Google Apps for small business IT

Who’s ready to make email fun? Who wants to integrate an easy to use, company-wide web based calendar? Who wants to be able to send, open, and collaborate on any document with their colleagues any time?

Super Barack!

I love the part where his little ears are flapping in the wind as he flys to kick pirate booty. Funny!

Heartbreaking protests in Iran

Neda Sultani is the name of a woman who was shot by the Iranian Militia as she left a peaceful protest with her music teacher in a pro-Democracy gathering in Tehran, Iran on June 20th. She was not politically aligned, she was not violently protesting or confronting police, she was simply an ordinary Iranian. She was shot by snipers and died almost instantly, she was 27. “Neda wanted freedom, freedom for everyone,” said Kaspeen Makan, her fiancee.

Basiji Mil

Check out Wave – the future of communication

Google unveiled Wave at it’s I/O conference in late May. Wave is the mind-blowing multimedia, nonlinear evolution of email. Rather than a static message model that emulates real world mail, Wave works asynchronously and enables group editability. Instead of confusing lengthy email threads, conversations will be much more like talking face to face in that participants exchange information instantly and in a nonlinear format called Wavelengths. It is being developed by Lars and Jens Rasmussen. Who are they? Just the brothers who brought us Google maps! Check out the developer’s demo. It’s lenghty but worth it -  Wave!

Social Media Marketing – What Good Is It?

A client of mine recently asked me if I thought that having FaceBook, MySpace, and LinkedIn pages was “valuable” after they let their profiles at these services languish and finally die. My answer is an emphatic YES! But you get out of these services what you put in.

Think of them as small garden patches. When you set them up you are planting seeds. If you go back and attend to your garden it will thrive. Then if you are having an event or launching a new service or product, you can tell all of your new friends at FaceBook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. about it. You can instantly communicate updates and share links to things you think your network will find valuable. In turn, they will share your information with their networks. You can communicate with an unlimited number of people without spending a penny on postage, or phone service, or printing fancy mailers. If you think about it, the potential is amazing.

Conversely, if you plant your garden but never return to attend to it, you’ll find that it simply dries up and dies. This not only yeilds nothing, it presents a negative image of your organization. Imagine having a dead patch of weeds outside your lobby doors.

The bottom line is that Social media marketing is an unbelievably valuable, absolutely FREE way to promote your organization. All it requires is a bit of consistent attention.

Some things to consider:

1. Create a plan for how your organization will use social media and what you intend to share on those sites.

2. Build your profiles intelligently using a dedicated email address (NOT an individual’s email address). Document when the site was created, by whom, and with what email address, username and password. Make sure that at least two people in your organizatioin have this information. It should be noted that any changes must be communicated to both people.

3. Assign the “gardening” responsibilities to someone who will enjoy it. An overburdened employee is not going to be able to adequately maintain the profile, it needs to be someone with the energy and interest to approach it with freshness and creativity.

4. The ultimate goal of your profile pages is to inspire action. Do you want your viewers to attend an event? Make a donation or purchase? If so, you MUST set up the necessary infrastructure to enable that action. If you have a big “Register Today” button but no online, efficient, fast method to accept online registratons or payments you have just wasted time and energy, and potentially annoyed a future supporter.

5. Use reporting tools such as the Social Media Metrics Plugin for Google Analytics or SociafQ to see how many viewers are visiting your social media profiles and, where possible, what they are doing when they visit.

Those are a few ideas to get you started, I hope it is a helpful overview. Just one example of social media marketing success; Paul Potts went from being a debt-ridden cellphone salesman to an international opera star in a few months. Since then he has sung for the Queen of England, released two top-selling albums and travelled the world many times over. See what he says about how YouTube changed his life.