Social media is the new marketplace where businesses connect with clients. If you’re not using social media, you run the risk of being left behind. "But what do I say?" is the question most commonly asked. Think of social media as one big room. While the medium is different, the same basic networking and presentation techniques apply.

Know your customer. Who are your target customers? Where do they "hang out"? Which social networks do they visit? What are their problems or challenges? What do you want your customers to do? Buy a product? Learn something? Perform a certain action? Ask yourself these types of questions to know your customer well.

Listen up! Before your company can have effective conversations in social media, you need to know what customers are saying. It's easy to set up tools to monitor conversations, but the tricky part is choosing keywords that yield the best results. One social media monitoring tool is Social Media Firehose, which allows you to track brand or product mentions on social media sites such as Facebook, myspace, flickr, twitter, friendfeed, digg, etc.

Don't mix business and pleasure. Present yourself professionally. Include a professional looking photograph and explain what you offer. Remember the basics: no typos, no foul or offensive language, and no hype. In all social contexts, there is a time and place for everything. What you say on your personal profile may not be appropriate for your business profile. I have separate profiles. Facebook is my "playground" where I socialize with friends. LinkedIn is my "office" where I network with clients and conduct business. Clients are not interested in your personal life. They have a business need or problem, and peruse your profile to decide whether you can meet their need or solve their problem.

Participate. Don't just "sit" there. You wouldn't sit around and expect to meet people at an in-person networking event. You would approach a person or group, and participate in the conversation at the right moment. It works the same way in social media. Participate by asking questions, posting an article or blog, sharing information, or answering a question. Clients will see you as an expert, and soon come "knocking on your door".

Watch other people. If you're not sure how to present yourself, look at other profiles. When you see a
profile you like, emulate them; but don't copy them word for word. Ask your colleagues for advice and feedback.

Reach out and "touch". Reconnect with colleagues or classmates and tell them you're expanding your client base. Don't be afraid to connect with people you don't know. Do your due diligence by carefully checking their profile for professionalism. If you like what you see, connect with them! It's a small world, and you may be only one degree of connection away from meeting the next client.

Tell nothing but the truth. Don't lie or exaggerate your expertise. You'll soon be caught and quickly gain a bad reputation. One click on the mouse and bad news goes viral almost instantaneously. So, be careful. Don't leave out important information. Tell the complete story so clients can understand clearly what you offer.

Don't share too much personal information. Think of your business profile like a brochure. You can include a picture of yourself and a business description. Provide the same information as you would on a brochure. Don't divulge personal information such as your home address, nationality, date of birth, etc. You won't include that in a brochure, so why include that on your business profile?

Jazz up your profile. Give presentations, write blogs, and launch webinars, videos or podcasts. Share interesting and useful information. The best type is "how to" information that explains how to do something or solve a problem. Clients are hungry for information and like quick solutions. Present your business as a solution provider, rather than just a business looking for clients. 

These are some lessons I learned in my social media travels.

How have you used social media for your business? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Effective marketing is of paramount importance especially in today's marketplace. The concept of KYC, know your customer, is very important as well. You need to study your customer like a scientist who studies a specimen under a microscope and ask the who, what, when, where and why questions:

• Who is your customer?
• What makes them tick?
• When is the best time to reach them?
• Where do they "hang out"?
• Why would they buy your product?

By understanding your customer, you can target your communication and marketing much more effectively.

Social media is becoming the new platform where business can become visible to their customers. You no longer need to spend vast amounts of money on fancy advertising and slick brochures. You can communicate to your customers through your blog, podcast, online news sites, and even by posting on other businesses' blogs.

I believe that social media will revolutionize how you market your business. Why?

• It is much easier to produce content using social media tools such as blogs, podcasts, webinars etc. than traditional tools since there is practically no learning curve. I had my blog up and running in minutes!
• Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn allow you to network with your current and prospective clients. These tools are very useful to me as a business owner. You'd be surprised how many people I connected with on LinkedIn. I use to have only 15 connections but now I have almost 100! Some people believe that social networking sites are impersonal, but I don't agree. I network just as effectively with people on LinkedIn as in person. 
• You can educate your current and prospective clients about your products by hosting webinars, podcasts, and telephone seminars. Some business owners even post presentations on YouTube to reach many prospective clients who may have never heard of them.

