I was recently tasked to help our Business Development Manager to look into how we can leverage LinkedIn to network with people within our industry and start making it as our hub for getting leads. For those of you who haven’t explored LinkedIn yet, it is actually the biggest social network for professionals, C level individuals and entrepreneurs.

I did create a profile way back in 2007 but my account during those times is sitting idle until I found the value it has for me as an IT professional and someone who wears different hats. Like any social networks, it’s as simple as finding contacts, expand your network, and grow your business and be able to have what everybody loves, free publicity.

Many startups face the challenge of having a low or no budget for doing a large scale marketing campaign and gets frustrated in acquiring leads. This is where LinkedIn comes in. Why?

Some Numbers You May To Know

• As of January 2011, LinkedIn has a whooping 101 members worldwide, 58.9% of them are male and 41.1% are female.
• The most active age bracket is from 25-54 years old.
• Majority of the member are from North America and the smallest group is in Australia and New Zealand.

So, How Do You Use It For Your Business?

1.)    Connect, Connect, Connect – Most of the people you know in your industry are probably in LinkedIn. If they are not, then invite them once you’ve created your profile.  One of the things I like about LinkedIn is to maintain the bridge between former colleagues and old-workmates. Let them know that you are still there for them. Another thing is LinkedIn allows you to see the intersection of your network and how you relate with people in other networks and this can start conversations.

2.)    Understand The Networks – When you want to start a conversation, one of the oldest tricks in the book is to be able to find a common interest or acquaintance to make it easier to do introductions. LinkedIn made this easier for you since you can explore the networks of your networks and find the right people to help you accomplish first base.

3.)    Make It As Your Industry Listening Hub – Combine LinkedIn and Google Alerts and this will work like a charm. Use LinkedIn to find key people in a company you want to connect with and create a Google alert for that company and use those individuals as filters. This will give you an updated stream of what the web is saying about those individuals. This, my friend, is a simple way of gathering intelligence.

These are just a few of the many things on how you can use LinkedIn for your business. Like how other tools in the social web works, LinkedIn also begins with connections, conversations and relationship. On a professional or business level and it won’t hurt to be authentic and human.

Related articles

• LinkedIn is now available on Android Smartphones (jobcontax.wordpress.com)
• LinkedIn: Sign up, then what? (theglobeandmail.com)
• The LinkedIn Blog ” Blog Archive The New LinkedIn Platform: Help Build the Professional Web “ (dccrowley.posterous.com)

This year, Manila, Philippines will be joining other cities from around the world in celebrating Twestival 2011 on Thursday 24 March 2011. The event will raise funds and awareness for JeepneEd to help them successfully pilot, operate and sustain projects. JeepneED is a mobile science and tech lab for rural schools in the Philippines.

Their mission is to provide community-driven, financially sustainable in-school support in science and technology on a redesigned jeepney that runs on used vegetable oil. Their goal is to graduate both academics and farmers by reconnecting the disparity between everyday science and the science of inventors.

JeepneED serves as an engaging outdoor learning lab with 10 netbooks, a 3G hub for Internet connectivity, a printer and scanner, a projector, and other basic science materials for a community of 8 to 12 rural public schools. Its unique and creative approach to enriching the quality of education for Filipino children is a cause worth supporting!

JeepneED Official Kickstarter Video

What Is Twestival

Twestival® (or Twitter Festival) uses social media for social good by connecting communities offline on a single day to highlight a great cause and have a fun event. Twestival is the largest global grassroots social media fundraising initiative to date. Since 2009, volunteers have raised close to $1.2 million for 137 nonprofits. All local events are organized 100% by volunteers and 100% of all ticket sales and donations go direct to projects.

Twestival was born out of the idea that if cities were able to collaborate on an international scale, but work from a local level, it could have a spectacular impact. Over 200 international cities from Buenos Aires to Bangalore, Seattle to Seoul and Hong Kong to Honolulu have participated in Twestival.

How To Be Part of Twestival Manila 2011

• Follow @TwestivalMNL in Twitter and share the information!
• Be a fan on Twestival Manila’s Facebook Fan Page
• Check the BLOG regularly for updates
• And don’t forget to save the date and be there on MARCH 24, Thursday, 8pm, Le Bistro Vert, Valero St., Salcedo Village, Makati City
• Be proactive! Tell the organizing team if you have leads on sponsorship, ask your friends to donate and tell your friends all about Twestival Manila (and all the ways they can help)!

