conversation.” A little gratitude goes a long way — hopefully all the way to checkout line.

Photo credit: Flickr/stashabella

Not to fear. In this presentation, I explain how to post links and images — in good times and bad.

Effective moderation of online communities can result in an increase of comments that benefit the community as well as a marked decrease of those comments that derail or attack the community.

Intel’s social media policyuses the motto “The Good, The Bad, but not The Ugly” to frame its moderation of user comments:

Whether content is pre-moderated or community moderated, follow these three principles: the Good, the Bad, but not the Ugly. If the content is positive or negative and in context to the conversation [emphasis mine], then we approve the content, regardless of whether it’s favorable or unfavorable to Intel. But if the content is ugly, offensive, denigrating and completely out of context, then we reject the content.

Spam certainly falls into the “completely out of context” category. Most of us are familiar with spam in our e-mail inboxes. In the world of social media, spam posts or comments intend to drive traffic away from your online community and onto another Website for the purpose of making a sale or giving exposure to another product or idea. These posts rarely, if ever, make a direct association made between your online community and their Website.

The next time you receive something “spammy,” consider the following:

Does the post address you by name?
Does it make reference to your content?

If so, that post made an attempt to initiate a conversation with you. If the post did none of the above, consider it a Facebook “robocall” — an unwanted, unpersonalized announcement that is most likely posted on a number of other fan pages.

On Facebook, you have the ability to flag posts or comments that can be considered spam. On Twitter, you can block followers who are spammers. Use these features when appropriate: set the tone early that you don’t spam your online community — and that you expect the same courtesy from your community members.

Some comments might not be as clearly identified as spam, but don’t seem particularly on topic. In this case, a community manager can advise the poster to direct her/his question or idea to the company via e-mail. The community manager can provide a generic company email for this purpose. If these comments are on Facebook, a community manager might suggest that the poster repost her/his comment to the Discussions tab. Some community managers may wish to provide these posters with links to other online communities that are a more appropriate fit for their queries/comments/posts.

The bottom line: you want to host a community of people who respect each other’s time and opinions. The happier community members are, the more apt they are to interact and refer others to your site. Effective moderation of comments can encourage all of that to happen.

Photo credit: iStockphoto®, ©kabliczech, Spam.

The latest  installment of my Social Media Rock series resides on the Website of Dr. Shannon Reece.  Dr. Reece specializes in giving her clients tools and strategies to reach their professional goals — so my article on how to rock one’s career seemed like a natural fit for her blog. I encourage you to read my tips there and to learn about Dr. Reece’s services.

The next Social Media Rock article will appear back here on the Sierra Tierra Blog – it will address the second business lesson I learned in the aftermath of John Lennon’s assassination.

If you’re interested in reading this Social Media Rock series but don’t want to keep checking the site for the latest article, you can have the site email you when a new article is posted. Go to the right of this page, look for “Email Subscription” and click the “Sign me up!” button. If you know how to use an RSS feed (like Google Reader), you can add the Sierra Tierra blog feed to get the latest stories.

Photo: El Vez and a fanzine publisher by sierratierra

I can’t remember how I heard about the death of John Lennon – but on December 9, 1981, I learned that the famed Beatle had been assassinated the previous evening in front of his New York City apartment building.

People were moved in different ways upon hearing this shocking news. Some trekked to the Dakota to be close to where Lennon took his last steps;  thousands of people went to their local record store to buy Beatles and Lennon solo albums; a few, overwhelmed with grief, took their own lives.

At the ripe ol’ age of 11, I did something different. I wrote a small magazine about the event.

I started with the front page article – first the headline, then a hand-drawn image of Lennon, followed by few paragraphs about his life and death. Proud with my work, I showed Page One to my mother.

“Look what I did!”

Silence.

“That’s nice, honey. But if you want to use quotes from Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono, you have to let readers know where those quotes came from.”

Ouch! Hard to believe that Mom was the softie when it came to my writing … but she did teach me an important lesson: You’re entitled to write your opinions, but when you begin stating facts or quoting other people, you best reveal your sources.

This tip from Mom is more important than ever these days. In our online world, tons of content is pushed live without proper attribution. Tons more excuses are made for this sloppy content creation:

*I have to get the news out there first.

*I only have 140 characters.

*I don’t want to mess up my visual presentation with photo credits.

Folks, this is straight up plagiarism. It’s so easy and unobtrusive to give attribution these days. On Facebook, give props to that funny video you saw on your friend’s page with a “via” link.* When you tweet from a conference, quote the speaker or give a hashtag of the conference. When you blog, include hyperlinks to your written and visual sources.

Giving attribution is not only academically correct, it’s *social* — it is, in most cases, giving thanks to someone’s hard work and offering them potential for more exposure.

___

Soon after Lennon’s death, I became consumed with reading everything I could about his extraordinary life. This period revealed another lifelong lesson that I will write about on the Sierra Tierra blog later this month.

*Give me a shout if you thought Via was the new coffee they sell at Starbucks. I’ll help you with the jargon.

Photo credit: sierratierra

When I was old enough to attend live concerts, I did so with near compulsion. In 1988, the time came to choose between attending my senior prom or seeing a killer triple bill of hardcore punk bands. The decision could not have been made faster. MDC and AOD headlined a great show…

In graduate school, I founded a music fanzine that did pretty well for itself. During that time, I met a lot of musicians — including some of my favorite artists and others who fell into the camp of “rock stars.”

Soon after I published my ‘zine’s swan song in 2003, I packed up my rock ‘n’ roll suitcase and tucked it away for safe keeping. Little did I know that I’d be constantly pulling out that bag with my work in social media.

I’ve had so many memories of these times envelop me lately. These thoughts and reflections have inspired me to write a series of blog posts of my encounters with rock ‘n’ roll and how they apply to social media. It might be hard to imagine how on earth the Beastie Boys connect to BlogWorld, but I will attempt to lay it all down.

The first post is slated for December 8 —  the 31st anniversary of the assassination of John Lennon. In the wake of that tragedy, I learned a lesson that I still incorporate in my work (especially in the work I do online). I’ll tell you what I learned in that upcoming blog post.

It’s an all ages show and no advanced tickets are necessary. Here’s hoping I hear back from you on the Sierra Tierra blog on December 8 and the weeks to come with this Social Media Rock series.

Photo: They Might Be Giants taken by sierratierra.