Archive for the ‘Apps and technology’ Category

On March 30, I was one of three panelists providing an overview on social media for Commercial Real Estate Women of Detroit (CREW).  Joining me were Kelli Herman of MICCO Construction and Heather Greene of Neumann Smith.

 This web document contains links to resources we introduced during our presentation.

Kelli’s topic was Facebook business pages and Heather covered Twitter. I spoke on corporate social media policies and blogging.

 Social media policies

There oughta be a policy — There are two kinds of companies in the world: Those that embrace social media and those that avoid it. No matter which one you are, you have to have a social media policy. It should be part of your employee handbook.

In the links document you’ll find two websites to help you. One engages you in a dialog to help you write your policy on the spot. The other links you to the social media policies at nearly 200 companies and organizations.

Social media R U: I believe that every company should embrace social media. You can use it to help employees and customers more easily collaborate with each other and/or to move from a marketing campaign to conversing with your customers.

For example: When I was buying a used car, the salesman at the dealership was blocked from using the Internet. I could compare prices at other dealerships and he couldn’t!  He had to use his smartphone. (That example isn’t necessarily about social media, but it does show how bad communications policies can hurt sales).

Embracing social media must go beyond a policy. It means training, supervising and measuring results. It means you trust your employees to represent you.

 Blogging

People freak out at the idea of blogging.

“I don’t need to tell everybody what I had for breakfast,” they huff.

Don’t think of it as a blog. Think of it as news. This is especially true if you’re in a service business. You’re selling yourself  – your wisdom and creativity. Show it off!

Blogs posts don’t have to be weighty tomes. A couple sentences about a creative solution to a problem will suffice. Repurpose other people’s content. When you see an interesting article in an online publication, write a sentence about why it’s relevant, include a one-sentence quote from it and provide a link to the body of the story.

There are tools that allow your readers to subscribe to your blog posts, but don’t stop there. In the digital marketing world there is no pull; there is only push. Today’s best practice is to send a regular enewsletter with headlines about recent blog posts and links to the full article. This puts control into the hands of your readers, using their time in a respectful way. (In fact, that’s probably how you wound up reading this article: Because you receive MY monthly enewsletter).

But sorry, that’s not enough: You must share, share, share! Remember, this is SOCIAL media. Go beyond Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Use social bookmarking sites to expand the influence of your product, company or brand: Reddit, Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious.

You can start a blog right on one of websites for popular blogging platforms, like WordPress and Blogger.com. There your blog will have a domain like

Douglascommunications.wordpress.com. But why should wordpress get all the credit? You would do better to work with your website manager to integrate the blog into your existing website: Douglasgroup.biz/newsletter. That way your analytics will measure blog traffic along with the site’s other stats. (You do use analytics, don’t you?)

Once again, click here for the list of links on these and other subjects. You’ll also find my updated list of favorite smartphone apps, including the guide to finding all the Angry Birds golden eggs.

Oh, I do love this little feature in MS Office 2010. Instead of enlarging the font in a document or squinting at an email, I just slide the bar to the right to zoom in. It’s in the bottom right of the screen for all Office applications. And of course you knew that in Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox you just need to press Ctrl and the plus sign to zoom in, right?

When you have a redirect virus, every time you click on a search engine result you’ll get sent to another, irrelevant page.  I had one on my previous computer and it was a miserable experience.  Because I use the Chrome browser, I was able to work around the virus by choosing “open link in a new tab” instead of just clicking on it.  In Internet Explorer, though, even “open in a new tab” took me instead to a redirected page.  These viruses are hideously difficult to get rid of.  One of my favorite Web information sources, Komando.com, has posted this extensive article on how to get rid of a redirect virus.  (This despite how I deplore Komando’s practice of spreading long articles over multiple pages to generate links and ad views.)

Put three or more smartphone users together and within minutes they’re comparing apps.  That observation inspired me to lead an App Swap session at the recent Orgpro conference.  Here’s a list of some of the apps I use.  Comment on this post to suggest your own!

• When I turn off the ringer on my phone, I often forget to turn it back on again.  Shush will turn it on after a specified period of time
• What happens if your phone is lost or stolen?  With Wave secure you can shut it off, wipe out all the data or, if it has GPS, locate it.  Lookout performs similarly.
• I’m not quite ready to store my music on the Cloud, or to use up broadband listening.  I store my music on my desktop and sync it with my smartphone using Doubletwist.
• Listen to 50,000 radio stations free with Tune in radio
• The standard Android calendar doesn’t have a traditional calendar view.  That’s why I use Jorte instead.
• Amazon Kindle – Not quite sure how this happened but, in all my school years, I never read any Russian literature.  I’m rectifying that by reading Anna Karenina.  Using the Amazon Kindle app.  It is surprisingly easy to use.  (And who knew that Anna Karenina is just a big old soap opera?)
• There are several apps that turn your camera’s flash LED into a flashlight
• Golfers:  While it doesn’t beat a full-featured golf GPS device, the free Skydroid app gives accurate distances to the front, center and back of the green

I’ve tried over the years to use Outlook to manage my tasks, but never successfully.  I want to be able to organize my tasks by due date, priority and/or client.  I don’t really need to be able to share them with others.  Recently I decided to switch to an independent, web-based task manager.  I started with Wunderlist but it didn’t let me alphabetize by category and the screen display was fussy.  In his entertaining and useful presentation at the 2011 Orgpro conference, Sterling Raphael of Avectra mentioned Remember the Milk and I’m sold.  The display is clean, it lets me categorize and tag tasks and share them if I want.  While, for now, I continue to use Outlook’s calendar and email client, I could integrate Remember the Milk with Google, if I so choose.