@dottotech talks about Google Photos — a must have tool for business and personal images…
Part 5 of our Google Basics series is Google Photos! Want to know the ins-and-outs of the best photo management app on the market? Google photos will make it easier to access your photos, and more efficiently organize your photos.#askdottotechhttps://t.co/skSrV9SiAn
I believe that mind-mapping is a special skill that will help you organize your thoughts for business or life. Here’s Brian Johnson’s take. Click the title to watch the video…
The four stages of competence, also known as the four stages of learning, is a model based on the premise that before a learning experience begins, learners are unaware of what or how much they know (unconscious incompetence), and as they learn, they move through four psychological states until they reach a stage of unconscious competence.
By understanding the model, trainers can better identify learning needs and develop learning objectives based on where their target audience is in the four stages related to a given topic: The Four Stages of Competence – Training Industry
“I’ve replaced my iPhone and Android apps with CloudMagic. It’s the best overall option with its reminders, improved search, cross-app cooperation and support for many email providers” via Speak low, if you speak love.
Imagine a place where people go to actually watch ads and where marketers can take all the time they want to unfold a story. That magical place is called YouTube and UPS shows us how it’s done:
If you can count on anything during the holidays, it’s advertisements that take aim at your heart — and this one hits the bullseye.
The spot from UPS highlights the bond between a 4-year-old boy named Carson and UPS driver Ernest Lagasca, who Carson calls “Mr. Ernie.”
Carson loves Mr. Ernie and his truck so much that he has a UPS uniform of his own and dreams of being a UPS driver. And when Mr. Ernie comes to the door in the ad, Carson practically leaps into his arms.
“I could come here three times in week and I’d get the same reaction every single time, all that excitement,” Lagasca says in the spot.
But in the commercial, Lagasca isn’t bringing an ordinary package. As part of the UPS Your Wishes Delivered campaign, he’s delivering a child-sized UPS truck to help make Carson’s dream come true.
If you have an online store, issue press releases or even just have a Facebook business “page”, then here are 6 reasons to publish images and photos as part of your business marketing tactics.
Articles with images get 94% more total views
Including a Photo and a video in a press release increases views by over 45%
60% of consumers are more likely to consider or contact a business when an image shows up in local search results
In an ecommerce site, 67% of consumers say the quality of a product image is “very important” in selecting and purchasing a product
In an online store, customers think that the quality of a products image is more important than product-specific information (63%), a long description (54%) and ratings and reviews (53%)
Engagement rate on Facebook for photos averages 0.37% where text only is 0.27% (this translates to a 37% higher level of engagement for photos over text)
Inbox Tabs in Gmail are a valuable tool for making sure you handle your most important email first. Watch this video and see not only how it works at the desktop level but also on iOS and Android as well…
If you like that, follow it up with my favorite 7+ Gmail features…
First off, this series is going to be a little like Star Wars in that I’m starting the story kind of in the middle. I was most inspired to start my new set of mobile screen casts focusing on Feedly which to me may be the single most important tool in the content marketers toolbox.
First a little bit of review. I said earlier other places that if you want to be a thought leader on the Internet you have to be able to manage all of your personal information well. By this I mean you’ll never be a big dog out on the Internet if you can’t get off the porch of your inbox. In other posts I’ve talked about how the single most important thought for me is to get newsletters and other just in case information out of my inbox into a feed reader. Feedly is the only feed reader that meets my five criteria for recommended application. I’ve included that list again here:
In his classic book Getting Things Done David Allen recommends that we use exactly as many containers as we need and not a single one more. Feedly is the container that I use and recommend both for processing and producing content to drive my content marketing campaigns. In the video below I’ll take you through the process of configuring Feedly for mobile use and take you through the processing, producing, and postproduction phases of using Feedly define the content you need to feed YOUR content marketing campaigns.
Where would you like me to go with this? What topics did I miss? Please let me know in the comments below…
As the 3rd most popular social network site in the United States, having an active Pinterest strategy should be a priority for your small business. If you aren’t quite sure how exactly Pinterest can work for you, here are 10 great ways to use Pinterest for your small business, courtesy of Karen Leeland.
The primary way I use Pinterest is to find and share great visual content. I can use it to find the right image or infographic for my post but having created a post that has rich visual content, I also want to use Pinterest to share that content from my blog so that it drives people to my website. Make sense? Questions? Feedback?
Tune Up Utilities is the only utility I use to keep my Windows computer running like new every day. Each year I gladly pay the $29.95 to update to the latest version. This year, however, it’s cheaper to install it as a trial version and click the ‘buy now’ button – you’ll save yourself $5.00! So, whether you’ve never used Tune Up or it’s time to renew save yourself the 5 bucks and have a good pint on me…
Your inbox is a mess — admit it. You are constantly bombarded with irrelevant emails throughout your extremely busy day. It doesn’t have to be this way, though. Luckily, you’ve come to the right place.
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…
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?
My mate in Australia, 
Next week I’ll start with the analysis phase in the flowchart. Questions? Feedback?
Bright, shiny objects! 
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