I am sure there are many more ways that social media will revolutionize how you market your business. What is your experience? How has social media revolutionized your marketing? Let me know in the comments.

ProServeIT Corporation develops technologies that help organizations use hardware investments more effectively, minimize hardware maintenance, lower real-estate and electric costs, improve disaster-recovery and restore times, and create affordable fault-tolerance. Today, over 100,000 IT organizations use VMware virtualization products to address key business objectives, such as server consolidation, desktop security, remote office management, reduced power and cooling costs, business continuity and software lifecycle automation.

Virtualization helps you do more with less. Normally, an organization’s computers run at 5 to 10% capacity; but with virtualization, they can run at 80% capacity. Virtualization software lets you run multiple operating systems, at the same time, on a single physical computer. And, each operating system acts as a virtual computer. Virtualized servers are server operating systems that run one a single server hardware.

Save Money

With virtualization, your company saves on operational, real estate, hydro and electrical costs. You also save on packaging and shipping since you transport less physical machines. Your management costs decrease dramatically with less physical machines and shared hardware for servers.

Improve Disaster Recovery

If a disaster strikes, virtualization helps your company recover more quickly while minimizing downtime. Normally, you recover the operating system file in a machine that matches the one that failed. However, with virtualization the operating system is hardware agnostic, which means the hardware of the machine used to recover the operating system does not have to match the machine that failed. 

Simplify Desktop Management

VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) lets you replace traditional PCs with user friendly virtual machines that provide the user experience of running Windows. This infrastructure is similar to the dumb terminal and mainframe, where the virtual machine is the dumb terminal that provides user access to software, and the server is the mainframe that centrally stores the software. With this solution, your company saves time and money by upgrading the software on the centralized server rather than pushing the software down to the users.

Want to learn how virtualization saves you time and money?

Go to ProServeIT Corporation to find out how.

And, let us know in the comments how virtualization helped your organization save time and money.

InterCall, a subsidiary of West Corporation, is the largest conferencing services provider in the world. Founded in 1991, InterCall offers more ways for businesses to connect with customers and partners, across town or around the world, by offering the broadest range of audio, event, web and video conferencing services. 

Like many companies, InterCall is answering the call to practice environmentally friendly policies and work practices: 

InterCall marketing educates employees on "working green" through a company-wide weekly newsletter and encourages employees to work with environmental charities.

• Training is 90% remote, conducted through web, video and audio conferencing. Since these solutions reduce corporate travel, businesses are more productive and they save time and money. For example, 1400 trainees per month participate in public customer trainings. If they traveled by car, they would have to visit 350 locations, averaging 35 miles per round trip. With virtual training, there is a savings of 6.6 tons of CO2 emitted into the environment. As a result, there is an increase in customer retention and adoption of services; plus, the average customer usage increased by 50%!

• InterCall is a Platinum sponsor of Climate Action, a joint development of Sustainable Development International and the United Nations Environment Program. Together, InterCall and Climate Action educate businesses, governments and non-profits on how to reduce their carbon footprint and impact on climate change.

• On-site managers sponsor recycling programs for printer ink, aluminum, paper and cardboard, and implements policies on electrical usage like monitor standby and after-hours policies.

• InterCall encourages telecommuting to reduce the carbon emissions from corporate travel. Eight percent of their 2000+ employees telecommute full-time. Another 13% can telecommute part-time.

How InterCall provides green services

Helping customers become green: InterCall customers are integrating conferencing services into their green initiatives with great success. Esurance, a leading auto insurance company in the US, has saved carbon emissions by using conferencing services for interviews, training and more. Listen to this webinar where Esurance discusses their exciting green initiative.

Raising awareness: At GreenConferencing.com, InterCall educates organizations, customers and government on using conferencing and other practices to reduce carbon emissions and operate businesses in a more sustainable manner. This website includes links to educational resources, partner environmental organizations, and a blog on current topics that effect companies' efforts to "work green".

Leading green initiative with conferencing: In a recent survey, when asked about what companies are doing to reduce its carbon footprint, the top response was conferencing tools as a way to cut back on travel (66%).

