What is ‘commun.it’?

Its a twitter intelligence tool!

A what?

A twitter intelligence tool!

Remember old school twitter where you went out and auto followed people by keywords, keywords in bios, keywords in tweets?

If they even sneezed your keyword you were on them, of course you followed them and if they didn’t follow back within 12/24/36 hours they got auto unfollowed.

Now this mass churning of followers is something that twitter hierarchy dislike.

Because for them its about the conversation.

Of course the irony of this following and unfollowing was that no-one actually read any, or very few tweets.

It was a case of throwing lots of mud at the wall hoping some of it would stick.

Fast forward to 2012 and ‘commun.it’ allows you to search for people with influence on a specific topic.

Ask yourself – which would you want – 100,000 followers who have no idea who you are or 100 followers who hang on to your every word and pass on your stuff without thinking about it.

I think the answer is obvious.

So you set up ‘commun.it’ and off it goes and scans your network, both near and far, and suggests influencers you may want to talk to

So what is pluggio
Pluggio is first of all web based. This means there is no software to download, no incompatabilities, no “an error has occurred” error messages. Having software on the “wrong” machine” is a thing of the past.

Once you are signed up, just link your twitter account,and away you go!

The pluggio workflow isn’t totally intuitive, although it does have a certain amount of logic to it. There are a stack of “start” tutorial videos to get you going.

Pluggio helps you to be ‘the signal not the noise’ and whereas most twitter software helps you get more followers

(pluggio does this if you want it to by the way)pluggio helps you get more followers by using a two pronged attack – specifically

a. By finding interesting people
b. Tweeting cool stuff

Lets take each in turn.

Finding interesting people.
You can find people who are tweeting certain words and phrases, hashtags and specific locations. You can turn this feature on or off. Once ‘found’, people are not alerted in any way. They are saved (not is a twitter list – Justin assures me that this is coming soon). At the moment, I have around 100 people who pluggio thinks I might want to talk to.

Tweeting cool stuff
With this cool feature you can add an RSS feed, any RSS feed!, and post from it to your twitter stream.

Thinking about it – you can any RSS feed posts and comments from; a blog, from a forum, anything. The logic here is that if you can’t be the source, be the REsource.

One final feature is that you can add tweets to a ‘rolling schedule’- In essence this means you can add tweets to a heap which will then be tweeted at random intervals.

You can add anything onto this queue and give the illusion that you are sat at your desk, when in fact you are nowhere near it!

There are several feature which I don’t use so can’t pass comment on and these include bulk upload of a spreadsheet of tweets, (Of course pluggio gives you the spreadsheet template to download) and I tend not to upload photos to twitter so I can’t comment on this.

All in all, if you want something that is reliable, funky and where the top man answers emails personally, look no further than pluggio.

Anyways, for reader under the age of about 25, the world would work like this at this time of year.

Up to Christmas, prices would be jacked up as high as possible.

Then, as soon as the Christmas period was over – the January sales would start.

And by sale, I mean HUGE slashing discounts. I recall scenes of hysteria in central London stores shown on TV news programs. People pushing each other out of the way to get a handbag or some jeans from a specific manufacturer.

A sort of 20th Century version of an apple, Microsoft or google launch.

So what about our January sale?

We have picked out a series of products that we think fit the January Sale bill exactly.

Over the next few days, we will be unveiling stunning discounts and never to be repeated offers. One blog post a day.

These products will be discontinued and some of them WILL NEVER be available again. They will be defunct, finished, desupported and removed from our inventory.

So what is first up in our January sale?

First up in our January sale is our “Marketing Basics” training course.
If you are a start up or new business, then the marketing basics is for you. Assuming you know nothing about marketing, this online training will walk you through working out what EXACTLY you sell and WHO you want to sell it to. Dealing with the pitfalls of each and helping you to work out the best plan of action to PROPEL YOUR business upwards in 2012.

So to get this SUPERB training (which will NOT be available again) for just £5 – jump over to the marketing basics site.

I read a lot (and I mean a lot of blogs). For someone who has a first wordpress indexed post in 2005, I feel I can talk with some confidence about what to blog about.

