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Archive for May, 2010

Review: Twitter for iPhone

Friday, May 28th, 2010

I’ve used a bunch of Twitter clients, both for my PC and my iPhone, so I wasn’t really interested in trying yet another one. I’ve been very happy with Tweetdeck for my PC and iPhone for several months now.

But when the new Twitter for iPhone came out and one of my friends was tweeting about it, I decided to give it a try. And I like it!

It’s a very clean interface. Nothing to get in the way of reading tweets.

Tapping a tweet gives you the option to tap links. It also previews pictures from many of the Twitter picture sites.

@jarehart might not be too happy with me over this one

Tapping to the user information gives you a nice screen with lots of information, including, as you can see, whether the other person is following you back. Not every Twitter client gives you that, and I think it’s a nice feature.

Yay! @jarehart is following me back

One of the things I really like is the nested DM conversations.

@ccooks3 and I having a nice chat over #ngagedc

Makes it look like a chat screen or the messages screen in iPhone.

What’s the thing I like the best? It’s fast! Tweetdeck is great for scrolling between columns. In Twitter for iPhone, you have to go to another menu and pull up lists one at a time, which is kind of a pain. But, with Tweetdeck, you have to wait for all the lists to load before you can do much with the program. I spend most of my time on Edge (for battery life). That means I sometimes have to wait for a couple of minutes before I can do anything with it. Twitter for iPhone is up, loaded, and I’m tweeting within seconds, even over Edge!

What do I dislike the most? Retweeting only works using the new style retweet (no editing). I figured out a workaround by using “Quote Tweet” and then editing to remove the quotes and add the RT, but it’s not as easy at tapping “Retweet” in other apps.

This is the screen to quote a tweet

It’s the Twitter app I’ve been using the most for the last week, and I definitely think it’s a keeper!

What did you think of all the pictures? Call me slow, but I finally figured out how to take iPhone screen shots!

Have a great weekend. I won’t be blogging on Monday (Memorial Day), but I’ll be back on Tuesday.

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Tags: iPhone, social media
Posted in social media | 1 Comment »

The Best Things in Life Are Free

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

What’s everyone’s favorite four letter word beginning with “F?”

No, not that one! I mean the one you can say in polite company. Right, FREE. Everyone loves free.

Last night I was a panelist on a presentation about social media. The audience ran the range from fairly experienced to so-new-someone-didn’t-even-know-the-right-way-to-pronounce-Twitter.

What all three of the panelists stressed repeatedly was that social media is free. Even the tools to manage social media are, by and large, free. Some mobile apps have a cost, but it’s usually not more than a few dollars, and there are plenty of good free apps if you want to go that way.

Free is good. Social media levels the playing field, as one of the panelists, marketing expert @CadenceMarket, pointed out. It used to be that only large companies with huge marketing budgets could get national or international exposure and name recognition. With effective use of social media, small companies with very limited marketing budgets can get that kind of recognition too. And I’m very excited about the possibilities.

But free has a downside, as social media evangelist (cool title!) @BizIncubation discussed. When you don’t have any money invested into something, there is a temptation to do it for a while until the new and shiny rubs off and then quit and do something else.

Conventional wisdom is that you get what you pay for. Social media is the same. The tools are available. They are free. You don’t pay anything for them in cash. What you do pay for them is time. And in social media, you get from it in direct proportion to the time and effort you put into it.

How do you make time for social media? Check out the above link to one of my blog posts on the subject.

Please don’t be fooled. Free is good. Free gets you into the room. But good work will take you where you want to go.

Where do you want to go? Will social media help you get there? Let us know in the comments!

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Tags: social media, time management
Posted in social media | 3 Comments »

Doing Things in the Right Time

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

I’ve been discovering some things about myself and timing of tasks lately, and I thought I’d share.

I thought it didn’t matter what time of the day I wrote. Turns out I was wrong. I’ve been struggling a bit with the rework of Face to Facebook. I’ve been doing other tasks in the morning and saving work on the book until later in the afternoon. Mistake!

Yesterday, I switched my scheduling and worked on the book in the morning. Wow! What a difference that made. What had been hard in the afternoon was almost effortless in the morning. Lesson learned. No more writing in the afternoon. Well, except for fiction. So far that works any time of day.

Checking social media used to be something I did in the morning. I still do, but less now. It’s a perfect late afternoon task. I can read and absorb blog posts just fine late in the day when I’m not up for creative tasks.

Same with catching up on email. It seems I can focus better on that when I’m feeling less creative. Although yesterday I needed to write a fun and creative email introduction. I made sure to do that earlier in the day.

What about networking? I’m still blessed in that I can be productive at networking meetings any time of day. But I know people who can’t do mornings or are just much better in the evening. If there’s a time of day you’re more effective networking, go for it. Spend more of your time interacting when you’re at your best. There may occasionally be a great event at your less effective time of day, and you’ll probably want to go to it. But try to schedule thing when you’ll be more sharp.

