On the first day of the Olympics, Dutch speedskater Sven Kramer won a gold medal. He was then asked by a reporter to state his name, country and what he just won. Here’s his response. His response is a great reminder to all in and out of the media to do your homework!
24% of US Small Businesses Now Engaged in Social Media Survey Says
February 18, 2010 By
American small businesses are pushing the limits on new ways to improve efficiency in the prolonged downturn, including a steady increase in social media adoption according to results of a study from the Small Business Success Index™ (SBSI) sponsored by Network Solutions and the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business . The SBSI reports social media adoption by small businesses has doubled from 12 percent to 24 percent in the last year.
The SBSI found that nearly one out of five small business owners are actively using social media in their business. Small businesses are increasingly investing in social media applications, including blogs, Facebook® and LinkedIn® profiles. The biggest expectation small business owners have from social media is expanding external marketing and engagement, including identifying and attracting new customers, building brand awareness and staying engaged with customers. Sixty-one percent of the respondents indicated that they use social media to identify and attract new customers.
photo credit: harrietbarber
“Social media levels the playing field for small businesses by helping them deliver customer service,” says Janet Wagner, director of the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. “Time spent on Twitter®, Facebook® and blogs is an investment in making it easier for small businesses to compete.”
Small business owners use social media to attract new customers:
- 75% surveyed have a company page on a social networking site
- 61% use social media for identifying and attracting new customers
- 57% have built a network through a site like LinkedIn
- 45% expect social media to be profitable in the next twelve months
Small business owners still have concerns with social media:
- 50% of small business social media users say it takes more time than expected
- 17% express that social media gives people a chance to criticize their business on the Internet
- Only 6% feel that social media use has hurt the image of the business more than helped it
To download a copy of the Small Business Success Index and also find out how your business scores on the six key dimensions of small business success, visit www.growsmartbusiness.com.
Has your business adopted social media? What is your company doing? What have been the results so far?
What are the Best Tech Products of 2010?
January 3, 2010 By
photo credit: marcopako
Michael Arrington, founder and co-editor of TechCrunch and the world’s fourth-most-powerful blogger, according to Technorati, has released “2010: My fifth Annual List of the Tech Products I Love and Use Every Day.”
According to Arrington:
This is a simple list of the tech products that are an integral part of my day – work or play. Some have withstood the test of time and I just can’t live without. Others are newcomers that have captured my imagination.
I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them. There are now 24 products on the list.
Arrington writes that TechMeme, Skype and WordPress are the only products that have been on his list for all five years. The entire list of products follows:
- Android
- Animoto
- Apple Magic Mouse
- Foursquare, Loopt, and Gowalla
- Gmail
- Hulu
- Kodak Zi8
- MOG, Pandora and Spotify
- Scribd and Docstoc
- Skitch
- TripIt
- WordPress
- Yammer
- YouTube
What tech products do you love and use everyday?
It’s Good to Back Up, Tips for WordPress Bloggers and Gallery Users
October 20, 2009 By
You’ve heard that. You know it’s true. You may even have done it, or at least think you have done it. This has become an especially important topic for those of us who have a WordPress blog (such as this) or a personally maintained photo gallery, such as Gallery, an open source web based photo album organizer.
photo credit: Nano Taboada
It seems the first thing that’s emphasized is the importance of backing up the systems database. Most packages provide specific instructions for doing that. If you have done that you figure you’re done. After all your blog or gallery is the same thing in your mind as the database. The trick here is that the database is a particular thing used by web systems to enable them to function. It’s not your data your content its data about your data. After you have backed it up you still have not completely backed up your blog or gallery.
Your blog or gallery consists of three things:
- the content (the wise words in your blog or the great shots in your gallery)
- the program package that tells it how to work, and
- the database that describes its structure so it will work
The entire system resides on a web server somewhere. To back up the database you follow instructions explaining how to use mySQL to back it up and download it to your computer where you store it somewhere safe. Now, if anything happens to the system as it resides on the far away web server you would have a copy that can be used to restore the database, but you cannot necessarily rescue the programs nor your content.
To backup the programs and your content that are on the web server you need a FTP capability a package such as FileZilla to download them to your computer where you can store them.
