Tag Archives: twitter

Apr12

Entrepreneurial Vitamins – Caine’s Arcade

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Entrepreneurial Vitamins – Caine’s Arcade

Without a doubt, if you need a little optimism today — watch this great video.  I smiled all the way through, and felt totally energized watching Caine at “work.”  It reminded me of something we forget all the time – that enjoying one’s work equals play.  It made me remember all the fun things I did as a child – hopscotch, acting out silly kid versions of commercials with my friends, playing kickball and just plain old giggling.  There are millions of kids like Caine who will grow up to be creative adults – and the world surely needs them.  Hope you enjoy this!

Mar26

We are in the land of “New is Better”

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We are in the land of “New is Better”

Sometimes it feels as though we are in the land of “New is Better” – we are a consumer society… looking for the next new thing.

A good example is Pinterest.com - this social site caught people’s imagination like wildfire, and why?  Not only was it “new” it was visual.  And a picture is worth a thousand words, right? WHat is Pinterest?  Basically it is a web-based application that allows you to create “boards” like bulletin boards in real life, with themes, and share images/pictures/videos that you find from around the internet with people who choose to “follow” you.  It allows you to tweet or connect to Facebook in order to publicize your “Boards”.  You can see my Pinterest boards by clicking here (it is a link inviting you to join to see my boards).

And as soon as it caught on, we (the collective we) started looking for ways to make best use of this new social media tool.  There is a whole panoply of resources that seemingly sprung up, spontaneously, out of nowhere addressing the many ways to market your business or wares using Pinterest.com.

But like any new tool, you should take a look at how much you can benefit versus how much effort you will be putting in.

One of the grand challenges that we all face is carving out regular time to manage and attend to the variety of tools we have at our fingertips.  Facebook pages, Google+, Twitter, Posterous, Friend Feed, and Pinterest – to name a few, are only as successful as the effort that is applied to them.  The investment of time, and sometimes money, requires planning and discipline.

I have seen many folks throw up their hands and declare that -fill in the blank- social media doesn’t work for them, after only a minimal effort.

There are few free lunches.  You have to carve the time out or assign someone to do it, or invest in one of the many applications out there to do it for you.  Time or money or both.

But take heart, if you do expend the effort, you will get your name out there, and your service or product.  Marketing is not necessarily about the dollars brought in, but in the awareness of your business that is heightened by the effort.

Good luck, and please comment with your experiences!

 

Feb17

The cost of doing biz

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The cost of doing biz

There are a lot of folks out there struggling.  The cost of doing business is so very expensive that it makes it seem like a Herculean task to try to navigate through all the different tools and decide what to use for what – and get the most bang for your buck (a very important consideration).

So I am here to tell you about two services that are FREE, that can help most consultants, small business owners and even the occasional artist.

The first is FreeConference.com – it enables you to have a conference call, for free.  Hence the name.  LOL.  Seriously – if you do phone training, need to have a meeting with people across town or across the states – this is a great tool.   You can tie it to your Evernote.com application for reminders, if you like.  You get up to 4 hours of free conference time for up to 150 participants.  For additional costs, you can record the conference call – which works great if you plan to put a copy of  the call on your website.  It is easy to set up, and you can send emails to your participants with the phone number and pass code to use for the call.

What would you use it for?  Team meetings, collaborations, fundraising, study groups – the possibilities, as they say, are endless.

The second tool, enabling you to do webinars – is Anymeeting.com .  It enables you to have a webinar (voice and web-based presentation which allows you to share desktops) .  As with the first tool, there are some cool free features and the best feature (in my humble opinion) is that there are no downloads needed.

How would you use it?  Presentations that rely on slides or pictures (which you can show on your desktop), training, collaborations, study groups, orientation meetings,  weekly status meetings, interviews – you can do a lot.  You can even charge for your webinar using this tool.  And they have training tools available so you can easily learn how to use this tool.

TGIF – ponder how you can use these tools to improve your business or just have a great weekend (or both).

Mar4

Why Social Media is Like Building a Mayan Pyramid

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Why Social Media is Like Building a Mayan Pyramid
Many years ago, my friend Dar and I went on a vacation to Mexico.  Part of the fun included a tour of Tumul and Xumal guided by an octagenarian named Senior Pinkie (really!). Senior Pinkie had been doing the tour for nearly 60 years at that point and had heard everything from “Chariot of the Gods” to the “X-Files” and set about to explain that the great “mystery” of how the ancients were able to create such amazing and long-lasting structures.
His delivery was good-humored and emphatic.  “How did they do these things? How did they build these temples, ports, pyramids?” He asked us all on the bus, with a twinkle in his eye… “They thought, they planned, they set their goals and then the people worked to those goals. How did they do it?? They worked HARD.  20% did the planning, 80% did the labor. All that you see here, the port, the buildings, these were built without television, without alien invasions, without supernatural powers, these were built by people doing work! HARD work, yes, but they knew they would be accomplishing SOMETHING, they were motivated, yes! Not by whips, but by the community. They built these things for themselves and their families. THAT is the great secret. WORK. ”