Finally, client and one to one meetings? I’m okay with those morning and afternoon. Much after 4:00, though, and I start to lose focus one on one. Good thing I don’t have many people wanting to meet at those times.

I challenge you to look at your regular tasks and events. Is something giving you trouble? Try it at a different time of day and see if it makes a difference.

Wouldn’t it be great to get more done in the same amount of time? You can if you schedule things appropriately.

Anyone else have a good story to share about switching around the timing of a task?

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Tags: task management, time management
Posted in Time and Task Management | 1 Comment »

Review: Your Twitter Karma

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

I read a good review of Your Twitter Karma at @bloggingbistro‘s blog, but I had a few things to add.

Briefly, if you’re too lazy to go read her review, Your Twitter Karma is a web app to manage your Twitter followers. Like Friend or Follow, it shows your mutual friends, who is following that you aren’t following back, and the reverse.

What Your Twitter Karma does that’s extra is give you filtering and sorting options, and in some cases, a button to follow or unfollow, right from their website. Yes, that means you don’t have to click back to a Twitter page to start or stop following someone. Which is a great time saver when reviewing and managing your Twitterati.

However, there is a limitation. You can follow anyone who is following you and you’re not following back. You can unfollow anyone who isn’t following you back. But to unfollow mutual friends, you have to click through to their Twitter page.

Why would you want to unfollow anyone who is following you back? I cleaned up a lot of my following this weekend, and I deleted people in these two categories:

1. Spammers and shameless self-promoters.

A few months ago, I experimented with following back anyone who followed me. Which meant I ended up with a lot of spam in my stream. Mostly gone now.

2. People who haven’t tweeted in more than 60 days.

Granted, they were neither helping nor hurting but since they weren’t active, it neither hurt nor helped me to unfollow them.

I eliminate about 10% of my following number that way, and it felt good.

I’d had “clean up twitter followers and lists” on my To-Do list for almost a month now. Going through my list through Twitter.com had been so time consuming that I hadn’t ever finished the task.

Your Twitter Karma allowed me to do it in about two hours. I estimate it would have taken me at least twice that without it.

You know I’m all about saving time. If you haven’t tried them yet, check it out.

Update: Well, someone keeps track of when they are mentioned. Dossy, the developer of Your Twitter Karma, read my review and added an Unfollow button to mutual followers. Awesome! Thanks. You just made a good tool even better.

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Tags: social media, time management
Posted in social media, Time and Task Management | 4 Comments »

We’re #1! (Or Not)

Friday, May 21st, 2010

Claiming your product or company is “#1 doesn’t really work as part of your networking message.

Why? Two reasons.

1. We probably don’t care. Really. In most cases, we are referring you, the person, not you, the company, or you, the product. Does your product or service do what you say it does? If the answer is yes, that’s all we care about.

2. #1 according to whom? As soon as someone says they are “the best,” that’s the next question I ask. You’ve heard the quote “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” I’m not saying that everyone who says they are number 1 is automatically lying. But I hear so many competing companies in the same industry all say they are number 1. Can’t be done.

So don’t even take us down that road. Tell us you are damned good at what you do. Back it up with great client stories. We’ll believe you.

Leave the “number 1″ claims to your competitors. It’s making them look bad anyway.

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Tags: communication, Referrals
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Don’t Treat Your Customers Like Idiots

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

I both love and hate it when my competitors act stupidly. I love it for the obvious reason. Them acting foolishly makes me look better. Sort of.

But when our niche is networking, and a competitor violates a basic principle, that just brings us all down.

What the heck am I talking about? A competitor of mine is currently offering a “sale” on Twitter. There are two problems with the sale.

1. The product is an ebook, but the product page doesn’t mention that, and the picture makes it look like a paper book. Don’t play games with me. If something is an ebook, tell me. If it’s paper, tell me that. I’m assuming she’s being deceptive because she doesn’t perceive value in ebooks. I could be totally wrong in my assumption, but considering the price she’s selling it for (extremely high), that’s the message I’m receiving. And in communication, the message heard is far more important than the message intended.

2. But the bigger problem is the “sale” part. The sale is a bundle including the afore-mentioned ebook and a couple of audio downloads for a package price. Sounds cool, eh? Not really. I calculated the price if I bought the three items separately. They actually cost less to buy separately than if I buy at the “sale” bundled price.

Some sale, huh?

Either she is math-deficient or she thinks her customers are. Either way, she’s not representing herself or our niche very well.

The moral of this story? Consider your message carefully. Assume your customers are bright and treat them with respect. Networking is about relationships. Do you maintain relationships with people who act like you’re an idiot?

I didn’t think so.

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Tags: communication, e-marketing, Relationship building, reputation, sales
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Working On the Go

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

Time management is tough. Believe me, I know. As business owners, we have a lot of demands on our time and not enough hours in the day.

