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Time to Get Your GoMo On. Improve Your Mobile Presence

By on November 2, 2011 in Cool Tools, Marketing, Mobile & Local with 0 Comments

If your site isn’t mobile friendly, you’re losing business. And it’s going to get worse unless you get better. Time to get your GoMo on with the help of Google’s new mobile initiative:

There’s a free test of your current site with GoMo Meter. The GoMo Meter will display how your site looks on a mobile device. With four different types of business purposes to choose from, go through the simple handful of test questions and let Google help determine your Mobile-ity score.

Time to test your site today.

Aside: ConverStations received a 4 out of 4 (thanks to WPTouch plugin)
Wishlist: WPTouch Pro for the holidays:-)

Why I Nominated Triberr on Mashable (Even Though I Don’t Use Triberr)

By on October 28, 2011 in Blog Coach, Cool Tools, Social Media with 2 Comments

Mashable Awards

The first time I recognized the wide-spread use of Triberr, I was a bit annoyed. In my Twitter stream one early morning, 4 of 5 consecutive tweets were RTs of the same tweet. Word-for-word. Verbatim. By clicking on the time-stamp, I saw that each of the four were using Triberr.

I had kept up a bit on the back-and-forth on whether Triberr was a noise generator or clique, but I didn’t pay much mind because it hadn’t bothered my signal-to-noise filter. But that 4-out-of-5 thing.

So I visited the site and immediately saw many familiar faces. People I either follow or list on Twitter, and many of whom I subscribe to their blog. Credibility gained.

I clicked through a couple of the categories I have interest in. Like Hollywood Squares, a box for each person offering a headline, snippet, and link to their latest blog post. Signal delivered.

But wait, what about the noise? The automation? Two things:

  • Repetition helps the learning. Do you click on that video the first 3 or 4 times you see it? Right. I’m not watching Twitter streams all day, so Triberrs actually help me in finding signals
  • There are many who use Triberr that don’t automate (Kristi Hines shares a great practice for using Triberr)

Triberr isn’t just a join and you’re in. It’s by invitation only, though here are a few ideas on how to get an invite.

So how does one gain value from Triberr if you’re not in a tribe? A couple of ways (Full disclosure: I’m not a member of Triberr):

  • Connect: Especially if you are new to blogging or on Twitter, browsing through the categories and blogs allow you to find top-notch folks in your category of interest. Remember, these tribes are by invite only. That means everyone in that tribe has given each other a thumbs up on quality.
  • Research: If you’re writing about something outside of your normal comfort zone (e.g., for me it might be Fashion or Photography), a run-through the category listings will give you ideas and potential sites to link to in your piece.
  • Other ways are to find other Twitters that are “triberred” with someone you already follow, or simply study headlines and get ideas to burst through your writing block.

I still shake my head sometimes when I see 3 or 4 tweets bang-bang verbatim, but it’s not that often. And if it’s spreading a good article (and they usually are), it’s worth the minimal repetition.

The folks I know that use Tribber love it (Many say it allows them to engage in more and deeper conversations). And now you’ve heard from the other side of use.

While I am not a Tribber, I’m a fan and active reader.

Here’s how you can vote for Triberr to win a Mashable Award this year.

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Kindle Pages Provide Crowdsourced Quotes & Highlights

By on October 7, 2011 in Blog Coach, Cool Tools, Quotes n Notes with 0 Comments

Are you looking for a great quote to punctuate your blog post, or perhaps to motivate your Twitter stream?

I sent this to Twitter this morning. A quote from Dan Pink’s book, Free Agent Nation

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Having both the print and Kindle edition, I’m pretty familiar with the book – but I grabbed this quote from a source not many are familiar with: Kindle Pages

Amazon Kindle book pages are a resource rich with what readers resonate with. Kindle readers can “highlight” phrases and quotes from a book that gets stored in their own Kindle Highlights page

In addition, Amazon also stores the collected highlights on the book page (Kindle Edition) right below the reviews. Here’s the Kindle page for Free Agent Nation. Can you see the Kindle highlights under the reviews?

So, if these highlights resonate with those that have already read the book, chances are likely it will resonate with those in your readership who haven’t yet read the book.

If you’re looking for a writing prompt or a Twitter quote – check out the Kindle pages.

 

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Pinterest: A Place to Let Your (Business) Hair Down

By on October 4, 2011 in Conversations, Cool Tools, Social Media with 0 Comments

Bookshelves. DVD or Music Collections. For some, the medicine cabinet (huh?)

They’re among some of the first things we look at when we visit someone’s house for the first time. Commonalities is what folks are looking for when they take a gander or stare at your collections.