Related articles

• HOW TO: Run a Global Charity Event From Your Laptop (mashable.com)
• Tom Rielly: Introducing the TEDActive Projects: Social Networks (huffingtonpost.com)
• Twestival 2011: the biggest Twitter meet-up for social good (thenextweb.com)

Many businesses find it as a puzzle to solve on how they can cement their relationship with their customers. Some spend millions and think of razzle dazzle ways to bring their customer’s attention back to them. But this is not rocket science, well for us it is not. We’ve seen this scenario a couple of times before and numerous case studies and white papers had been published to educate businesses about this.

Social Media efforts are not very different with how we do things offline. It just gave us a funky way of doing things faster, smarter and efficient. Think about yourself as a new student in middle school, high school or college. Do you blend right away?

I’ve been in situations where I had to join a new company, move or visit a new country or meet new acquaintances. I guess you too had some sort of experience similar to these. And the scary or exciting part with these is that everything is new. Even the beer you have to order or how they call chips in that place. Yes?

Another similar situation we all had was being the new guy or gal in school. We don’t know who the bullies are, the nerds, etc. And we ask ourselves in deep depression if we are doing ok or if we can blend in. It frustrates us and sometimes affects the way we do things.

For startups, they go through a similar process. They understand the hardship of gaining new customers and will probably do different things and experiments to get their attention. I’m not a guru in this field but here’s how I would probably do it.

Observe and Listen – I believe this is the most important thing in this process to be able to blend properly with your audience or consumers. Knowing something about them is gold. It shows people that you exerted effort in trying to understand and knowing them. Observing and listening is an integral part in knowing where you will fit in.

Speak Their Language – In school, there are different types of languages. Some are verbal and some are thru actions. We often see bump-fist in school as a way of saying hello or hi. Sometimes it’s the shake hands and short hug and pat on the back combination. I personally try to learn greetings in other languages when I visit a new country. It’s enough to bring a smile to locals and tells me that they appreciate the effort.

Do What They Do and Think How You Think – But it doesn’t mean that you have to do things that doesn’t interest you or you don’t like. It will tremendously affect your credibility and authenticity. Join activities that will allow you to contribute or share. And maybe, just maybe, you can become the go-to-guy.

These 3 things that I’ve discussed worked well for me and I believe many of you too. Whether you’re the new guy in school or a company formulating campaigns to gain customers or building better relationships with your customer, these steps should be part of your tool belt not only because they work but it’s the most humane way to blend in the crowd.

Now, I want to hear your story. How will you handle being the new guy in school? Let’s talk below in the comment section.

Related articles

• The Power And Wisdom Of Crowds And Community (customerthink.com)
• Do You Get a Lot of High Fives? (blogs.constantcontact.com)

Have you ever been in the situation of having read many great blog posts you want to share on Twitter? It happens to me all the time. However, I have always been quite reluctant to tweet too many tweets back to back at once. Flooding my followers with lots of updates is not something I want to do. Instead, I recently started using a new app, called Buffer.

It lets me share all these great blogposts, but without the backlash of overwhelming my followers with them all at once. On top of that, you are able to put all your tweets in your Buffer right from the page you are on. Let’s take a look inside:

How does it work?

Whenever you come across an article you like, hit the Buffer icon. In order to do this you can install one of the available browser extensions. Buffer, by default, then suggest you the text and the link of the site you are on. You can edit the tweet further or simply hit “add to Buffer” right away.

See an example of Robert’s post below:

Where does my tweet go to?

Once you “added to Buffer” your tweet is scheduled for you in your Buffer account. It will go out to your followers during the day.

What makes this a completely hassle-free experience for you is that there are fixed daily tweeting times for you. There is no need to schedule each tweet individually, like you would do with other tweet scheduling services.

Here is my Buffer full with tweets, each one going out at one of my set daily tweeting times.

