Archive for Web/Tech

What’s In Your Digital Toolbox?

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

small business marketing toolkitWe all have our favorite tools for saving time and collaborating with others. Here are 5 applications that I use every day – what’s in your toolbox?

Buffer App – Gives you a buffer to add items that you want to share with others via Twitter and/or Facebook. You add things to your buffer as you find them, and then the app distributes them throughout the day according to a predefined schedule that you can customize.

Evernote – a notebook(s) on steroids, Evernote allows you to capture anything you want to remember and quickly retrieve it on any device.

Dropbox – is just about the easiest way to share and collaborate on files that I have found. It is also a great way to share files across different computers and devices. For example, you can access your Dropbox files from the office, your home computer, iPad, smartphone, or any web browser.

Workflowy – is like having the world’s biggest piece of paper to keep track of all of your projects and to-do’s. It’s so simple, it’s hard to believe how powerful it is. Check out the video on their homepage.

Clearly – from the makers of Evernote, Clearly makes it easier to read and print web pages by removing everything except the article or blog post that you want to read.

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Categories : Web/Tech

RTBot helps you find fresh information, fast

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

RTBot_logoAs the amount of information available to us continues to grow, it can be difficult to find what we want, when we want it. Luckily, clever people will continue to create new tools to help us find, sift, sort, consume, and share this information.

This morning I had a note in my inbox informing me about a tool call RTBot (Real Time roBOT). RTBot allows you to enter a topic title and instantly get related content from multiple sources.

I decided to test it out by searching for “duct tape marketing”. Here is a screen shot of the results (click on the image to enlarge):

duct tape marketing search results in rtbot

As you can see, RTBot retrieved relevant videos YouTube. In addition to videos, RTBot returned:

  • Articles from Wikipedia
  • Images
  • Twitter messages
  • News stories
  • Documents (mainly pdf files in this case)
  • Blogs and
  • Weblinks

According to their website:

RTBot aims to simplify the access to information and content stored in different sites, reducing the time it takes to find relevant and fresh information on the internet.

  • Access the freshest information and multimedia content about almost any subject, person, place or event in one single place.
  • Complete research tasks quickly and easily.
  • Get a multi-perspective vision and real-time context for every topic.
  • Eliminate the need to visit different online resurces separately.
  • Obtain new information each day – even if you are looking at the same article.
  • Visualize multimedia and social-media content related to every topic.
  • Embrace a didactic, intuitive, holistic approach to learning.
  • Discover new, relevant content about your favorite topics and interests.
  • RTBot offers a fun and engaging learning experience.
  • Topics research is moving from being “stateless” to being very much in the here and now

I particularly like the 3 item – providing real-time context for a topic.

Their website also states:

RTBot provides content only for specific topics such as concepts, subjects, personalities, events, places, companies, products, etc., but not for broader, unspecific searches.

I haven’t had enough time to play with it yet to know how limiting that will be. I suspect I would still turn to Google for broad searches and use RTBot for either doing research or checking for “latest news”.

RTBot may also prove to be a good tool for small business marketers to get an overall view of their web presence from the point of view of their prospects and customers. Everyone has their preferred place to look for information and learn about solutions – will they find you where they are looking?

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Categories : Web/Tech

This presentation from Web 2.0 Summit by Kirk Skaugen of Intel, contains some incredible stastics about the amount of data being transmitted via the internet – and it’s only going to continue to grow. Learn what Intel intends to do about handling “Big Data”.

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Categories : Web/Tech

Seeing Spam with Yahoo! Mail Visualization

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

Yahoo! recently released the Yahoo! Mail Visualization tool. The tool shows how Yahoo! routes billions of emails every day. It also gives us some insight into how they filter spam.

Here is a quick screen shot of the Mail Visualization map (click on the image for a larger version)

yahooVisualize

Click on an area of the map zoom in and provide you with additional data of emails in that area.

Clicking on the green “Trending Keywords” box on the left will show you the top keywords in email subject lines for the geographic area you have selected. The “Reveal Blocked Spam” green button on the bottom gives you an idea of how much spam is being blocked. For example, this morning 4 spam messages are being blocked for every good email that is delivered.

You will also notice that when you click on the Reveal Blocked Spam, you can also see the spam keywords show up in the trending graph as well as the word cloud. The spam words are color coded gray.

keywords

Spend a little time with this tool and you may be surprised to find that many words that people have told you are spam triggers (like “Free”) show up as “Good” keywords in the visualization tool.

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Categories : Marketing, Web/Tech

What Type of Salesperson Is Your Website?

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

You may have heard people refer to a website as being a “virtual salesperson” or a “24 hour salesperson”. As you know, salespeople come in all shapes and sizes – what type of salesperson is your website?

The Brochure Distributor – Most websites start as the equivalent of an online brochure. They may provide valuable information, but are hard to find via the search engines, so people have to know about them before they visit. If this type of website were a salesperson, they would be order takers – only making sales when someone asks to buy.

The Networker – At this level, your website it becoming more visible. Like the salesperson who consistently shows up at local networking events, your website appears in relevant search results. It also starts to get referrals; links from other sites and social media discussions.

The Nurturer – Successful salespeople work to stay “top of mind”. Some sales people stay in touch by sending the same information to everyone (i.e. a newsletter). The more successful ones stay in contact by providing information that is relevant to the prospects’ needs and/or preference – the equivalent of segmenting your list and tailoring your message to each segment.

