If like most people starting out on the world of social media your answer is yes, Don’t worry; you’re not alone.

The good news is that there are a number of free tools which allow you to automate some of your Twitter activities. I recommend Social Oomph to help ease your workload and boost your productivity on Twitter.

Now I emphasise the use of the sentence “automate some of your twitter activities”, you don’t want to completely automate everything and become just another bot on twitter, this will turn your prospects off faster than Charlie Sheen can say “Winning”, however there are some tasks that you can comfortably allocate to Social Oomph.

Social oomph is a useful tool allowing you to do way more than just schedule Twitter posts. It does much more,  you can automate following and messaging, and it sends you emails of mentions of your keywords on Twitter allowing you to target people you may want to build a relationship with.

So what can you do using Social Oomph?

1. Add an unlimited number of Twitter accounts. This is only useful if you have a large number of accounts that you are maintaining, if you are, this is one of the only tools that allows you to add all of your accounts for no additional cost.

2. Schedule tweets. Self explanatory really but very useful for ensuring your tweets are delivered throughout the day rather than at one time when you are online.

3. Automate following. Follow everyone who follows you…or if you don’t like that then choose the next option.

4. Vet new followers before automatically following. If  don’t want to automatically follow back to build your network, you can have Social Oomph curate a list of your new followers for your review and approval before following them back.

5. Rotate welcome messages to new followers.  Set up different messages for new followers. I don’t do this as it annoys me to receive them so I don’t send them…you know, do unto others as you would have them do unto you and all that jazz.

6. Set-up a keyword alerts—up to 50 keyword terms sent via email once or twice a day.A great way to see who is talking about the products or services that you are delivering, once you know who is talking, get into the conversation.

7. Create a more detailed Twitter profile inside of Social Oomph. This makes it easier for people to find you and follow you.

8. Track your links— Social Oomph allows you to use URL shortening and analytics tools like Bit.ly, as well as providing its own shortening service (which comes with statistics).

9. View your @ mentions and retweets. See what people have reposted and when they’ve mentioned you by name on Twitter which is again a great service which allows you to continue the conversation and strengthen that relationship.

10. Sending a message to new followers. I usually don’t send automated messages to new followers, mostly because I ignore those types of messages sent to me. But I’ll occasionally send an automated message with a link to a specific online resource using Social Oomph.

Many of these features can be done through other Twitter tools however being web based and not taking up a lot of my computers memory is a blessing for me, other tools I use often crash my browser because of the resources they suck up, with Social Oomph I’m able to login in, set up the tasks I want to automate and then leave it rather than having it running in back ground on my machine.

Go and check it out, there is a free version and you can trial the professional version which I highly recommend (doing the trial) you will be amazed by what you can accomplish using this great tool.

Try It Here

I had never thought about sitting down and getting to know dad before, the way you would get to know a friend.

I know him as my dad, he’s the dude who is always there no matter what sort of mischief I got up to or get up to, he’s the dude who married my mum who passed away 11 years ago at 54 from a rare ailment. He’s the dude who lent me the money to buy my first motorbike and he’s the dude who paid my fines when I got a ticket on that motorbike. He’s the dude who will love me no matter what.

I know that he was a sparky and that he was a fantastic sportsman and from the stories mum would tell he was a bit of a ladies man but other than that I have never sat down and talked to dad about what his dreams were, what his aspirations were or are for that matter.

So one of the things I’m going to do in the New Year is take my dad out for dinner and chew the fat, talk to him about mum, talk to him about his life and what it has been like for him.

It will probably be a tough conversation because we have never been that way together, we generally do the :

Me: “how you going dad?”

Dad: “yeah good son, how about you?”

Me: “yeah good dad? What have you been up to”

Dad: “oh not much? what about you?”

Me: “Oh just the same ole same ole? Want a cup of tea”

Dad: “Yeah”

End of discussion.

So thanks to Baz Luhman and the following song, hopefully Dad and I will begin a new journey of understanding

The boys wanted to play at the beach even though it was a cold winters day. Kate is warm and cosy snuggled up to mummy while Alex and Bailey scamper around the beach.

Kate is 4 months old now and I have not mentioned her, bad daddy!

She has been an absolute amazing baby with next to no crying, sleeps all through the night and is always smiling.

She is a gorgeous little girl and has such a great personality that Rebecca is already talking about the next one… after all our goal is to have 5 in total. So 3 down with 2 to go.

Alex (2 now) thinks she is fantastic and is always trying to tickle her toes or steal her dummy.

I’m having trouble attaching a picture so come back later once I fix the problem.

Many of Christchurch’s most fashionable have been left wearing only the clothes they’re wearing and while emergency clothing is getting through, the Designer Garage Sale team wanted to give those Christchurch women something a bit special to pick them up.

So we’re asking shoppers to look for one additional garment when they’re shopping at the sale, to purchase it and leave it on the Christchurch Fashion Emergency rack at the front door.

“We know that our Designer Garage Sale shoppers are stylish and savvy and they’ll be able to spot a great style that they’d love to see go to a Christchurch woman,” said organiser Jill Blomfield

“It could be a t-shirt or a little black dress – with garments priced from as low as $30 and a wide rage of sizes age groups and genres, there will be something for everyone,” she said. “We hope we’ll be able to despatch a fantastic selection of fashion items to Christchurch at the end of the sale,” said Jill.

Shoppers attending the sale are also invited to drop off fashion garments they’ve already got in the wardrobe that they haven’t worn often, but would like to see go to a new home. Cash donations will also be gratefully received.

For more information, contact Jill Blomfield: jill@paulblomfield.com

As you know I’ve been surfing and I did do a little training again thanks to the Play Station move, (don’t let people mock how good this thing is for losing weight, I would spend an hour on the boxing game and be drenched, puffing and needing a rest which is perfect for weight loss) so I quickly dropped 5kgs. Not bad since It didn’t feel like work and it certainly wasn’t hard (in my mind). Unfortunately I’ve reached one of those plateaus so now it’s either increase the workload or decrease the calories….neither one of which sounds enjoyable.

The surfing has been awesome with some fantastic barrels on Wednesday this week at a new beach break we found, I wasn’t happy with the amount of horse poo that was on the beach though (local horse trainers use that section of the beach for running their horses on) so not sure when the next trip to that spot will be.

This year I have been in the process of selling off my last business in Australia which with a bit of luck will occur in the next few days and at the same time kicking off a couple of new ventures.

Planet Homes is the latest start up and this will build sustainable homes here in New Zealand, it’s an exciting project and it seems the timing is just about perfect as NZ faces severe housing shortages. If anyone out there is interested in investing with us we need to build some show homes.

The other project is a Financial services business that is able to offer banking services worldwide with a couple of gents from Australia. Wyk has been in New Zealand for about 3 years now but had been sitting dormant until November last year when we decided to register it as a New Zealand Financial Service Provider (FSP).

The web business trucks along and gets better and better everyday as I learn more and the more I learn the more excited I am about the business.

And of course we had little Katherine 2 weeks ago today.

Awesome.