No recurring setting of times

When setting up your Buffer account, you can decide to set the frequency of daily tweets for yourself. What I really appreciate about this is that I only have to do this once and can then forget about it. Here are my 5 daily tweeting times. You can adjust the amount daily tweeting times of course.

Why should I use Buffer?

If you are a bit like me, reading many great blogposts every day and trying to get the most out of Twitter, Buffer is a must have for your toolkit.

What really differentiates Buffer to other Twitter Apps for me, is that it means no extra effort to add a tweet whilst reading. Yet you share great articles with your followers consistently by using it.

The fact that your tweets are now evenly spread out, will also be much appreciated by your followers. No flooding, but one tweet at a time.

You should try out Buffer and let me know your views below.

Note: This post was contributed by Leonhard Widrich from Buffer. You can reach him at leo at bufferapp dot com to learn more about Buffer or visit their website.

Related articles

• Want to tweet while you sleep? (bufferapp.com)
• How to: Be efficient and genuine on Twitter in 3 steps (shoutmeloud.com)
• 7 Apps to Change the Way You Use Twitter (blogs.sitepoint.com)

Last year, 2010, people had been shouting that it is the year of the mobile. Not because of iPhone or any smart phones out there but because of the surge in consumer usage. During the previous years, people were demanding for better reception, smarter phones, outstanding response and other stuff we consider today as basics.

Today, consumers focus on 3G/4G services, much smarter devices and with the advent of mobile tablets, a more user-friendly approach in presenting and consuming mobile content.

Types Mobile Consumers

Business Professionals – We can probably consider this group as the heaviest and most device-dependent individuals. They use high-end smart phones for doing personal or corporate email, web browsing, mobile Web 2.0 tools and productivity apps.

Mission Impossible Parents – This group are multitasking individuals who will not leave their house without their phone. They are avid users of high-fashioned but not sophisticated phones. Enough for them to be in constant communication with family and friends is in the loop for activities, shopping, events, information on the fly and SMS.

Mobile Gen Y – They are the earliest adopters of new technologies such as large touch screen interface and advance services. Their devices are equipped with WiFi/3G/4G, GPS, high-megapixel camera and are capable of accessing app stores. Must haves in their devices are highly capable browsers, intuitive text messaging and social networking apps.

Connected Kids – If you’re a parent and have kids, you probably have experienced scratching your head when your children start asking you for a mobile phone. Their phones are not fully loaded but are capable of doing text messaging and social networking and they love it. You find them teaching you about your phone and how to user certain features and believe me, after a few months they will be begging you to get them a better mobile phone.

Penny-Wise and Mobile – They carry fewer feature-rich phones and often times, not willing to pay for an expensive data. Like 150MB for a month is sufficient. But this group still view their mobile phones as an extension of who and what they are. Services such as text messaging and MMS are a must-have for this group.

As more mobile devices get introduced in the market, the more consumers get segmented. Some will follow those segments and some will listen to a wider and broader audience. But whoever our business follows, we need to prepare our content and make sure we satisfy consumer needs.

We’re still in the stage of figuring out how effective our web presence is. Some are still convincing themselves they need web presence. Now that mobile is knocking on different industries, including your business, what will you do?

One of the things that many of us experience in our personal life is that sometimes the fire that started our passion starts to diminish. Whether in the personal or professional area, we can all relate to this cycle. But let’s look at this one on the customer and business level. Believe it or not, we sometimes forget that there’s this intimate relationship that binds your business and customers.

Everything we do in the beginning is to attract and keep customers. Once we feel secure with our accomplishments, that romantic tie starts to fade away thus making us just think about sales and transactions. No more, no less.

Whenever we feel secure with a particular relationship, we tend to forget small and simple things that mean a lot to the other person. The same goes to businesses who often times overlook giving attention to their customers. It may be because they already have a significant number of customers or their products sell themselves.

But our customers are not mind-readers or can tell the future and all they want to see, hear and feel is that you appreciate and value them. If you think that there’s no more romance between your business and your customers, then move those lazy bones to make that effort in bringing back that binding fire. Don’t expect it to just happen. It is YOU who should start the first move.

Be Creative and Romantic

Send Your Customers a Little Note – High school days huh?! We all know that special note and leaving it where it in a place least expected. Email is not dead and I assume that you did some data collection when you started. A simple note that has a personal tone can really bring a smile to your customers.