Firstly, take a step back and think – before you even write.
What is the purpose of the blog. Is it engagement, is it to get signups to your newsletter or list, is it to show your expertise in a topic.

Once you have this – you can start to construct a plan. (Yes I know thinking and planning are boring but jumping right in is never a good thing).

Once you start writing a blogging plan, bear in mind, one thing the blogging gurus continually bang on about is your “authentic voice.” Writing in corporate speak isn’t for me – I had enough of it in a previous life. So you will find my writing peppered with questions, brackets and generally broken up.

(This has the added benefit of making it easy to skim read).

How does all this help you with what to blog about?
As an aside, many people seem to make the mistake of confusing blogging with selling. If a blog post is a veiled sales piece (or even an unveiled one) – it leaves the reader very little scope for doing anything meaningful.

For a sales blog post, all you will ever get comment wise is
1. Great blog post (Difficult to distinguish these from spam comments – reap what you sow and all that).
2. People complaining they have used your product or service and it was lousy.

Neither very good if you blog goal is engagement.

So, what’s the £63,000 answer
Take ideas from this list (assuming you have a business blog related to your expertise..)
Product reviews
Book reviews – You do read don’t you?
TV programs (No – the ones RELATED to your expertise)
Industry events, conferences and exhibitions you attend.
What YOU personally think about news or current affairs and how they affect your industry. (Maybe you want to be controversial, maybe you don’t?)
Things you did recently – No not what you had for lunch – more interesting stuff. Did you see something unusual or strange related to your industry.

But what are your options for designing the site?

Get someone else – a pro designer to do it for you?

But that costs money…

Get a friend or relation

Sorry I meant a wannabe web designer.

Here’s the thing – If you are paying no money, you can’t really insist on what you want.

You do it yourself

Now we are talking – but you don’t know anything about webdesign – or more importantly – layout & presentation. You don’t know your divs from your alts.

FREE TRAINING

What if we said that we wanted to GIVE AWAY our “what not to do with wordpress” training to one lucky person.

Easy to enter contest

No hunting around the web – no wild goose chases – just 3 simple steps

1. Like us on facebook

2. Send a tweet (using the oauth system so we don’t get to see your password)

3. Leave a comment below – as short or as long as you like – but there may be a bonus prize or two for the best comments.

That’s it

Winner picked at random

I was talking to a couple of people recently about elearning and was explaining that we prefer the words ‘online training’

Why?
Elearning conjures up all sorts of images and means many things to different people. Different people have different elearning definitions.

One of the people I spoke to – her elearning definition was “comic sans” fonts and cheesy clipart images.

Another said they couldn’t get past the idea of an American styled
‘smile training’.

So what are the various Elearning definitions ?

Listening to a ‘podcast’ is elearning and that is seen as sexy and sophisticated but..

Watching a ‘Youtube’ video (depending on the content) is also elearning but is seen as a waste of time by many. Youtube does contain videos of dogs on skateboards for instance. It does also have some pretty heavyweight academic and other videos. The “TED” series for instance.

It all comes down to – definitions – when you ‘pays ya money’ you ‘takes ya choice’

As soon as you say “elearning” to someone – be they prospective client or someone at a networking event, they put on the definition they have in their head and play the record.

It’s a hard job once people have pre-conceived notions in their heads to change them.

But what about the tech heads?

In the technical community, their elearning definition is which LMS (learning management system) the learning uses. Scorm 1.2 or Scorm 2004 which flash player version, mobile compatible etc etc.

For them – the technology is the ruling factor.

Although using the phrase “Online training” is fraught with danger.

Almost without exception, people these days want knowledge but don’t want to do anything and sometimes nothing at all, about acquiring it.

The words ‘training’ and ‘learning’ imply that you will have to spend some time taking action.

However – Online training is what we do and our definition of learning is clear.

What the Corporate’s Know about Training That Small Businesses Don’t.

