ImpactOrg

See which social marketing activities have the most impact

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 15:34:40 -0700

See which social marketing activities have the most impact

Sprout Social has released a great tool for interacting with...

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 12:49:27 -0700

Sprout Social has released a great tool for interacting with your followers and tracking the social conversation about your business.

Quick teaser from RainmakerVT’s (one of my clients)...

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 11:02:57 -0700

Quick teaser from RainmakerVT’s (one of my clients) upcoming video based sales & marketing training for attorneys. RainmakerVT’s web based video training system allows you to guide an attorney avatar through a series of exercises designed to help you learn how to sell your services and market your brand more effectively. If you’re an attorney, you’ll definitely want to check out RainmakerVT. The product hasn’t launched yet, but you can sign up to be notified as soon as it does. This snippet is part of the media lesson in which several experts (including yours truly) discuss how use online media to market yourself.

Social Media More Popular Than E-mail

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 08:41:20 -0700

emergentfutures:

Americans spent 22.7 percent of their online hours in June using social media sites, says Nielsen. That’s a 43 percent increase from June 2009, when 15.8 percent of Web time was devoted to social media. Meanwhile, e-mail usage fell from 11.5 percent to 8.3 percent, and instant messaging dropped from 4.7 percent to 4 percent.

">Social Media More Popular Than E-mail:

Americans spent 22.7 percent of their online hours in June using social media sites, says Nielsen. That’s a 43 percent increase from June 2009, when 15.8 percent of Web time was devoted to social media. Meanwhile, e-mail usage fell from 11.5 percent to 8.3 percent, and instant messaging dropped from 4.7 percent to 4 percent.

Photo

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 20:41:45 -0700

The new iOS 4 operating system has a lot of improvements, but in...

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:49:42 -0700

The new iOS 4 operating system has a lot of improvements, but in my experience so far the most useful one is definitely folders. Folders allow you to group a lot of apps together into a subgroup and helps you save a lot of space on your various screens. I went from having 9 screens full of apps, to now just having 4. It also helps you keep like items together if you choose to organize them that way. Now, when I need access to an app related to my business, I just go to the Business folder and they’re all right there.

Last Friday afternoon I sent an email to my buddy Tarun looking...

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:40:20 -0700

Last Friday afternoon I sent an email to my buddy Tarun looking for some feedback on the video I had created for ImpactOrg. It was after 5, but Tarun’s a worker so I knew he’d be in the office scouring over the business plan of his next investment target. Within 2 mins of pressing “send” I got 2 snarky responses back from him (below).

A “massively huge” impact – you sure you need both words – how about just a “massive positive impact”…

and then a few minutes later, I got another

Sure you want a picture of you in a bar?

The first was talking about ImpactOrg’s tag line. The second was referring to the picture of myself I included in my bio page. The exchange prompted me to think for a moment about how exactly I wanted the public to think about ImpactOrg as a company and me as its founder. But I didn’t dwell on it for long. I came back to something that Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37 Signals talked about in their book ReWork (my review here) and that is “Sound like you.”

Their comment was referring to the fact that many professionals feel the need to use big words and “professional” language when communicating to the outside world. In reality, none of this really matters. Am I to assume that the company that sounds professional is going to do a better job then the company that sounds like a bunch of normal human beings? I doubt it.

Now I’m not saying to use profanity or bad grammar in your business writing, but this idea that you need to sound corporate and stale is just not accurate. It’s much better to write as if you were speaking, as that is the language you’re most comfortable with, and it’s also the language most people like to read because they “get it” without needing a law degree or an MBA to figure out what you’re talking about.

On the topic of the photo, I think our views on content are changing to some extent. Yes, the picture happened to be taken at a bar, but it’s not as if people are doing keg stands or pounding Jaeger Bombs. It just happened to be a decent photo of me (I think) and also just happened to be taken at a bar. Now, there may be people who object that such a picture isn’t professional. Well, I probably shouldn’t be working with those types of people anyway, because ImpactOrg’s entire business is based on the idea of sharing content and being open. People who object to such an image clearly don’t “get” that mantra and no amount of my explaining it will change that view.

So ImpactOrg’s tag line is “Our mission is to have a massively huge IMPACT on the success of your ORGANIZATION” and we’re sticking with it, and the profile picture on my bio happened to be taken in a bar… and your point is?

A good snapshot of why social media continues to be so important...

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 12:54:48 -0700

A good snapshot of why social media continues to be so important to business: People are spending a LOT of time on these services

A great way to stay on top of what you need to do and when you...