It might be one reason Pinterest is growing so quickly. We’re all looking for connections and commonalities. So what does this have to do with business? A lot.

People might start doing business with a business, but we stick to doing business with people (and the people of a business). So, using a service like Pinterest is one way to show off who you are and some of your non-business likes and dislikes (and just be you!).

I’m a lover of books (bound and electronic) — I love to read. And my favorite leisure activity is a good book in front of a crackling fireplace.  Especially if I have a few Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwiches at hand. Add a soundtrack by Hans Zimmer . . . I’m in a wonderful place.

A great thing about my Pinterest is the ease of use.  A couple of clicks to surf, find, and pin a picture. The mobile apps make it ever so easy. Update: I just found a cool Chrome extension making “pinning” to Pinterest a one-click stop: Pinterest Right Click. Easy!

One thing that would make Pinterest even cooler is to be able to “embed” a board into a blog post or website.

I’ve been connecting with friends in new ways and strangers become friends quickly.

How are you finding/connecting with new people?

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Klout Topic Pages: Small Business Can Connect and Curate

By on September 23, 2011 in Blog Coach, Cool Tools, Marketing with 0 Comments

While there’s plenty of debate about the Klout scoring (gauging) system, there’s no question that finding new connections and new content is made easy by touring Klout’s new Topic Pages (now available to everyone).

In the case of the owner of a small diner (she’ll call it a delicatessen), she pays the bills with her lunch business – but her passion and draw is from her fantabulous cheesecakes. And that’s what she wants to be known for. Cheesecake.

Taking a tour of Twitter and Klout, we find some tasty tactics:

Klout Browser plugin:

The Klout Browser extension (Chrome | Firefox) allows us to easily toggle between Twitter and Klout. See, it’s not so much looking at the “score” and making a determination, but this allows us to quickly get to that Twitter user’s Klout page and “dive deeper” into connection and content possibilities.

Klout Topic Pages:

Once we get to Klout, we find on TOPICS on the left menu. This allows us to see the TOPICS a particular user is talking most about (and most recently) in their social circles. We find the TOPIC relevant to what we’re looking for and click on that. The result is the page to the right (click to enlarge).

Not only can we find a list of “influentials” on the topic of cheesecase, but we can see some of their “fans” as well. We can dive deep into each users social content as well, providing they’ve linked their other social services to Klout.

If we’re looking for connections and content (our own meaning making for our own business), the Klout “score” is more of a secondary guide rather than the elephant sitting in the judgment chair.

Remember the toggle: You can click right into a person’s Twitter or Facebook (or whatever) right from any of these Klout pages.

Make a Twitter List:

Make a Twitter List (private or public) of all the new “cheesecakers” you find so you’ll have a stream of content and connectivity at your beckon call. Here’s a great HOW TO make a Twitter List lesson.

Making the list allow you to share great content with your customers (who love cheesecake!), especially if we keep our 70-20-10 content sharing guide in mind. Doing this also creates a Professional Learning Community of your own, connecting with other awesome cheesecakers that are around the globe.

Your Own Klout: You can also use Klout topic pages to gauge your own content production. As I write this, Klout says one of my “topics” is weddings. I can see that – this summer I got married in a very social way, my sister-in law got married (with lots of Facebook photos), and I’ve written about marriage on several social channels.

Here’s the heads-up: If you’re a plumber in New Jersey wanting to be known for your trade, produce content towards that end. If you want to be known for your expertise about the Mets, Law & Order: SVU, and Wrestling – that’s up to you. But if so, don’t say “social media didn’t work for my business.”

Bottom line:  Although much discussion might be swirling around the Klout scoring system, let those pundits cook up their thing, you stick to using Klout in manner that tastes good to you and your business.

How do you use Klout to build your business?

 

 

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Talknology: Life is Like a Pecan Braid [Fotobabble]

By on September 17, 2011 in Cool Tools with 0 Comments

I’ve found another cool tool for content creation: Fotobabble

This could be a good way for a small business, teacher, or consultant to take a snapshot, do a voice over, and embed it into a post. Simple!

Here’s a recent fotobabble I did on a simple philosophy I like to bite into daily:

Content Curation: Testing Keepstream for Twitter

By on September 16, 2011 in Blog Coach, Cool Tools with 0 Comments

Update: I hadn’t seen this, but apparently KeepStream is closing at the end of the month. Too bad – I liked the ability to embed full streams.  Anyone know of another tool?

I found a new tool worth experimenting with called Keepstream. The tool seems to allow me to “bundle” tweets – either from the regular stream, those I follow, or various lists. Or, best yet (?) my own stream of tweets.