Be Meaningful With Your Gestures – Not because media has its eye on your or netizens are criticizing you or the whole army of Twitter users just put you in the trends leader board. If you’re going to do something for the sake of your customer, do it with a heart. Be authentic! Ever wonder why Oprah and Ellen are big names?

Go Out for a Date – Weird? That’s why we all hear these Tweetups and Meetups . We don’t just expand our networks through these but have fun with people who we work with and meet new people. If you’re a business owner, how do you think your customers will feel if they see you personally and have a chat over a couple of beers? Bring back the conversation that was lost.

Bring In The Horse Drawn Carriage – In an expected place and time, many of us love surprises. Your customers brought you to where you are right now. It is only logical and probably rational to make them feel special by doing extraordinarily things for them. They are your loyal brand ambassadors, serve them well.

I can go on and on and on with inspirations from the Romance 101 book but what I would love to hear are ideas from you. I know how romantic you guys are when it comes to things you are passionate about so, I’m giving the floor to you and let’s chat at the comment section below.

Related articles

• Meetup’s Challenge: Making Money While Focusing on Community (blueglass.com)

First of all, I would like to apologize for leaving 2 weeks without an article. We recently moved here in Sydney, Australia and had to sort lot of things. We call it starter’s dilemma and good thing we were able to finish all of it in a few days time.

Awhile ago, a relative of mine kidnapped me for a “business meeting” in Paramatta RSL. Knowing that he too is a business minded guy, I did not hesitate coming. A curious cat I am, I started asking questions on what it’s all about and just received short and hanging answers. I may not be a brilliant digital fanatic, but it’s not that hard to smell that you’re on your way to an MLM meeting.

I’ve been in environments where principles of direct selling and multi-level marketing were injected in this thing between my eyes and I do get it. I was able to pick what’s good and never looked at what annoys me.

Yes, many of you are probably saying that direct selling and MLM had been one of the best proven methods in the industry and one of the oldest. Many made money from it and there are some who failed miserably in the art of duplication. FYI, last time I heard a MLM person was a decade ago. Did it change?

So, I was doing a lot of tinkering since I evangelize social media. Will it be possible to mix their DNA and make direct selling social? I don’t know, you tell me. Let’s do some digging.

Both Social Media and MLM Have These

Network Marketing – It primarily uses your personal network to market a product, service, an organization or a cause. If whatever it is you are marketing, if it’s worth it, will spread outside your network and will earn its seat for being viral.

Relationship Marketing – We all have this relationship in our networks. Some have cemented that relationship and some are still floating in cyberspace. In the offline world, we have family members, friends, officemates and close acquaintances. And these networks are made up of people.

Trust As A Currency – You don’t just do business with a total stranger right? There has to be something to make someone trust you. In the web or in the offline world, this school of thought will never be a myth. To gain people’s trust is probably the best tool in your armament.

The art of duplication and social media both requires patience and time to produce results. Some call it residual and some call it long-term. What bothers is me how the messenger delivers the message. This comprises of authenticity, truthfulness and limited medium.

It’s not that I don’t trust the method; my main concern is the call to action. I don’t find it very authentic. Maybe I just know too much or maybe not. MLM visited me again down under and it was another interesting encounter.

Can social media and MLM blend together? What say you mate?

Related articles

• Tried & True Plan For MLM Success Is To Generate Your Own Prospects And Leads (marketersdaily.com)
• Don’t You Just Want To Eventually Commence With Creating A Massive MLM Team? (marketersdaily.com)
• MLM Systems – Times They Are A Changing (profitonknowledge.com)

Another year and another set of challenges are ahead of us. I believe many of us now are polishing our strategies and making final notes on what we need to do this year. But what about those who are still trying to figure out what needs to be done? I know how hard it is to figure out a good structure for all the things that you want to happen especially with all the ideas that suddenly appear in your thoughts.

Start with a small structure. Make it a simple strategy first and see how it will give you results. We can’t accomplish anything by implementing a big wave. It just won’t work.

Here are some tips to thinker over as you start your 2011 strategies. If you’re not yet in the digital space, I hope these things will help you jump-start your 2011 initiatives.