There is one further consideration about backups that goes beyond what is needed to backup a blog or a photo gallery. What about any files that are stored on your computer that you do not want to lose? Have you backed them up onto something that is stored away from where your computer is, so they will be safe in the case something happens to your computer or its location?
In the old days we did not have many of these files so we could store them on floppy disks or later on CDs. They didn’t take up much room and we could keep them at some other location we felt was secure. Now there are many more files and they have become quite large. Furthermore we’d like to back them up frequently and immediately move the backups off site. Two packages that can be used to accomplish this are Mozy and the new S3SystemBackup. One final decision you will need to make if you decide to use such a package is whether and how much to backup backups you have stored on your computer of your blog or your photo gallery.
140 Twitter Conference LA Recap; From Tony Robbins to Dr. Drew to Chris Hardwick
September 26, 2009 By
photo credit: Randy Stewart
After previewing online the two day conference agenda and the speaker roster for the “140 Twitter Conference” in Los Angeles, run by the Parnassus Group, I was hesitant to sign up. Although I really enjoy using Twitter and believe both individuals and businesses of all types can get a lot of benefit from it, the agenda gave me pause to register—it was heavy with a seemingly “entertainment focus”. And my interests primarily center on what I could learn that would best benefit my clients. But I went ahead and registered.
Well, I was very pleasantly surprised. And I was most surprised by Tony Robbins. I really wasn’t looking forward to his day two keynote address. His talk was informative, insightful and yeah—it was pretty motivational. He was supposed to speak from 8:30 am till 10 am. Instead his talk was nearly two and a half hours and he had his audience of 400 business people and Twitter users clapping, jumping, play acting, giving each other massages, and quite mesmerized by his free form talk. He said he was giving the talk for free because he “wanted to give back.”
Robbins views Twitter as an “Intelligent browser that teaches what people say about your brand and is a brief way to connect, share and trigger.” That’s how he says he uses it. Robbins has more than 1.36 million people who follow him on Twitter now—plus one. According to Robbins, “Twitter is the crack of the tech world.”
Other surprises came from the celebrity panel and the musician panel which included a number of power Twitter users including television host Dr. Drew Pinsky, professional skateboarder Tony Hawk, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome, actor Levar Burton, singer Tyrese Gibson, rapper Chamillionaire, musician Mark Nubar, Tears for Fear singer Curt Smith, and comedians Chris Hardwick, Tucker Max and Loni Love. The panelists debated how they used Twitter, what were the right ways to engage their followers, their feelings on letting others “tweet’ for them and whether they should financially benefit directly from the Twitter conversations.
They all agreed that the overriding principle that should be honored on Twitter is “authenticity.” They also agreed to have someone else tweet in your name was dishonest. Chamillionaire talked about how “Twitter can be an active conversation.” He likes to start arguments on his account and enjoys lively debating his followers over who is the best athlete of all time—Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant.
photo credit: Randy Stewart
Curt Smith likes to use Twitter not primarily for pitching his music but for engaging others to talk about politics, his kids and everyday life. Curt is now working on a song with someone that he met on Twitter. What he seems to enjoy most about Twitter is its ability to let him be direct and not have his words translated by a record label or a reporter. Levar Burton mirrored Smith by explaining that for him, “Twitter has created an environment that is absent the gatekeepers ad it has leveled the playing field.”
For Mark Nubar, “Twitter’s elegance lies in its simplicity. I love its 140 characters.” Mark also spoke about his band’s evolution with social media, “MySpace was the gateway to Facebook and now Twitter. We now have a global family. My band would not be alive without social marketing.”
Tony Hawk believes that what he learns from Twitter about his own brand is “the best focus group.” For Mayor Newsome, Twitter marks “the beginning of the end of how things have been done with governing. Twitter is changing the world of government. We want to lead the world. It’s about government 3.0 not just 2.0. ”
What was impressive at the conference, was not the continual updates or “tweet” being noted by the 400 attendees and flashed up on screens, but the eagerness and willingness of the Twitter users –both celebrity and business users– who enthusiastically sang its praises. Instead of quickly escaping once their panels had finished, both celebrity and technology luminaries stayed and sat in the audience to learn more from each other.
The two day conference can be summed up pretty well by Tony Robbins, “Twitter is a community. We are a culture on the surface but we have the tools to go deep. Twitter allows you to understand someone’s blueprint in seconds. Look at what they write and what they share.”