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 12:05:50 -0700

A great way to stay on top of what you need to do and when you need to do it is to connect your Google Calendar account with your cell phone. Then you can have Google send you text messages to remind you of when you need to do stuff.

To get started, just provide Google Calendar with your cell phone number, then select the carrier. You’ll get a text with a code. Then just enter that into Google Calendar and you’re good to go.

Makes it easy to stay on top of your schedule, particularly when you’re out and about.

Want to know what ImpactOrg does? Watch this video!

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 11:33:06 -0700

Want to know what ImpactOrg does? Watch this video!

In the post right before this one (no link, just scroll down a...

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 21:52:49 -0700

In the post right before this one (no link, just scroll down a little bit), I mentioned Google Reader as a good way to manage your RSS feeds. This name sounds cryptic and complex, but it really isn’t. Rather then me taking a stab explaining it, I figured I’d leave it to the good folks at CommonCraft.

What do these buttons in the corner mean?

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 07:54:00 -0700

If you’re viewing this blog and are unfamiliar with Tumblr, your may be wondering what these buttons are in the top right corner of the page. One says “Follow” (in this image it says Unfollow because I’m already following this blog) and the other says “Dashboard.”

These links are part of Tumblr’s blogging platform. Tumblr has taken a unique approach to blogging by competing with the traditional notion of “subscribing” to a blog via RSS. People “subscribe” to a blog (typically using a feed reader such as Google Reader) so that they can automatically keep up with new content that is posted. It makes it a lot easier then having to constantly browse to news sites and manually check what’s new. Though the RSS feed is pretty well understood, it’s not always a great user experience. Often times, when you click on an RSS feed link on a blog you’ll see a page full of computer code that scares you to death (like this from Venture Hacks).

To avoid this fugly computer code and make the user experience better for everyone, Tumblr has built in this idea of “following” a blog. It’s very similar to “following” someone on Twitter or “liking” a Facbook page: it subscribes you to the stream of updates from that blog. To make this easy, Tumblr provides a link on every blog so that existing users can easily add the blog they are viewing to the list of those they follow. Over time, as users begin following more and more (tumblr) blogs, they end up saving lots of time by being able to view all that content in a single place as opposed to having to browse to them all individually.

This is a good example of why your social media platform needs...

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 08:31:50 -0700

This is a good example of why your social media platform needs diversity. Many organizations and employers block sites like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and other sites synonymous with the social web. These entities seem to believe that a heavy- handed, Dean Wormer-esque, “no more fun of any kind” approach to business is a best practice. Ha! hardly… people will just find other ways to connect with friends (hint: using email and SMS).

The unfortunate reality is that some places do actively block social media websites. For marketers who rely on sites like Facebook exclusively to distribute their message, such policies effectively remove their ability to communicate with their target audience. To get around such restrictions, companies should install and operate their own social media infrastructure, such as those built and deployed by ImpactOrg. Such an approach assures that anyone who can find your company on the internet can at the very least read your blog and thus remain informed on the latest news about your company.

WhaleMeister’s current homepage

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 13:22:49 -0700

WhaleMeister’s current homepage

Using labels in Gmail or Google Apps is a great way to organize your inbox. If you’re like most...

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 12:02:56 -0700

Using labels in Gmail or Google Apps is a great way to organize your inbox. If you’re like most of us, you get email that falls into a few categories:

Important email that you have to act upon immediately (e.g. a client who’s following up or something for a project you’re working on)
Interesting email that you want to look at, but doing so is not urgent (e.g. someone who wrote on your Facebook wall or an email telling you about a new Meetup in your area)
Email that you might need for reference but don’t really need to read (e.g. a statement from an airline about how many frequent flier miles you’ve accumulated or a confirmation of a recent iTunes song purchase)

Google makes it really easy to go through your inbox in a snap and focus on the first kind of email, while avoiding the distractions caused by the second and third kind. Gmail Labels allow you to add a description to any email and make it stand out with a custom color. Filters are like rules that allow you to specify how a message should be treated when it hits your inbox. By using labels and filters to mark your email as read when it comes in and give you a visual cue as to what kind of email it is, you can save yourself a lot of time.

Even better, when you use filters to mark non-urgent email as read, you avoid that email generating an alert on your mobile device. If you’ve ever experienced your BlackBerry buzzing like crazy every few minutes when you get an email, you know how frustrating this can be and disruptive to productivity.

You can also create labels to help you stay on top of what you need to do. One method I use frequently is anytime I receive an email where I need to do something, but don’t plan to do it right then and there, I add the “Action Needed” label to it. Then when I have time to get some stuff done, I have an easy way to go back through the items that require me to do something without having to go back through all my email.