As a result, I hate to waste any time, especially time when I’m out of the house. So I make sure I always have something to do. If someone is running late for an appointment, I don’t fret about the time I spend waiting because I’ve got something productive to do.

What kind of work can you do on the go?

Email is the obvious one. If you have a smart phone, netbook or iPad, you can check your email almost anywhere. It’s possible to burn through a lot of messages in a short period of time if that’s all you’re focused on.

Are you working on a writing project? Again, a netbook or smartphone can keep you writing on the go. I do all my content creation in Evernote. It doesn’t matter where I am. I can always pull out my iPhone and write something. What I work on is automatically backed up, so when I get back to my computer, I can seamlessly pick up where I left off.

What about all those books you intend to read? Have one with you at all times. Then when you have a few minutes between appointments, you can catch up on your reading. I do set reading boundaries. Because almost all of my reading is on my iPhone, I always have both fiction and non-fiction with me. I use my time during working hours to keep up with non-fiction, and I leave the fiction for off hours.

Maybe you’re editing something? You can either print it out and work on it by hand or bring it with you electronically. You can do the same with forms or other paperwork you need to complete. Keep a sample with you at all times.

Those are my suggestions. Anyone else have their on-the-go working ideas to share? Talk about them in the comments. Looking forward to learning more tips.

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Tags: iPhone, task management, time management
Posted in Time and Task Management | 1 Comment »

Evaluating Twitter Followers

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

I had a couple of my clients ask the same question yesterday. They were looking at who to follow on Twitter, and both of them wanted to skip over people who had a very small number of followers. They also both asked about people with protected tweets.

I thought those made good topics to discuss here.

Few Followers

To follow them or not? To decide, look at your Twitter goal. Are you looking for people to promote you? Then they probably won’t be a big help. Are you looking for content to retweet? Again, they probably won’t be much help.

Well then what good are they?

Ah, but are you looking for potential customers or your next raving fan? If so, you might want to take a second look. Remember that having 20 followers today doesn’t mean they will always have 20. Most of us started with a small number that grew over time.

If someone is only following a small number of people, your tweets won’t get lost in a larger stream. Once you are following more than 100 people, its virtually impossible to keep up with every tweet in your stream. You have an opportunity to build a relationship now. Then as they follow more people, you’ll still be someone to pay attention to.

This is particularly important if you are a retail business. People with low followers/following numbers are often real people, not a business or spammer. If their interests coincide with your business services or products, they are excellent potential customers and worthy of following.

I recommend following them back. Build the relationship now and make them raving fans.

Protected Accounts

What about those people with protected tweets? I tell my clients not to worry about them. There’s no harm in them following you. You can’t build a relationship with them easily, but if they read your posts, fine. You probably won’t be able to follow them back, but that’s okay. They aren’t hurting and might eventually help.

Anyone else have something to add?

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Tags: social media
Posted in social media | 5 Comments »

Back From Retreat

Monday, May 17th, 2010

I had an amazing week on retreat and got a lot done. I thought I’d take a little time to write a quick round-up of what I accomplished and report on whether I thought it was worth taking the time away.

I went with three goals: incorporate recent blog posts into my upcoming book, Face to Facebook, work on an ebook on elevator speeches and finish the first story in my upcoming fiction series.

That was the goal. Did I accomplish them? Not quite.

I got about halfway through the work on Face to Facebook. I did the heavy lifting of planning and organizing, so I can finish the rest fairly quickly. I’ve given myself a deadline of the middle of June.

I’m a little less than half finished with the elevator speech ebook. Again, easy enough to finish that as a part of my regular work week.

I didn’t get much writing done on my short story, but I did work my way through a point where I had been stuck for at least a week. I now have the rest of the story planned out, and it should be fairly quick to finish it now. I also have laid some foundations for further stories in the series.

So it doesn’t sound like I accomplished much, does it? Was the trip worth it?

Definitely. Grunt work of adding and editing content is easy for me to do in and around blogging, client meetings and networking. But having time away to do planning and organization was valuable. And I certainly got more done in three days away than I would have here. Without the retreat, I think it would be midsummer before Face to Facebook would be in shape to send to beta readers. Now, I think I can have it there in a month or maybe a bit less.

I had been making no progress on the stuck point in my story. I think I could have gotten unstuck here, but the story is going to be better for the quiet time I had to reflect and work on plot seeds, backstory and other fun stuff.

I do plan to go on retreat again. By staying in my camper, the total cost was less than $200. Very affordable to do once or twice a year.

I’m tentatively planning to go out again in September. This time to work on rewriting an old novel, bringing it into the world I’m creating with the series of short stories.

By the way, I’m going to be looking for beta readers for Face to Facebook in about a month. If you’d like to volunteer, sign up in the comments. All readers will get a signed copy when the book is published. Feel free to email me if you want to know what it will entail. Thanks!

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Tags: writing
Posted in General | 1 Comment »

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