I will like that last one, because I can choose from the best and share here. Maybe I’ll do so weekly, maybe daily. But first let’s see if I can embed this into a post. If it doesn’t work, here’s my bundle for yesterday (09/15/11).

 

Thanks to SloDive (and Leo – you rock!) for tipping me off on this content curation tool.

Here’s a video Keepstream tutorial:

 

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Candidio Video: Shoot. Edit. Share. Simple SmallBiz Solution

By on September 8, 2011 in Blog Coach, Cool Tools, Marketing, Video with 2 Comments

It’s amazing what kind of nuggets you can find in footnotes.

This morning I was scanning through the RSS feeds I read and came across this video with Jay Baer and David Meerman Scott, thinking I could have it run in the background so I could listen while I work (BTW, the conversation between Jay and David is one you should watch too).

What really caught my eye is the note Jay shares about Candidio, a super-simple video editing service. Jay writes:

“Video production, editing, titling by my friends at Candidio. If you need your raw video footage tidied up good, fast, reasonably priced, they are the guys.”

Now Jay has built up a lot of trust in the social business/content marketing space. I respect what he says and shares, so his line about Candido helped guide my next step — a visit to the Candidio site, where I saw this video:

The text on Candidio’s site says a lot with few words:

“You shoot. We edit. You share.  Produce quality videos for a 1oth of the cost.”

When it comes to videos, small and rural businesses are concerned about both quality and cost. Candidio looks like they have answers to both and I can’t wait to recommend them to a few folks.

Thanks for the tip, Jay!

 

Cool Tool: Buffer App Saves Time with a Single Click

By on September 1, 2011 in Blog Coach, Cool Tools, Social Media with 4 Comments

For a long time, I’ve taught the infosumption path as Skim, Scan, Save and Share. Until now.

Buffer App is changing the way I consume and share information.

One of the headaches BufferApp solves is what I call (probably you too) “Twitter Noise” where Susie Celebrity (who has 12K followers) tweets something and 100 people immediately re-tweet her.

It might be better for all concerned if there could be some distance between all those retweets. It’s one reason I suggested to folks that we favorite a tweet, then RT it later (or schedule it via HootSuite).

BufferApp changes that – one click from anywhere: Twitter. Google Reader. My browser. Facebook soon!

On Twitter: Just hover over the tweet you want to “buffer” and the BufferApp icon appears. A single click:

You can then schedule it or tweet it right now. And you can edit the tweet to add your 2 cents:

You can do this from any screen or stream on Twitter.

On Google Reader: It gets better. I spend a lot of time in Google Reader reading RSS feeds. Again, a single-click:

If you’ve never used the “Send-To” feature on Google Reader, setting it up is simple.

With a Share Button: If you look to the left of this article on my site, you’ll see I’ve set up a “Share on Buffer” button. Simple.

In your browser: Buffer has goodies for any browser (in Chrome it appears as an extensions at top-right, in Firefox see the bottom-right corner of browser). You can tweet a web page, or you can highlight a quote from a page and tweet the quote.

From your Mobile: There’s an Android app and a way to send to buffer from an iPhone.

On Facebook: I don’t know, because it’s not out yet – but I’ve signed up for the BufferApp/Facebook  beta when it comes out.

There’s a few short steps to get your times up (the free version allows you to have 10 updates in the queue at once – you pick the times in advance). I’ve just upgraded to the pro version (50 in the queue, multiple accounts) so I can also buffer tweets from SansoneSpot.

There is a bit of buzz going on with BufferApp, so don’t just take my word for it:

Here’s a video from Buffer to give you a bit more:

If you like this piece, buffer it, hmm?

Infographics: Love ‘em or Hate ‘em?

By on August 31, 2011 in Cool Tools, Marketing with 8 Comments

Infographics have been the rage for awhile now. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they are everywhere. I’m sure many still are asking “What’s an infographic?”

These things are part eye candy, part data crunch – data visualization.

Here’s a quick video from Visual.ly on the future of infographics

Many are embedding full infographics on their sites. Personally, I would like to see the data listed below the graphic , or at least a click away. I don’t always have time to sift through the images, though I may go back-and-forth to navigate the mapping of information. Some infographic vendors offer the data if you request by email.

Here’s a good infographic on Twitter usage:

Infographic: Meet the Tweeters
Infographic by: Column Five Media

I’ve started saving infographics in a Delicious folder, and I’m thinking of adding a page or category here for ones I find resonating or relevant.

Alltop has its own Infographic section, a great place to find and follow the latest releases of visual data.

Here are a few tools and resources in making an infographic for your own project or business:

How about you? Are you a fan of infographics? Do you design them? Have you outsourced to get one done?

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