You Need To Evaluate Your Internet Marketing Effectiveness – Did they do well last year? Do you have the necessary data that will back it up? Do you have the tools to measure effectiveness? Maybe Radian6 can help you measure.

You Need Twitter – Yes, you need it! It’s one way of humanizing your company and telling your customers that there is a human at the other side. It also gives you’re the ability to build international presence fast.

You Need Facebook – If Facebook is a country, it will be the 3^rd largest country in the world. Just think about that population and how cool it will be to be able to build presence on that platform.

You Need to Change the Way You Talk To Your Customers – Call centers are so structured and will take around 3-4 buttons to get to the right department. Customers are now more demanding in getting answers. Dell uses Twitter for customer service. Why not try it?

You Need To Rethink About ROI – It’s not always about the money or revenue. It also describes how you influence your customers or potential customers online. Return On Influence maybe?

You Need To Transform – Most business rely on outbound marketing by shouting their message to people. Why not incorporate inbound marketing and be more specific. What this means is you become strategically present in social media channels.

There are so many things that our businesses need right now but will be impossible to implement all of them. What we have here are the basics and with proper monitoring, can give us results we haven’t seen before.

Social Media is a powerful tool but not a silver bullet. Most of the tools are free and you can have lots of fun while using them. Why not give them a try?

Related articles

• 101 Must-See Digital Marketing Charts and Graphs (steffanantonas.com)
• “Your Social Media Roadmap” Solves the Problem of How to Create an Integrated Social Media Marketing Strategy (prweb.com)
• Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing (hubspot.com)

A few more hours and firecrackers will start bringing noise around cities and towns here in this side of the world.  2010 was a very unusual year for many of us. The global economy turmoil was a big threat for many businesses, big and small, but since we all know that the show must go on, we survived 2010.

Though there were some who are still waiting for the right time, there were companies and individuals who launched their website, blog, created their Facebook fan page and Twitter accounts. Their online presence is now paying off with traffic, products sold, subscriptions and communities around their brands.

No, you were not left behind. If you will still wait for the right time this 2011, don’t worry, those things I mentioned above will still happen for others while you wait.

What You Can Do To Start

Update Your Website – Look at your competitor’s website. If you think you’re not that different then it’s high time to look for people who can do a decent overhaul of your website. Right click your website and View Source Code. If you can still see the word FrontPage, then you should really consider this update.

Evaluate Your Content – The start of the year is a good time to evaluate your content. Is it compelling? Is your audience sharing it? Having a nice looking website might propel you to the top for a short period of time but having compelling content will make you stay on top.

Social Media Channels – Start positioning yourself on the web. Find channels where your customers convene. If you’re not talking to them, someone else might. Start learning the art of listening, learning and sharing. Need help? CLICK ME!

Look Into Video Blogs – YouTube is currently the 2^nd largest search engine. Yep, it surpassed Yahoo. With proper targeting and syndication, your video content can propel from the bottom to the top of the ladder. Thru videos, you open a whole new channel for sharing, learning and entertainment.

Be A Little More Techie – Working on the digital space is not that complicated if you understand a thing or two. I often here marketers and business owners telling me that they are not techie yet are eager to explore the digital space. It will not hurt to learn something from our side of the road.

What 2011 Will Be Like In Our Space

Rise of New Social Networking Platforms – As the current ones start mobilizing their business models; one of the things that don’t just disappear is advertisement. Some love them and some don’t and those who don’t will be on the lookout for new social networks that don’t run ads or have premium accounts that doesn’t display ads.

Mobile Advertising – Apple recently launch iAds, the advertisement platform brands are excited about. With developer tools to create rich-media content, tapping the iPhone, iPod and iPad consumers has never been this easy. But how much will it cost? Expect other mobile platforms to follow especially Android.

Social CRM – Will become an important piece of the enterprise. Some will be wasting lot money overdoing this but Social CRM will be big for businesses that are looking into porting their customer service in social media. See what Radian6 or SocialMiner will be cooking this year. 2011 will be the year Social CRM goes mainstream.

New Breed of Interactive Agencies – Gone are the days were software houses only build business and enterprise level applications. With booming users of social media channels and API availability, more and more of these shops will venture with social media development and integration. This will be a big threat to integrated advertising agencies.