Giving green rewards: InterCall launched the "Green Rewards" program where customers can cash in "Green Points" for every minute they use their dedicated conferencing account. With these points, customers can do green things like plant trees, buy carbon offsets, and purchase green office products. 

How green are you? GreenConferencing.com offers a short quiz as a fun way to see how green you are! InterCall plants a tree for every quiz submission. So far, InterCall planted over 5,000 trees!

Want to learn more?

Go to http://blog.greenconferencing.com and http://blog.intercall.com.

Question for you

What is your company doing to green our planet? Let me know in the comments...

--- As seen in Backbone magazine, May 21 2008

TORONTO, ON, May 20 2008 – Communicating your company’s green initiatives can reap great benefits such as increased customer loyalty, enhanced employee morale, and increased value to the company’s brand image. With the threat of increasing climate change, companies have the opportunity to not only increase profits and reduce costs; but to make a difference, and even change the world.

Billions of dollars are being poured into green IT measures such as virtualization technologies to save energy, optimization of data centers to lower utility bills, e-waste reduction programs to mitigate the health and environmental risks of lead and toxins, and conferencing technologies to reduce CO2 emissions from travel and commuting. Companies are even going as far as forging partnerships in reforestation programs and funding community green programs. With so much time invested in such great initiatives, where do corporate leaders find the time to communicate their green initiatives to stakeholders such as clients, suppliers, partners, staff, and potential employees?

According to Giselle Conyette, Director of Con-Yet Incorporated, a professional writing outsource for technology companies, “The public needs to know that a company is “going green” because being green is now part of a company’s brand. Clients prefer to buy from companies who practice green business. And, new recruits are beginning to examine what companies are doing to save the planet before signing on.”

While getting your message out there is critical, Giselle advises companies to avoid green washing, which is making your company look more environmentally friendly than it really is. For time-strapped corporate leaders, Conyette advises encouraging employees through your code of conduct, policies, guidelines, training, best practices and rewards, and informing customers, suppliers and potential clients through the company newsletter, blog, website, press releases, podcasts, white papers, and webinars. This is a very exciting time to do business - what companies do today, can change tomorrow.

About Con-Yet Incorporated
As a professional writing company, Con-Yet Incorporated helps companies creatively capture technology products in words. Director Giselle Conyette provides over 12 years of experience in high-quality research, interviewing and writing on technologies for clients in various industries such as health care, semi-conductor manufacturing, telecommunications, government, banking, and energy. Clients rely on the writing they outsource to Con-Yet Incorporated because they consistently receive a complete and reliable product back: content is written clearly, easy to understand, and accurate. Dealing in leading-edge technical and business information, confidentiality is upheld. Con-Yet Incorporated is headquartered in Toronto, Canada. A tip sheet on How to write effectively when you’re in a real hurry is available by emailing conyette@sympatico.ca.

For information, contact:
Giselle Conyette
Director, Con-Yet Incorporated
Technology Creatively Captured in Words
Voice  416-593-7987
Email  conyette@sympatico.ca
Blog    http://giselleconyette.typepad.com/

I use Word and FrameMaker to write creatively about technology. Both tools can produce professional documents but they each have their advantages and disadvantages.

Word is:

• Easy to learn
• Not as expensive as most desktop publishing tools
• Bundled with other applications such as PowerPoint, Excel and Access
• Good for simple documents where there is no complex numbering or formatting
• Great for small documents (less than 50 pages)

However, Word falls down when it comes to producing large documents. I've seen Word literally blow up documents where I had to spend hours rebuilding them from scratch. And, at 12:00 midnight while rushing to meet a major deadline, that is no fun!

There are problems with numbering too - especially with numbered procedures. If you move a numbered procedure to a different section of your document, chances are your procedure numbering will continue from the new previous procedure, and you’ll have to restart the step numbering manually.