In terms of using social media, people who are not familiar with Twitter, or MySpace, or Facebook, let alone blogs or any of the myriad of social tools out there -  believe there is some magic in how others are able to make good use of these tools.  Perhaps some secret society of indoctrination has the special key to using these things effectively, or maybe it is some mutant or alien race who created these tools to torment the average person with tantalizing promises of media exposure and clients flocking to websites in droves.

The actual answer is that like the Mayans of old, the way to build a social media structure that will last and be successful requires a strategy, a plan, and then the discipline to work that plan, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.  And like the amazing structures or old, a strong social media plan takes time to build up.  Unless you stumble on the “It subject” of the moment, you will need to grow slowly, and work at it.  This doesn’t mean you cannot capitalize on the momentum of whatever is popular at the moment, just remember that it will be fleeting, while what you are slowly building, will last longer.  And when you look back at the distance you have covered, the clients you have won, you may chuckle as others ask you what your secret is…

Posted via email from Natalia’s Other Blog

Feb4

Social Media Management – Setting Your Sights on the Right Sites

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Social Media Management – Setting Your Sights on the Right Sites
Social Media Management – Setting Your Sights on the Right Sites
Copyright (c) 2010 Enzo F. Cesario
BrandSplat
http://www.Brandsplat.com/

One of the most amazing features about the Web is that it allows many people to take advantage of features they did not originate. Livejournal, Twitter, Digg, Reddit and each of the many other Social Media sites were proposed and implemented with a relatively small cadre of people, yet thousands of businesses are finding ways to use these sites for promotion and improvement every day. These sites allow for communication with the nearly captive audience that is any business’ dream.

Of course as is the case with any innovative process many businesses jump in to Social Media Marketing without understanding the problems at hand, and find themselves ignored or scorned for seeming to be incompetent. In some cases this is a failure of research, while in others it is a case of forgetting that these audiences are indeed people with complex opinions and attitudes. Combine these traits with the mass communication capability of the Internet, and you have equal potential for word of mouth fame or disaster.

Before jumping into SMM, every business needs to consider the core options available to them and see just which ones truly suit the organization and its needs. The leadership must consider the objective of their business and the audience that will facilitate this objective. Then they should consider not just which Social Media sites this audience frequents, but how to reach them in a way that makes them care. To that end, what follows is a short review of some Social Media sites and a comparison of their roles to highlight these issues.

Twitter

Twitter is Social Media at its barest; short messages are sent out to anyone following the account, usually consisting of no more than a brief comment or a short URL. US President Barack Obama relied heavily on Twitter during his successful White House bid, using it to promote rallies and campaign meetings. The very brevity of Twitter gives it some of its most unexpected strength. After all, what could be more mysterious than a message reading ‘Tyler Park, 9:30 pm, bring chips and sunglasses’? Sunglasses at night? Chips? It immediately gets the mind racing with questions and interest.

Yet in a classic example illustrating that audiences are not simply feedback devices, but actual people, consider the gone-wrong story of the Republican Party in Connecticut. In an effort to satire some of their opponents, the party set up 33 fake Twitter accounts impersonating state Democrats! Twitter shut down the accounts citing terms of service clauses against impersonating other individuals. The move raised a number of ethical questions and is a classic example that users should always ask if ‘can’ necessarily means ‘should.’

Facebook and Myspace

The title of this section indicates a common perception in the media that these competing services are offering essentially the same product. In a sense this is true, as both offer users a chance to join groups, manage and customize a profile, and use a variety of applications for entertainment or business. They represent the more involved tier of Social Media, combining aspects of blogging and websites for easy access.

However the facts show that perceptions can be misleading. Facebook only allows for plain text customization, whereas Myspace allows users to customize with HTML and CSS. While this may not sound like the greatest of distinctions it does make Facebook more accessible to the ‘casual’ user of Social media, while Myspace by default becomes the realm of those more interested in website design. If your business’ aim is to recruit potential designers, this distinction alone tells you where to focus your efforts.

Digg and Reddit

These sites and others like them are in essence an Internet popularity contest. Users submit content, and other users vote on whether they find it interesting. The theory of use here is that these sites can be used as a benchmark for public opinion, based on a reading of what is popular at any given time. Except it isn’t always that simple. Digg has faced criticism that the site’s owners have a great deal of direct influence on which stories make it to the front page, which does call into question whether it actually represents public opinion.