Google wrote a good blog post about how to use labels and filters called “Gmail eats your bacn.”

WhaleMeister

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 09:52:47 -0700

WhaleMeister is a Food & Beverage Consulting company based in New Jesrsey. ImpactOrg was retained to build the company’s intial web presence including logo design, building out a Social Media Platform, Google Apps Integration and more.

Dropbox: An easy way to share files

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 09:52:48 -0700

Dropbox is one of the easiest ways to share files (especially large ones). Let’s face it, attaching files to email is kind of a pain. You have to browse for them on your machine, wait for them to upload and then send your message. It’s even more cumbersome if you’re sending more then one file or *gasp* large files that take a while to upload.

Dropbox makes this task much simpler by enabling you to have a “shared folder” on your desktop. It works just like any other folder, you simply drag files and folders into it. The difference is Dropbox automatically uploads everything in the folder to the Dropbox website and syncs it to your other computers and/or mobile phones where you have installed Dropbox.

This video explains it a little better then me:

Which blogging platform is the best?

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 15:52:48 -0700

There are several popular blogging platforms out there that all have similar feature sets. For most of my clients, the one I recommend is Tumblr, as it is by far the easiest one to learn and offers the fastest method of publishing new content.

One of the challenges for people and companies that are new to blogging is keeping up with it. They may get a bunch of inspiration one day and crank out several posts, but then forget about their blog for 3 weeks and not publish anything. This happens A LOT (and yes, I’ve suffered from it too), and it hinders a company’s ability to communicate with its audience effectively. After all, if the the company doesn’t care enough to post anything, why should users or customers care enough to look?

Tumblr combats this problem by taking the approach “if we make it so painfully simple to post stuff, then more people will keep up with their blogs.”

The company accomplishes this by breaking a blog post down into its core elements: text, photos, videos, links and other types of content. The result is that it ends up being much faster to publish something on Tumblr, then elsewhere due to the incredibly simple user interface. That simplicity makes it easier for people who are new to blogging to keep up with one and increases the likelihood that they will stick with it.

Using Basecamp for Client Management

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 15:52:00 -0700

If you aren’t using Basecamp, you really should look into it. It’s by far the simplest and most useful tool I’ve encountered for managing “to do” items, milestones, and communication for a project.

Though I’ve been using basecamp for managing my own projects for a while, I recently made the decision to begin giving clients access to it. It’s still early, so I’m learning the best way to explain how to use the tool to those who aren’t familiar with it, but for the most part, Basecamp is intuitive enough that clients “just get it.”

Basecamp makes it really easy to brand the site to fit with your company’s design and logo colors.

My work is collaborative and requires the client provide certain files, access to accounts, etc. Basecamp is especially useful for keeping track of all this stuff, and makes it a snap to find everything after the fact. The alternative is using email and as someone who has tried that approach, I’m here to tell you that it’s SO much more chaotic to do it that way. Ultimately, projects get done faster, with greater accuracy and clients are ultimately happier as a result of using Basecamp. Thanks 37 signals!

PressBoxed

Mon, 31 May 2010 15:37:00 -0700

One of my clients is actually… well… me. In the limited amount of free time that I have, I’m working on building a product called PressBoxed.

Below is a quick video that talks about the concept. This is a great thing to do because it allows you to spend some time articulating the concept the right way, and then syndicate that message through different channels so that people are clear on what your company does. So much of getting adoption for an early stage company is communicating clearly what it is your company or product does.

PressBoxed got the royal treatment and has all the Social Media Platform integration that I offer to clients.

ImpactOrg

See which social marketing activities have the most impact

Sprout Social has released a great tool for interacting with...

Quick teaser from RainmakerVT’s (one of my clients)...

Social Media More Popular Than E-mail

Photo

The new iOS 4 operating system has a lot of improvements, but in...

Last Friday afternoon I sent an email to my buddy Tarun looking...

A good snapshot of why social media continues to be so important...

A great way to stay on top of what you need to do and when you...

Want to know what ImpactOrg does? Watch this video!

In the post right before this one (no link, just scroll down a...

What do these buttons in the corner mean?

This is a good example of why your social media platform needs...

WhaleMeister’s current homepage

Using labels in Gmail or Google Apps is a great way to organize your inbox. If you’re like most...

WhaleMeister

Dropbox: An easy way to share files

Which blogging platform is the best?

Using Basecamp for Client Management

PressBoxed

Blog (blog.pressboxed.com)

Twitter (twitter.com/pressboxed)

Mailchimp Email Marketing List Integration (get on it)