Local Advertising Will Be Sexy Again- With geolocation apps, which you can access via mobile devices like FourSquare and Gowalla, local advertising will be sexy again. Expect to see deals or coupons from these platforms this year and see how local commerce embraces it.

Portable Content – As iPhone OS, Android and Nokia battle the top spot, companies will be making their content portable and mobile friendly. Before, we just try to deal with making our content compatible with IE, FireFox and Safari. Today, we add three more platforms.

On My End

Moving To Australia – My family and I will be moving to Sydney, Australia January of this year. To be in Manila for a year was awesome. It gave me a clearer view of the social media landscape.

Digital Media and Consulting Firm – I will be completing the service line up of my shop from digital media, mobile applications, communication, and social CRM. My main HQ will be in Sydney. Watch out for the new website and of course the blog.

PhotoGraphikas – Is one website that I really need to update. I will do more photography next year since the entire country is fresh for my eyes. Expect to see more B&W photos in normal and wide-angle formats. By the way, I’m back in using film.

2010 was a great year and I believe that we can do better things in 2011. What I really love about our space is that it changes everyday. The challenge we see everyday, creating solutions in different platforms and understanding the needs of the market is something I look forward in doing more this 2011.  Care to join me in my journey this 2011?

Related articles

• What will happen in digital advertising in 2011? – Quora (quora.com)
• 11 Predictions for B2B Social Media in 2011 (socialmediab2b.com)
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A few more hours and the world will be celebrating Christmas. This is not only an occasion where we give and receive gifts but also a time to for thanksgiving. A mentor of mine once told me that the reason why he’s helping me climb the ladder is not because he know I can climb it but because he wants me to do the same when I’m done.

In our journey, though we see ourselves walking forward alone, there are people behind us every step of the way. These are the people who we share our dreams, supports our ideas or are just there because they believe in you.

As a sign of gratitude, I created this post to give thanks to those people.

My family, who always gets affected with the things I do, considering time I spent online, tweaking web pages, meetings and out-of-town engagements, they were always there to support our goal, which is to spend more time together.

Misty Belardo(@mistygirlph) of Bit Rebels for being the first true friend I have in Twitter. We started deciphering social media online together and it was one jolly experience. We’re both going to venture outside the country next year.

Cels Esguerra(@celsbels) for welcoming me in Prox when I got back home. She made me feel that it’s good to be back.

Leah Besa-Jimenez(@leahbesajimenez) for giving me the opportunity to work with BBDO/Proximity Philippines. It was an awesome experience to be with the No. 1 when it comes to Digital here in the Philippines. I learned a lot from you Leah and good luck to your new venture.

Proximity Team is probably the best team I had in my career. After gaining 20lbs, I felt young again working with creative and brilliant minds. By the time I was told to move again, I realize that it’s not a team but a family.

Edwin Jamora (Reynz) for trusting me the keys of Barrio Siete. Seeing a community grow tremendously is something you don’t see everyday. I’ve witnessed this in B7 and was amazed with how opinions helped a community evolved.

Rosario Juan(@juanxi) also a good friend I met in Twitter and one of the people who I maintain a good relationship offline. She’s a brilliant woman with a good sense of humor. By the way, she knows Binalot (@binalot).

Debra Cincioni(@momsofamerica) though I became a little bit busy with things, she continuously say Hi or How are you in Twitter. When my body clock was still CST, I never forget to send her a “wink”. Highly engaging woman, sweet and friendly.

Dinoza Maruf(@dinoza) and Daniel Doughty(@danieldoughty) the Trust Agents of Kota Kinabalu. This dynamic duo and I have a lot of things in common. We’re connection weavers. I value their friendship so much and will continue supporting their social media initiatives in their region.

Jay Cadayona for giving me the inspiration to go back to the dark side of film photography. Damn it Jay, this is one fun and freakin expensive hobby to maintain but I love it dude.

Reggie Ramos and Chay Saputil are pioneers from the Microsoft communities we started years ago and happy to see that they are still around with new ventures. Seeing them around brings back good memories.