FrameMaker has several advantages. I'll name a few:

1. It's 99.9% bulletproof. Case in point: I was producing system documentation for a leading financial company. I had to update documents for 30 subsystems, which each subsystem being a chapter. The documents were complex with numbered headings, procedures, complex graphics and screens, and numerous cross references. Near the end of the contract, my coworker and I noticed that FrameMaker was taking a few minutes to generate the table of contents. To our surprise, we discovered the document totaled 1400 pages! I had only a few months to produce all these documents, so you can imagine I was working at top speed and multitasking like crazy - and FrameMaker crashed only once.
2. You can create multiple versions of a document quickly and easily. For example, with FrameMaker’s conditional text feature, you can single source printed documents for different audiences.
3. Cross referencing is very versatile. You can cross reference within your document and across documents. And, you can customize the cross reference formatting to include the chapter number and quotation marks, and include text before the page number. For example, your cross reference can say: See Chapter 1, "Introduction" on page 10.
4. You can use variables to customize complex numbering series. For example, your procedures can have numerical numbering for the main steps and alphabetical numbering for the sub-steps.
5. You can customize and save table formats. For example, you can create a table for your procedures where one column has the step number, and the other column has the action and result.
6. You can put a logo or a graphic in a paragraph style. This is very useful if you need a "hazard" symbol in a warning or an "exclamation mark" in an important note.

FrameMaker 8 has some very powerful new features:

Unicode support. You can produce documents in Russian, Greek, Turkish and other languages that use non-Latin alphabets.

Rich Media support. FrameMaker 8 supports Flash and Acrobat 3D, which makes it possible to produce interactive PDF files where you can include animation and voice over. Now, you can create much more engaging online documentation.

Tracking text changes. Like Word, you can now track text changes easily. And, you can use the History palette to highlight, accept, and reject text changes, and to undo multiple changes.

Dita Support. You can create and distribute topic-oriented information in XML and create DITA maps.

Microsoft Office 2007 support. You can import content created in Word and Excel 2007.

Although FrameMaker is expensive and has a huge learning curve, I vote for FrameMaker hands down because of its robustness and versatility.

Which tool do you prefer to create documents? FrameMaker or Word?

Let me know in the comments…

A lot of my friends and colleagues have websites; and lately, I’ve been feeling like an oddity not having one. After all, everyone has a website, right? Besides, a website can help me publicize my business, increase my sales, establish my online presence, make new connections, and do business all over the world without leaving my office.

Recently, I asked a well-respected and established entrepreneur if I should get a blog. He told me a blog will be a waste of my time because I’ll spend too much time blogging and not enough time establishing my business. So, I took the plunge and began to strategize my website.

My website designer friend is busy until the end of May because she is in very high demand. I cannot wait until May. I want my website now, so I decided to design it myself. I soon realized that I don’t have a clue on how to design my website. I have so many questions:

What colour scheme should I use? Should I use red, white and blue? Red, grey and white? Or, brown, green and white? I surfed the internet to find a colour scheme I like. The more examples I saw, the harder it was to decide.

How do I design my website? I considered using web design software like FrontPage, but I don't have strong web design skills and I don’t want to spend too much fighting with technology. I checked out some websites that specialize in designing templates. There is a myriad of choices, and I got lost in a sea of confusion.

What navigation system should I use? Should my navigation bar be on the left or at the top? Should I use square buttons? Round buttons? Links? Smiles? I don’t want too many special effects like spinning buttons or flashing arrows. All I want is a plain, simple website. At this point, a few hours passed; but I pressed on.

What background should I use? This is easy to decide. I don't want a flashy or colored background. I want the text to be easy on the eye so my visitors can read it quickly and easily.

Then, I have to think about page design, layout, fonts, typefaces, graphics, images, navigational rules... And, I haven't even thought about the content. It was the end of the day, and I still haven’t design a single pixel of my website.

Discouraged, I sank in my chair as I stared at my blank computer screen.

The next day, I went to an excellent seminar on how to get free publicity for your business. The trainer recommended we start a blog! After the seminar, I spoke with him and told him my dilemma. He recommended that I read the book Blog Wild! by Andy Wibbels. I hurried to the bookstore and snapped up the last copy. (I guess it's selling fast.) I read it, and I was sold. I decided to start my blog.

I checked out blogging software and was shocked as to how easy it is to use. All I have to do is sign up, choose the layout and design, and boom! I'm ready to blog. Just like that! It took me five minutes. And, I don't have to design the template. All I have to do is focus on creating great content, and I love it!

Who knows, I may get a website one day - but not today.

Want an immediate online presence? Start a blog. Now.