The Sales Pro – a professional salesperson takes things to the next level by using their observational skills to adjust the conversation based on a prospect’s responses, as well as their body language and other clues. When combined with marketing automation software, your website can detect your visitors’ digital body language and help you respond accordingly. This type of intelligence helps you determine which prospects are “sales ready” and which still need nurturing.

Which type of salesperson is your website? If your website were a salesperson, would you give it a raise or fire it?

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Share Your Google+ Circles

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Google recently announced they have added the ability to share circles.

A new “Share” link now appears when you hover over a circle on the Google+ Circles page. Clicking the link will let you add a comment and then share that circle with your friends on Google+.

Two things to note – 1) this only shares the members of the circle are shared, not what you’ve named the circle and 2) only the current members of the circle are shared. If you had new members to a circle, you will have to share the circle again.

Here is a short video from one of the engineers on the Google+ team showing how to share your circles

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Categories : Web/Tech

Google Maps Now Includes Weather

Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

Google recently partnered with the folks at weather.com added weather information to their maps application (http://maps.google.com), making it dead simple to quickly get weather information.

Google uses a new layer to display weather information. Even if you don’t call them that, you are probably familiar with layers – have you played with the satellite or terrain views of Google Maps? Those are layers. If you hold you mouse over the satellite box at the top right corner of the map, you will see a drop down menu like the one below:

Google_Map_Layers

Clicking on the Weather item will toggle the weather layer on and off. When it is on, you will see weather icons on your map, as well as some information from nearby cities. Here is my local weather map this morning:

(click the image for a larger view)

GM_Cities

You can also click on any of the weather icons on the map do get a mini 5 day forecast for that area:

weather_detail

For a more detailed forecast, click on any of the blue links you see in the pop up window to be taken to the weather.com site.

How could you use this for marketing? Maps with the weather layer cannot be embedded in your website, at least not now. However, you can email a link that, when clicked, will pull up the map with the weather layer enabled. This could be a nice tool to use for your business if the weather effects your customer experience – for example, if you own a bed and breakfast or are an event planner, letting you customers know what to expect from the weather before they pack for their trip can be a nice touch.

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Using Dropbox for Collaboration

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

dropBoxLogo

Dropbox is an easy-to-use, cloud-based file backup and sharing system. There are many ways to use Dropbox; as a marketing consultant, I like to use it to share files and collaborate with my customers and strategic partners. Dropbox is so effective and dead simple to use it is one of the primary tools we use in our Managed Marketing engagements.

Dropbox gives you access to your files anywhere. It works with Windows, Mac, Linux, iPad, iPhone, Android, and Blackberry. You can access your files from the Dropbox website. For collaboration work with my customers, I like us both to have the optional software installed on our machines.

Once you install the software, you will have a local Dropbox folder that behaves the same as any other folder, but it will automatically synch any files and folders inside it with your online account.  You can share folders with specific people (just enter their email addresses). You can also share files in your Public folder with anyone – but for team work, you will most likely share folders with a limited number of people. Files in your Public folder can be accessed by anyone who has the URL.

The reason I like Dropbox as a collaboration tool is its simplicity. Once you have your shared folders set up, then everyone just works on files the way they normally do. They don’t have to check files out. They don’t have to go through a download-edit-upload cycle. You don’t have to be connected to the internet (your changes will synch the next time you go online).

If you have a standard set of folders and files that you use for every project, Dropbox makes it super easy to set up a new project. Simply create a new folder, copy and past the files and\or folders from your “template” project into your new folder, share it with your customer and you’re done.

During synchronization, Dropbox only transfers the parts of the file(s) that changed, so it’s very fast.

Dropbox has a free account that provides 2GB of storage space. Paid accounts provide more storage space. You can also earn additional free space through referrals. For example, if you sign up for Dropbox with this link, you and I would both earn 250 MB of bonus space (up to a limit of 8 GB).

Dropbox isn’t meant to be a full blown project management tool, but for it certainly makes sharing project related files dead simple. Include a spreadsheet listing tasks, due dates, and people responsible and it may be all you need for many projects.

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Google’s Me on the Web

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

As use of social media and the web continues to grow, it is becoming increasingly important to manage your online reputation, including monitoring what is being said about you on the web. Many people have used Google Alerts for this task. Google recently made it easier to set up these type of alerts with the introduction of their “Me on the Web“. It may take you longer to find how to access this new tool than it will to use it, so I thought I’d provide a quick walk through.

Start by going to your Google account -

https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount

Once there, in the Personal Settings area (to the right of your photo), click on the View data stored with this account link

 

This will bring you to your dashboard. The second section down is the new “Me on the Web” section.

The left hand column shows you links from your Google profile. The right column contains links to information on how to control what third-party information is posted about you on the web. The top link (marked by the arrow) is a link to help quickly set up a Google alert that will notify you when someone posts your name or email address(es) on the web.

If you haven’t already set up Google Alerts for you name, I recommend checking out this new tool as an easy way to get started.

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Categories : Misc., Web/Tech

Google Adds Voice Recognition to Desktop Search

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

You’ve been able to search Google via voice on your smartphone for a while – now Google is bringing voice recognition to your desktop search as well.

You have to use the latest version of Chrome to take advantage of this feature. It will take a number of days for Google to roll this out to everyone, so it may be a while before you start seeing the little microphone in your Google search box. When you do see the microphone, just click on it and speak your search request.

Below is a short video from Google that not only shows voice recognition in action, but may also provide some search tips that you haven’t had a chance to use yet, like searching for flights.

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Categories : Web/Tech