Tag: Technology

Damn, we’re good!

I’m a little bit torn between two conflicting philosophies of self-promotion here. Woody Hayes always said “when you get to the endzone, act like you belong there”. On the other hand, it’s a sad dog that can’t wag his own tail, so please forgive a little tail wagging on my part…

Earlier this week, I posted about the work we’re doing with farm implement manufacturer AGCO. Yesterday Wunderkind Public Relations of Atlanta said that while “Georgia’s top public and private companies scored a D for social media engagement in 2009”, e1evation’s client AGCO was one of only four brands in the state singled out for their excellence in the social media space…

“Four Georgia companies received perfect scores: AGCO Corp., the Coca-Cola Company, Delta Airlines, and Infor Global Solutions. These companies utilize a variety of channels to create an interactive dialogue with customers, prospects and employees. On the other hand, thirty-one companies received a score of 2 or less, and all but one company is using some channel of social media. Data also concluded that public companies as a whole, whether B2C or B2B, are more engaged (2.36) than private companies (1.92).” Source: New Research Reveals Georgia Companies Lack Social Media Engagement — ATLANTA, Jan. 28 /PRNewswire/

Now I’m sure there are a lot of great social media consultants in Georgia, but when AGCO needed a social media plan, they turned to the e1evation/Envano team from Northeast Wisconsin. As AgWired reported…

“One of the recommendations Sue makes is to not be afraid to get started with social media. She says that there are some great consultants out there who can help you too. I’ll use this opportunity to make a little plug for Todd Lohenry with e1evation, Inc. [sic] who has worked with AGCO.” Source: AgWired » Blog Archives » AGCO Shows How To Go Social

The e1evation/Envano team offers a unique combination of expertise and value and we’re just down the road. Comment, call or contact us to talk about how we can help you bridge the social media gap in your firm…

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Google and privacy. An oxymoron?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvL3mNtl1g&feature=player_embedded
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5 reasons why Gmail rocks!

Lifehacker
Image via Wikipedia

Lifehacker says…

Email as a technology has been around for decades, and thanks to wide spread adoption and popularity, it isn’t in danger of disappearing. Check out the five most popular email clients to help you wrangle your email.

Earlier this week we asked your to share your favorite email client. We didn’t restrict the voting to only stand-alone email applications or web-based email clients, but we did specify that if you voted for a web-based tool it had to have distinctly client-like features—such as Gmail’s ability to fetch and sort email from other sources. The email Call for Contenders was one of the most popular we’ve ever had, with over 1,000 votes logged. Source: Five Best Email Clients – email clients – Lifehacker

The poll is one of their most popular ever and Gmail is kicking it! Here were the results when I voted…

I won’t lie — I have been a massive fan of Gmail since day one — I’m convinced [to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote on beer] that it is ‘proof that God loves us and wants us to be productive’. The benefits are too numerous to mention, but here are a few that pop to mind at this moment…

  • The ability to search your email using a special Google syntax means you’ll rarely [won’t say never] lose another email
  • Ample storage for all your email and documents online so that important stuff is always available
  • The ability to use Gmail as your corporate email through Google Apps
  • As a web-based product it’s completely cross platform and available from computers down to smartphones
  • It gets better almost daily whereas other email clients must go through a long development cycle to provide updates

btw, I still use Outlook and Thunderbird daily, and I have used AppleMail and tried the Postbox beta [Note: you can use them all in conjunction with Gmail if you’d like]. None of them can touch Gmail’s ability to simply and effectively process that never ending river of correspondence. Nothing’s worse than knowing the answer is in your inbox but not being able to find it — I see colleagues wrestle with their email clients every day trying to solve problems that are simple for Gmail users. Sigh. If only they knew how to use Gmail like I do…

Comment, call or contact me to discuss how this applies to your business — I’d be happy to demo why I think Gmail is such a compelling product for EVERYONE…