The crew of Efficio headed by Brent Whitney for trusting me to be their database guy. All those sleepless nights and creating “handcrafted solutions” was one of the best in my tech career. Thank you for letting my other feet stay in IT. What is life without code right?

And of course to all those people whom I met during Tweetups, RoofCamp and conferences in and out of the country, clients, you too are all in my gratitude list.

You guys gave something that made me remember our connection and would always do my best to maintain that. Thank you for helping me grow in what I do and for supporting my ideas. It will be another chapter in my life next year and I hope that miles will not be a challenge to maintain these connections.

Thank you!

Related articles

• Life, gratitude, and the new year (psychologytoday.com)
• Why gratitude isn’t for wimps (holykaw.alltop.com)
• Gratitude Works! (everydaygyaan.com)

Cashsense is a service-based payment processing company which embraces the advances made in technology within the financial sector to significantly improve cross and intra-border payment efficiencies.

As a Filipino company, Cashsense is acutely aware of the deficiencies inherent within the payments market, especially at home with regard to the lack of availability of credit cards – which remains persistently low at around 6%.

Whilst growth in online shopping, internationally, continues to grow year-on-year, domestic expansion continues to be hampered by the lack of uncomplicated payment options at home… until now.

Focusing exclusively on cash-based payments, Cashsense has developed a simple and inexpensive solution for online shoppers and merchants alike that unites the pervasiveness of the internet and online stores with the ubiquity of convenience stores and pawnshops in the Philippines.

Cashsense has made it easy for all online entrepreneurs to get paid, safely and quickly for the goods they wish to sell – and it needn’t cost them a penny, up front.

For more details, please visit: http://www.cashsense.com/Shop/Login.aspx

Cashsense works closely with the online community and will be pleased to discuss ways in which we can work together.

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A lot of people out there are still trying to figure out what social media is all about. Especially for businesses, the common question they have is what is it for them or what will they get in return. Frankly, it doesn’t work like the traditional methods that we have learned. Maybe a good question to start with is what can you give?

Some say that social media is hazy and there’s no definite way of telling where ROI will come from or how will it contribute to their overall revenue. Yes, in the traditional corporate landscape, every move counts and should add up to a company’s revenue.

With all these content, talks, workshops and people telling you their success stories, you still don’t get it.

What You Can’t See

The social web doesn’t have different set of parameters but it does have different priorities since we all strangers the first time with engage with people.

• Trust I believe is the most valuable currency we have in the web and we cannot put a currency symbol to put value in it. The more people trust you, the more credible you become and this depends on how much you engage people online.
• ROI is actually Return On Influence. We shouldn’t always qualify ROI as a form of revenue but should also focus on how much we influence people’s decision or opinion regarding our brand, our services, product, etc.
• Social Media allows you to reach a different kind of audience; beyond the reach you have offline. And these particular audiences have their own opinion or voice. Wouldn’t it be nice to hear from them?
• Social Media allows you to listen and at the same time respond to people without going thru the traditional mediums. You don’t need to push a big budget to tell people that you’re actually listening to them or that you want to answer.
• Online communities matter. There’s so much noise out there and if we try listening to all channels, we won’t be able to accomplish anything. Build a community, create conversations and engage.
• Social media is not an instant solution to your troubled marketing strategies. It takes time to produce results. Be patient.

If you notice, most of the things I’ve mentioned above involve people. Social media is not this new shinning object that needs to be treated like rocket science. What we do is to actually humanize the way we do things online and that involves being social. Hope you get it now.

What say you?

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• How to Calculate the ROI of Enterprise Social Media (pamorama.net)
• When Social Media Goes too Far (crenshawcomm.com)
• HOW TO: Define a Social Media Strategy for Enterprise (mashable.com)

This is a common term in agencies, “The Big Idea” and you’ve probably heard it too when someone walks in your door to pitch for a certain campaign. The common problem with the big idea is that it’s big and overwhelms businesses especially if they have limited budget or have limited understanding of what digital is all about.

This may also frustrate you since you’re the one presenting the big idea. Yes, it’s not a walk in the park preparing materials to properly present your big idea and to make sure that every step you do is an assurance that your client gets it. We’re not in our ideal world and not everything we worked for will be appreciated instantly.