Not the Final Word, Just a Thought

Above we mentioned the curious case of Republicans attempting a bit of satire and finding themselves called on ethical questions. Another fact to consider is the irony vote. It is not unknown or even uncommon for Internet hobbyists to vote en masse for an irrelevant news story just to see if they can make it popular as a jest. For example, the infamous and popular social site 4chan seemingly organized massive, worldwide boycotts of the Church of Scientology because it could.

Working with a professional social media marketing agency can help ensure that your online efforts are focused on the right sites, with the right message, to the right audience for maximum ROI.

Above all, the lesson that must be learned is that the Internet is not a static collection of people waiting to obey the input of  various broadcasters. Each audience is composed of many distinct and individual users, many of whom are intelligent, critical thinkers with opinions and ideas of their own. If your campaign treats them as a switch to be thrown, it will fail, period. If you want your campaign to succeed, treat these audiences with respect and develop a campaign that communicates with rather than at them.

———————————————————————
Enzo F. Cesario is an online brand management specialist
and co-founder of Brandsplat, a social media company that
uses blogs, articles, videos and social media to drive
traffic to your site. For the free Brandcasting Report
go to http://www.BrandSplat.com/ or visit our blog at
http://www.iBrandCasting.com/

Posted via email from Natalia’s Other Blog

Nov1

Sometimes “Free” really IS Free

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Sometimes “Free” really IS Free

Surfing around the net this morning, in a frantic bid to catch up on my reading – a technical generalist’s job is ever shifting – I found some sites that offer tools and information that I just HAD TO SHARE, because let’s face it – when you find a treasure that is FREE, you ought to share the wealth!  And these tools are FREE, no requirements to join something or sign up for something – just plain old free.

My fave of today is at: MakeUseOf.com. This particular posting has 15 .pdf manuals to download that range from Audiophile guides to free music and services, to Linux for Dummies. Literally something for everyone there, and all concise and well-written.

A service that my co-worker, Afsheen, turned me on to is SocialOomph.com – it is not a pretty site, nor is it especially easy to navigate – BUT – it allows you to automate some of the Twitter activities that busy professionals might like – for example – you can set an automated thanks for a follow; you can set to automatically follow people who follow you; and most brilliantly of all – you can set up scheduled Tweets! That is what I call ROCK AND ROLL!

If you are looking for a free alternative to Photoshop, check out Photoscape it is freeware with lots of power. Not completely as versatile as Photoshop, but for the amateur – it is a pretty powerful tool – and allows photo collage and layering.

I will post stuff as I find it – drop me a line if you are looking for something in particular and if I stumble on it in my virtual travels, I’ll share!

Aug6

Another day in Tech Paradise

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Another day in Tech Paradise

Twitter….down again…. Facebook also seems to be having server issues.
Oh no – its the end of the world as we know it… or maybe it is just another Thursday in Tech  Paradise.

Even the least technical of my circle of friends will pace and froth at the mouth (metaphorically of course) when the internet sites they depend on are not available, or heaven forbid, hacked.  We rely on this media more than previous generations relied on Newspapers and Radio.  We rely on it more than Television.  And we are in denial about how much we rely on technology.  Because if we had to admit how much we don’t know about how it all works, we might have some responsibility in learning more and becoming more actively involved in the utilitarian aspect of the internet and its ancillary services…oh, yeah, can I get an “Amen Brother”!

Jul29

Social Networking and YOU

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Social Networking and YOU

At the end of the day the only person you have control over is YOU.  But each of us influence and have impact on others based on our relationships.  And “Social Networking” is a way of taking a systemic look at your relationships and leveraging them to help you accomplish your goals – whether that goal is to find a great realtor, gain access to a prospective client, find a new job, or raise funds for charity – your most successful forays will be with people who know you or know someone who knows you.

Randy Schrum, http://successwithlinkedin.wordpress.com/ has a whole blog, and an e-book about how to successfully utilize LinkedIn in marketing.   Charlene Li’s book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies talks about how social networking has taken hold of the internet and where it is all heading.  There are many other references out there…

Ultimately if you are trying to decide to “Twitter or not to Twitter”  ( you might want to check out: Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time ) or how to set up a Facebook page for your Business ( check out Clara Shih’s book The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff ) you need to set out a strategy and schedule some focused time to do it.  It is like any other aspect of your business, you need to schedule it in and spend some time to get comfortable with the ins and outs.

If you “shot gun” your approach, you spread yourself too thin, miss your target half the time, and may jeopardize the one thing you have to leverage – your relationships.   Guard them closely, your contacts are almost as precious as your reputation.  Learn how to nurture and leverage, remember to give value as well as harvest value, and take the time to stay in touch – that is the beauty of the internet and social networking sites – they enable you to stay in contact and find opportunities to help others.

Mar23

Tech Toys for Grrls & eBoys

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Tech Toys for Grrls & eBoys

First, let me say this about Google – great toys!

This nifty gadget   http://translate.google.com/translate_tools?hl=en   allows anyone to translate the page they are viewing to the language of their choice. Very cool and of course you’ll need to embed it in your website appropriately, and for some reason I can’t get the gadget to work in my blog…

Second, let me remind all the new Twitterers out there, that anyone can read your twitter if you don’t actively change your settings to private.  Case in point – read about the unhappy results on the BrandBuilder Blog http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/2009/03/19/how-to-lose-your-job-in-140-characters-or-less/.

That’s longer than a tweet and shorter than my normal blogs, but I have vowed to blog more often, so shorter is what you get.

Jan25

The old dog that teaches itself new tricks

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The old dog that teaches itself new tricks

Being at the tail-end of the Boomer generation, I become ever more surprised at the number of my peers (the technical as well as ”non-technical” ones) who are quickly becoming, well, downright stodgy. These are the people who have computers but do not have a Facebook or Myspace page…answer their emails about once a week or less, and complain that their kids and grandkids know more about the computer than they do. They also complain that they are no longer getting promoted, or able to figure out what their younger co-workers are talking about.

These are not unintelligent folks… they are in professions that are not dynamically involved in networking, or at least in positions that they perceive to be “not networking oriented”…and when they lose their job, through attrition or economics or because they don’t “fit” anymore…they are at a loss.   Why is this happening?

Aside from the social divisions, there are self-imposed divisions within any culture.  The self-imposed divisions are the hardest to overcome.  People who make an effort to stay on top of what is going on in the world at large, not just the news, but what people are doing, how they are doing it, how new jobs are coming into being – those are the people who are teaching themselves “new tricks” and are able to be adaptive and “embrace changes”.

Learning doesn’t stop when you leave school.  Technology, whether you like it or not, is continuing to evolve and if you can’t keep up you will not stay marketable.  If you aren’t sure where to begin, start with Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies ; then go open your Facebook or Myspace account and findout who you know that is there… you’ll be surprised.   I stay in touch with many of my Godkids more frequently through my Myspace and Facebook pages than I do on the phone, email, or snailmail.  Although I was surpised to have to explain just what “snailmail”* was to my 16 year old godson – *snailmail is paper mail sent by regular post.

If you work for a living and you don’t have a Linkedin.com account – why not.  It is the main US career-oriented site out there.  The one place where your “resume” being out there doesn’t instigate retaliation by a boss who thinks you are actively looking… this “open networking” is important for you should you ever need to find a job.  Remember the old adage “It isn’t what you know, it is who you know“. It isn’t strictly correct, of course, you do have to have skills and experience, but you also need an introduction to the people you want to work with.

Recently a friend of mine was interviewing for a position she really was excited about…she was represented through a recruiter who went AWOL for a few days. During that few days, the company was trying to reach the recruiter to set up the second/decision making interview.  She lost out on the job, and she was very understanding of the recruiter that had a family emergency and was AWOL.  She is still on unemployment and hoping that she can find a job before she winds up having to move in with friends.  She still doesn’t have a Linkedin profile.  She does have Myspace and Facebook, but doesn’t ever use them to network.

My unspoken thoughts (she is my friend and I was comiserating with her) were:

  • Why didn’t the company have your direct contact info and why didn’t you have theirs?
  • Didn’t you send a thank-you for the first interview, another opportunity to get your contact info to them?
  • Why didn’t anyone else in the Recruiter’s office handle this for him?

When I asked her, gently, why she didn’t follow-up directly with the company, she was horrified at me… in her mind, the recruiter was representing her, and she would have been rude and inapproprate to contact the employer directly.

In my mind, once the introduction is made, it is as much my responsibility (since I am the one who wants the job) to communicate as it is the recruiter’s.  The recruiter works for the employer, not for me.  And I know that the recruiter will be compensated based on my placement – and has “skin in the game”, but I would not let that prevent me from trying to get the job if I really wanted it.  And unless the recruiter specifically asks me not to contact the person I interviewed with at the company, then I see nothing wrong with it.

This is an example of “old dog” behaviors that have not evolved with the technology.  In the coming year, and in the current economy, unless you are able to teach yourself new ways of doing even the most basic things, like saying “thank you” after an interview, you will be behind the curve.

I am going to go check my email now…and tweet some folks.  And after I make another pot of coffee, I may clip and share some news on Social Median.  Check it all out…
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