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How to fail in 2010

I had the privilege earlier in my career to work closely with the great Jeff Martin [the guy Steve Jobs credits with the ‘Think Different’ campaign and you know Steve Jobs doesn’t often give credit!]. Jeff’s response to stupid ideas was to say ‘Well, that’s a great going out of business strategy’. My friend Dana VanDen Heuvel outlines some great ‘going out of business strategies’ in this guest column in the Green Bay PressGazette…

Congratulations! Your business made it through 2009, one of the toughest years since the Depression, and now you’re ready to accelerate into the rebound. After all, optimism is one of the hallmark traits of most successful business people. We know that we can’t sell in the past and believe that the best lies ahead of us.

There are a few things that can, if you do them, hinder your progress immeasurably, virtually sealing your demise in the New Year. If you do these things, failure is all but assured. However, if you heed this advice and act positively in the other direction, your success is all but guaranteed. Source: Guest column: How to fail in business in 2010 | greenbaypressgazette.com | Green Bay Press-Gazette

Go to the source to get 6 pointers on creating your own personal ‘going out of business strategy’…

;-)

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Facebook for business

…according to John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing…

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=8898075&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Facebook for Business from John Jantsch on Vimeo.

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Afraid of making mistakes online?

Get over it!

“Risk aversion is the number one reason that people and organizations fail to tap the full power of social media. People often tell me that they can’t afford to make a mistake online, because any error will be just one Google search away for anyone to see, forever.

Unless you’re prepared to risk the occasional mistake, however, you’ll never do anything interesting enough to earn real attention or foster real conversation. Even more crucially, you’ll never develop the social media fluency that comes from making, and then learning from, your own mistakes.

Of course, it’s hard to embrace the upside of online mistakes in a culture that avoids admitting failure, on- or offline. So let me do my part to chip away at the fear of failure by sharing four of my own cringeworthy social media moments. Here they are.” Learning from My Online Mistakes – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review

If you’d like to read more about Alexandra Samuel’s online boo boo’s go to the source — if you’d like to make some of your own, contact me! I can help you get over it… ;-)

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Are location-based services overrated?

Image representing Foursquare Solutions as dep...
Image via CrunchBase

Please consider this…

“Despite the buzz around location-based services, I have been ambivalent, if not skeptical about the technology.As much as social media has encouraged people to share information, I have not been convinced there is the same amount of enthusiasm for broadcasting your location.There’s the issue of privacy, as well as few “rewards” for telling the world your location.

In many respects, however, being unconvinced about the potential of location-based services has been like a Don Quixote-like experience, particularly when you’re an enthusiastic member of the social media community. The idea that you don’t really buy into the next new thing seems almost sacrosanct.

It was interesting and, to be honest, encouraging to read Joshua Brustein’s column in yesterday’s New York Times about whether the excitement surrounding location-based services is being driven by technology companies and investors, while consumers only seem modestly interested.

Brustein’s column came on the heels of a Pew Internet and American Life Project survey that discovered only 4% of Americans use location services like Foursquare and Gowalla, compared with 5% last May. Even among smartphone-toting 18 to 29-year-olds, only 8% use location-based services.

It may just be that location-based services won’t be widely embraced. Or it could be that location-based services have yet to find their sweet spot. However you want to explain it, the reality is location-based services have failed to live up to lofty expectations as social media’s next hot thing.

Perhaps Facebook’s entry into the market will change things, particularly if consumers are attracted to the link between the company’s Places and Deals services.

Or maybe not. It could be that most people have no use for location-based services despite the best efforts of companies and investors.

After all, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink” Source: Do Consumers Really Want Location-based Services? | Social Media Today

When I teach ‘curation’ as a form of blogging, I usually say that the author’s comment can be ‘yes, no or maybe so’. In this case, my response is a ‘maybe so’, but I’m leaning toward no. Let me tell you why…

Something like 87% of Americans have cell phones. Of that, 25% have smartphones. That number is projected to grow to 50% in 2011. The default mapping application on the two fastest growing platforms is Google Maps. Google just released a new product called Hotpot that makes it easy for patrons to write reviews directly on to Google Maps. Think about the implications. Say someone’s driving through Algoma, WI on their way to Door County and they’re looking for a place to grab a bite. They check Google Maps to see the options and as they try to decide, they check the reviews from Hotpot directly on Google Maps. Unfortunately, earlier that week someone had a rare bad experience at one of their choices. Do you think that won’t have an impact?

Michael Moon quoted Peter Drucker astutely in his book ‘Firebrands’ over a decade ago when he said that we’ve moved beyond the information age to the aged of ‘trusted relationships’. I believe that tech-savvy people with smartphones are going to change the face of American retail business by holding retailers accountable through mobile tools that allow them to report good or bad experiences immediately as they happen. These ‘trusted’ mobile ‘relationships’ will have the power to guide purchasing decisions at the mobile ‘point of sale’ like an endcap in a grocery store, directing potential customers to the ‘right’ place. Smart business owners will keep an eye on this trend…

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Electronic media usage by children reaches record high

USA Today
Image via Wikipedia

Apparently electronic media is equal to a full time job for most kids…

“The findings, out today in a Kaiser Family Foundation survey of 2,002 people ages 8 to 18, show that young people spend seven hours and 38 minutes using media in a typical day — up from six hours and 19 minutes a decade earlier.

About the only thing that seems to be fading: ink. Though daily book readership has held steady at about 47% since 1999, the percentage of young people who say they read a magazine every day has plummeted from 55% to 35%. It’s worse for newspapers, down from 42% to 23%.

Electronic media are now “a part of the air that kids breathe,” says Vicky Rideout, director of Kaiser’s Program for the Study of Media and Health.

African-American and Hispanic kids spend nearly one-third more time each day with electronics than white kids. Among other findings:

  • Cellphone ownership has increased sharply since 2004, from 39% to 66%.
  • Ownership of iPods has jumped even more since 2004, from 18% to 76%.
  • 20% of kids’ media comes via mobile devices.

The near-ubiquity of mobile devices has had a profound effect on kids’ free time, filling up “the insterstitial spaces” in their daily lives, says Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. She jokes that iPods and cellphones may be this generation’s “magazines and chewing gum,” harmless ways to fill time.” Source: Kids’ electronic media use jumps to 53 hours a week – USATODAY.com

What does this say about our culture? Our future? The future of newspapers? I have a thousand questions. What about you?

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Did you know?

I’ll be speaking to a couple of classes at Algoma High School today about how the internet is changing the world we live in and the options that are open to us as a result. Think about this…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQFTUJK9TkI&lt
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Tactic #8: Use ‘branded’ email

I took a little time off from my ‘tactics and tools’ series — no one’s paying attention in December anyway, right? ;-)

Now that everyone’s waking up from the holidays it’s time to get back on track with tactic #8 — using ‘branded’ email. ‘Branded’ email? What’s that? ‘Branded’ email is email that comes from a professional domain and supports your brand. Excuse me for ranting about one of my biases for a sec, but it drives me nuts when I see an entrepreneur using their sbcglobal, att, charter, road runner, etc. isp domains for conducting business — especially when there’s a great tool like Google Apps for Business! Every email is a chance to advertise your business by using a domain that points to your Facebook page or website. Besides, there’s nothing that screams ‘mom & pop shop’ more than using your personal home account to try to bring in that big deal…

Here’s a quick overview of Google Apps:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_TzCpYGpzw

Google Apps hits the ‘good, fast and cheap’ trifecta. Simple, yet powerful! A couple of years ago, I worked with a local entrepreneur in Green Bay that had an office with 7 people. He wanted the benefits of Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint for his team and spent $35,000 [first year acquisition cost of $5,000 per employee] for the hardware, software, licensing, and labor to acquire those benefits. Here’s the dirty little secret; there was no benefit he acquired that could not have been done better than Google Apps at the cost of $50 per user per year…

Consider the benefits of Google Apps:

“Google’s web-based messaging and collaboration apps require no hardware or software and need minimal administration, creating tremendous time and cost savings for businesses.

End users can use the familiar Microsoft Outlook interface for email, contacts and calendar as they transition to Gmail and Google Calendar. Source: Reduce IT costs, get less spam, and improve productivity – Google Apps for Business target=”_blank”

But wait, there’s more! Benefits include…

  • Proven cost savings
  • Email, calendar and IM access from any computer or smartphone connected to the internet, regardless of platform…
  • 99.9% uptime reliability guarantee
  • 50 times more storage than the industry average
  • Information security and compliance
  • Full administrative and data control
  • Helpful 24/7 customer support

Go here to read more…

Wow! A lot of cool features you say, but is it safe?

“Google applications provide a variety of security features, says Eric Ogren, a security analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group. For one thing, “you have to have authority to get in. Users can determine policies of who looks at a particular document, the amount of collaboration offered, and users have the flexibility to store data on their corporate laptop or have Google do it for them.”

In addition, he voices the security argument most commonly heard about SaaS solutions: “The customer’s IT department doesn’t have to maintain upgrades, so you don’t have to deal with patches with Google Apps, and that’s a nice feature.” Source: Google Apps has its advantages, but is it secure? – SC Magazine US target=”_blank”

Google Apps for Business is THE killer app for entrepreneurs, small businesses, non-profits, schools, and political campaigns. If I didn’t make myself clear, comment, call or contact so we can talk further about your particular situation…

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2009 in social media

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SPWTyv6zBk&feature=player_embedded
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The “Chicken Plucking” Secret of Success

Thinking about success for 2010? Here’s something to ponder…

Charles F. Kettering, inventor of the electric self-starter for cars, once said, “My definition of an educated man is the fellow who knows the right thing to do at the time it has to be done…. You can be sincere and still be stupid.” Indeed. The world is full of sincere, hungry people waiting for food to magically appear on the table.

But let’s not bother with them right now. It’s almost time for dinner and we have work to do. While the rest of the world frets about ruffling feathers, let’s get busy plucking the chicken. We’ll eat. We’ll laugh. And we’ll drink a toast to our success.”

A good reminder for entrepreneurs! Click the here to read more of this excellent post…

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Buying a new notebook?

Think different! No, I don’t mean buy a Mac — I just mean think before you buy. A friend of mine asked for a recommendation on a big, expensive notebook — you know, one of the ones with the big 17″ monitor? My advice to him was “my recommendation would be to avoid the big, expensive notebook. I would consider a big, expensive desktop combined with a small, inexpensive netbook — it will cost the same and you won’t need to pay a premium for a premium notebook. Give me a call if you want to talk more…”

Where does this bias come from? Maybe from the fact that these über-notebooks, or desktop replacements as they are commonly called, are getting so big and heavy that they’re really a pain in the back to carry around. A couple of years ago I bought a 17″ notebook from HP and after awhile, I traded it with my son for a smaller, lighter computer. I got tired of trying to fit it in my backpack an lugging it around — so tired that I was willing to accept a lesser computer in exchange for the ease of use! It was such a big process to get it out of my bag and fired up that I started looking for excuses not to…

Here’s my belief; most computing is context sensitive. Think about it. Do you really need to run Photoshop on your smartphone? No — if a good picture is worth editing, you’ll probably wait until you get home and use the desktop computer with 24″ monitor that only cost $700. My current thinking is this: instead of paying $1,000 for a high end consumer notebook, get a desktop with a big monitor, a netbook and a smartphone that runs the android os. Boom! Now you have a solution that delivers power when and where you need it, a portable tool that allows you to interact with the internet for those times you need a bigger keyboard, and a phone that will do a lot of heavy lifting without ever having to take that netbook out of the bag. Make sense? I’d like to hear your comments…

If you decide to go ahead and get that big notebook, know this:

“Laptop magazine went through the painstaking process of calling the tech support of every major notebook manufacturer. And they timed their waits before asking one of two very basic questions. The results may not surprise you.

Apple scored the highest with an A overall (that’s a combined score of online and phone tech support). HP, Acer and Dell tied for lowest with C- each.” Source: Laptop Mag Determines Acer, Dell and HP Have the Worst Tech Support – Technical Support – Gizmodo

Despite this, I’m sold on the HP brand and my experiences have not been bad — admittedly this may be due to the fact that I can perform a great deal of the tech support that most people need on my own, but I haven’t had quality issues and I keep my machines running well thanks to Tune Up Utilities, etc. If you can’t resist that über-notebook buy an HP that works with the XB-3000 [pictured above] — that way, you can have the best of both worlds! You can pick them up on eBay for around $100…

I hope this post wasn’t too confusing — the truth is that buying new equipment is really a context sensitive thing and should take into account how much time you spend in your office versus mobile, etc. and I’d be happy to talk through your issues with you. Leave a comment or use the contact form — I’d love to talk it through with you…

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Social Media in Plain English

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIOClX1jPE
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Moms and smartphones…

They’re not just for CEO’s anymore…

“Smartphones may have started as productivity tools for top executives, but they’re quickly finding their way into the hands and purses of “power moms,” a.k.a. the CEO of the household.

As smartphones become easier to use and in many ways more useful, more women, including busy moms, are buying them to leverage all kinds of digital applications to stay organized and to connect with their families, friends, and social networks, such as Facebook or Twitter. They’re also using these Internet-enabled devices to get things done like paying the bills, ordering groceries, downloading coupons, and hunting for ideas for the next family vacation.

And like their corporate counterparts, these women are hooked.” Source: Modern power moms flock to smartphones | Wireless – CNET News

Go to the source to read the rest of the article…

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Waving goodbye to 2009

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyoGbd1iJIw&feature=player_embedded
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More tutorials…

Here are a couple more…

“In response to my recent post on free tutorial sites for web worker applications several readers called out some excellent alternative sites. I’ve given these sites a try, and a couple of them are good enough that I feel trumped. In this post, I’ll discuss the kinds of free resources you can leverage there.” Web Worker Daily » Archive 4 More Top-Notch, Free App Tutorial Sites «

Click the link to read more…

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Lately I’ve been struggling…

…with the issue of what is the best way to graphically depict the relationship between the various social media tools that I use. I think I may just end up settling with a flow chart for now, however, I’m finding some interesting stuff along the way such as this…

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Blogging and thought leadership

…I ‘re-discovered’ this presentation this morning from Dana VanDen Heuvel of MarketingSavant.com — it may be the best presentation ever on the relationship between thought leadership, blogging and social media…

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Study: Work may be costing people

LOL!

“The National Sleep Foundation says Americans are not getting enough rest and work may be getting in the way.

In a study released Monday the Washington, D.C.-based organization said average nightly sleep for adults is 6 hours and 40 minutes, below the 7 hours and 18 minutes that most people say they need.

The reason for less sleep may be due to increased workload. The report said workers are spending an average of nearly 4.5 hours each week doing additional work from home on top of a 9.5 hour average workday.”

Work gets in the way of a lot of things — one reason you better love what you’re doing… ;-)

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The intangible benefits of blogging

“Search for the term benefits of blogging and you’ll probably find hundreds and thousands of blog posts and pages waxing eloquent about the great benefits of blogging and I totally believe in most of the stuff. Blogging has so many benefits that it is simply outrageous not to have a blog, especially if you run an online business…

Blogging has both tangible and intangible benefits. Since you’ll find tangible benefits of blogging almost everywhere, in this post I’m going to talk about the intangible benefits of blogging: benefits that are there but you cannot see them, you cannot measure them, and they may not even manifest an effect that you can observe.” Click the here to read more…

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