We’re busier than ever and the economy is in a downturn.  The initial reaction is to cut spending and refrain from any unnecessary expenses.  Many businesses view training as an expense, but the Corporate’s know this is not the case

Large corporate organisations measure the results of training spend and they know that for every dollar they spend on training there is a direct impact on profit.

Just take a few moments to consider these results:

Higher Profits

• The Cheesecake Factory, one of the most successful restaurant chains in the U.S., spends about $2,000 per employee for training each year and reaps sales of $1,000 per square foot—more than twice the industry average, and they have an employee retention rate of approximately 15% higher than the national average.

• Based on the training investments of 575 companies over a three-year period, researchers found that firms investing the most in training yielded a 36.9 percent total shareholder return as compared with the 25.5 percent weighted return for the S&P 500 index for the same period. 1

• Just a 2 percent increase in productivity has been shown to net a 100 percent return on investment in training. ²

Lower Employee Turnover

• Career development is the No. 1 factor in employee retention. ³
• According to a study by Louis Harris & Associates for Interim Services Inc., companies that fail to train their employees are more than three times as likely to lose them.

• In an AON survey, respondents ranked “opportunities for personal growth” as the main reason they took their current job and stayed in that job. Significantly, they ranked it ahead of salary.

Cost Reductions, Increased Productivity and Quality

• Motorola calculated that every dollar spent on training yields an approximate 30 percent gain in productivity within a three-year period. Motorola also used training to reduce costs by over $3 billion and increase profits by 47 percent. ⁴

• The less time and money you have to spend on monitoring and guiding employees, the more you have available for other activities.

• Training improves customer satisfaction. Better-quality work means better-quality products and services . . . resulting in happier customers.

Training improves a company’s competitive edge.

• Keeping up to date keeps you competitive.

• According to Nobel Laureate Gary Becker, professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago, “Any company has to recognize that not only is the human capital of their employees a major asset, it is also a depreciating asset that needs continuing investment.”

That’s not to say that any training is good training. It’s important that the training undertaken is in line with your business plan objectives, whether they be to increase productivity, cut costs, or improve customer service to name a few.

One area small business can benefit greatly from training is with Microsoft Office products since they can be used to streamline processes, improve communication and increase productivity.

With the vast majority of Microsoft Office users having never had any formal training it’s an easy area to gain some quick productivity improvements, and with the introduction of online training what was once only available to those with big budgets is now available to all at a fraction of the cost and inconvenience.

As far as “buying” it – you don’t actually buy it. You effectively lease the rights for sole use for a specific period. If you don’t pay the renewal fee – the domain will “drop” (watch for a future article) and the website and email attached to it will stop working.

Remember, some domains are valuable and it is worth paying for more than one year and making a note of when it expires – so you don’t lose it.

It is obviously a vital choice. Something you need to get right – so which domain to buy?

If you are a solo professional or 1 person business, you should always register your own name .com and preferably .net. If you are outside the US, get the country top level domain also. So in the UK – this would be .co.uk

Registering your own name will stop so called “cyber squatters” putting up site and asking you for a lot of money to buy it off them.

If you head a small business, think about registering your business name as follows.

1. Remember the “phone test” – Think about how you would explain your website or email over the phone. (Maybe to someone who doesn’t speak english as a native language). As a rule of thumb, if you think you are likely to run into trouble… You will…

2. Don’t worry about hyphens. There are theories that they are not liked by search engines. But as few people are party to what search engines like and don’t like, you can think of hyphens to just break up words.

3. Be careful what words you put together which normally have a space in between them. These can make the domain harder to remember and pronounce. Not what you want.

4. The shorter the better, As a general rule – short is easy to brand and fit round a logo. If possible under 10 characters.

5. Think about who you chose as your registrar. All companies offering domain registration should be registered with ICANN. But if you ever want to sell the domain, if it is not registered with one of the main players, your chances of selling it are likely to be less.
Also, some registrars will offer you cheap first year and then be more expensive afterwards. Think strategically as to how long you intend to keep the domain for.

6. You don’t have to get your hosting from the same place as your domain. Registrars will often give you a cheap domain but make up the shortfall on hosting. Don’t be taken in, again be strategic in your thinking.