What I learned from our team is how to properly lay down a good content plan. It’s not that hard and as a matter of fact; it’s like preparing a restaurant menu for your clients.

Measure Before You Pitch – Most of us base our idea on what our client wants, the almighty brief states the structure of the big idea.  There are times that clients really have no clue on what their customers want or need. Question is, will it be aligned to what’s really happening out there? Get Radian6 for this.

Is It Doable – Ask this one to your team before your pitch in. Sometime, your idea may require technology from the future or you’re thinking that it will be an easy task. You don’t want your production team getting back at you with questions about timelines right? Remember KISS.

Break It Down – Imagine giving a college freshman a Calculus book by Leithold on the first day of class. He will definitely freak out. Break down the components of your big idea, explain its purpose and goal, set realistic KPIs, and let the client decide which to prioritize assuming that you already explained what you measured before.

Keep Them In The Loop – One way of guiding your clients in understanding more is to keep them in the loop. Let them be part of the production process. Our common practice is to allow them to participate during testing or UAT processes. What I’m saying here is to make them participate from the time they give you a thumbs up during your pitch. Invest in a collaboration tool like BaseCamp to make things easier.

There’s really nothing wrong with having a big idea. These things inspire people to do the same and it encourages innovation. Our processes and how we treat the big idea determines the structure of how it will be accepted and how we will produce it.

What say you?

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• Client Presentation Tips for Designers (freelanceswitch.com)
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Two critical stages in software development are QA (Quality Assurance) and UAT (User Acceptance Test). This is where our precious code will be put into test, if all functions are working properly and if all creative materials are browser compatible. Some of you are probably saying that this is an easy task since we’re just testing.

Books and case studies have been written for years for the sole purpose of testing software. Various methods had been formulated to guide software engineers on how to prepare their products and to make sure that users or customer will not freak out every time they see messages that only techies understand.

Some organizations and companies created their own checklist for QA or UAT and some adopted existing practices. What I want to share to you is a comprehensive checklist that we use in making sure that our development efforts will not freak out people.

Pre-Launch

Content and Style

• Typography and layout
  • Check for incorrect punctuation marks, particularly apostrophes, quotation marks and hyphens/dashes.
  • Check headings for where you could potentially use ligatures.
  • Check for widow/orphan terms in important paragraphs.

• Spelling and Grammar

• Consistency
  • Capitalization (especially of main headings).
  • Tense/Style of writing.
  • Recurring/common phrases (e.g. ‘More about X’ links).
  • Variations in words (e.g. Websites vs Web Sites, or UK vs US spelling).
  • Treatment of bulleted lists (e.g. periods or commas at end of each item).
• Check for hard-coded links to staging domain (i.e. ensure all links will change to ‘live’ URL/domain when site is launched)
• Ensure no test content on site.
• Check how important pages (e.g. content items) print.
• For re-designs, ensure important old/existing URLs are redirected to relevant new URLs, if the URL scheme is changing

Standards and Validations

• Accessibility
• HTML validation
• JavaScript validation
• CSS validation

Search Engine Visibility, SEO and Metrics

• Page Titles are important; ensure they make sense and have relevant keywords in them.
• Create metadata descriptions for important pages.
• Check for canonical domain issues (e.g. variations in links to http://site.com http://www.site.com http://www.site.com/index.html should be reduced to a single consistent style).
• Ensure content is marked-up semantically/correctly (<h1>, etc.).
• Check for target keyword usage in general content.
• Set up Analytics, FeedBurner, and any other packages for measuring ongoing success.
• Create an XML Sitemap.
• Check format (user/search engine friendliness) of URLs.
• Configure Google Webmaster Console, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Bing.

Functional Testing

• Check all bespoke/complex functionality.
• Check search functionality (including relevance of results).
• Check on common variations of browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome etc.), version (6, 7, 2.2, 3.1 etc.) and platform (Windows, OSX, Linux).
• Check on common variations of Screen Resolution.
• Test all forms (e.g. contact us, blog comments), including anti-spam features, response emails/text, etc..
• Test without JavaScript, Flash, and other plug-ins.
• Check all external links are valid.

Security and Risk

• Configure backup schedule, and test recovery from backup.
• Protect sensitive pages (e.g. administration area).
• