I’ve spent a good amount of time recently helping a goddess in distress who needed to rollup over a dozen email accounts into one. The key? Use Gmail. And advanced search. And filters! I came across a great post that talks about using advanced search for deletion and I thought I’d share it here because you can use the same principles not only for deleting, but filtering email….
Here’s the perfect post for a rainy Sunday; make this the weekend you get command over your Gmail! http://t.co/kCOhdaDOYu — Todd Lohenry (@toddlohenry) October 6, 2013
Also, I came across a great tool on Lifehacker that checks your inbox for subscriptions and gives you the opportunity to either unsubscribe or roll them up to a single email. I’m a strong advocate against getting newsletters in your inbox from a productivity standpoint and unroll.me showed me that I had allowed over 200 of them to sneak into my inbox…
Click the link to try the service — it’s free!
One, and one more thing; I’ve added a Gmail resource page to the site. All the good articles I find will be posted there as well…
My mate in Australia, Brian Clark, found this little gem and passed along to me, asking for my opinion. I thought it might be a good opportunity to weigh in not only on the product, but the evaluation process I go through when looking at a new tool…
In order for product to receive my recommendation, it has to meet the following criteria [in addition to others]:
it must be best of class
it must be free or freemium
it must be completely cross-platform
This product belongs to a very small group of products that can actually auto post content from Google+ to other social networks and that really puts it in a class almost by itself!
Secondly, this is an affordable freemium product that allows you to auto post 40 times before paying a reasonable annual fee of $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year. Over the years I’ve become increasingly leery of great free products that appear one day and disappear the next — I’m happy to pay a reasonable price for a great product because it means that the products and services that I’m relying on may actually be there when I need them.
Lastly, because this product relies on Google+ sharing, it’s accessible from anywhere! Friends+Me is for people who are – or would like to be – using Google+ as their primary social network and I can see where it would be a valuable asset to people in both categories. I’ll be testing this product and let you know of a later date whether or not it becomes an approved part of my workflow…
One of the powers of YouTube is to create commercials that people actually WANT to watch and distribute while avoiding the constraints of television advertising which most people ignore anyway!
A couple of days ago, Craig Badings of the Thought Leadership blog asked me to complete the following sentence: “Thought Leadership is _______”. My response? Fundamental. As in “thought leadership is fundamental”. Craig asked me if he could post my definition on his site with attribution and frankly I don’t know if it’s because he thought my response was stupid or brilliant or somewhere in between. Let me explain however, what I meant…
At a time in history when almost 90% of people searchGoogle before making a buying decision you need to show up in search in a good way. To me a thought leader is someone who uses the incredible good, fast and cheap tools we have at our disposal to get found when people are looking for what they do, or, in what Google calls the Zero Moment of Truth. They use blogging and social media to attract and retain fans who either buy into their ideas or by their products.
It was Leonardo da Vinci who said “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. I maintain that if you aspire to thought leadership there are only two activities you must master: finding and sharing good information. When I teach my college classes, I call this deepening your expertise and documenting your expertise. Any person who aspires to thought leadership has probably done Malcolm Gladwell‘s 10,000 hours of work to gain their expertise but if you want to be a thought leader you must continue to nourish that expertise and stay current on the things that are important in your field of study. That’s what I called deepening your expertise. The second part, documenting your expertise, simply means to use the publishing tools available on the Internet to provide social proof of your work. If you’re a great thinker who aspire to thought leadership that’s all you need to know — hence my statement that thought leadership is fundamental.
I have developed a simple workflow that I call a ‘Me’cosystem which anyone can use to establish a thought leadership position over time. All of the tools are best of breed, free or freemium, and completely cross platform down to the smart phone level. There are nine different activities in which the thought leader must engage and I outline them here:
I’ll be going into more detail in each of these stages later on in the series. Organized efficiently from the beginning to the end of the process, it looks more like this:
And again, I’ll be going into more detail in subsequent posts. All I think you really need to know at this point is that the process really does work and that it’s simple enough and cost-effective enough that even someone who does TED talks can use my system. :-)
Next week I’ll start with the analysis phase in the flowchart. Questions? Feedback?
With each and every passing day, we’re seeing more and more people build networks of trust through the creation of content that adds value and – by doing so – wind up in some pretty spectacular positions. It’s easy to be negative and see these individuals as some kind of exception to the rule or an anomaly, but that is shortsighted. These individuals are doing what most brands (and individuals) don’t have the ability or integrity to do: spend the time to actually build the trust first, instead of looking for that quick, big fix. It also speaks volumes to what the future holds for those eager to become entrepreneurs. There Is A Bigger Picture (And It’s Worth Thinking About) | Six Pixels of Separation – Marketing and Communications Blog – By Mitch Joel at Twist Image
It’s better than Flipboard because you can access your favorite feeds both from your computer and your smartphone! It’s the reason why I find and share so much great content…
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…with a lot of other good stuff thrown in along with a tool for following them!
…with a lot of other good stuff thrown in along with a tool for following them!
Chrome is powerful, but it’s a memory hog too! Unnecessary or inactive extensions can suck the life out of your internet experience. Do a clean up today! I’m going to…
My mate in Australia, 
Next week I’ll start with the analysis phase in the flowchart. Questions? Feedback?
Bright, shiny objects! 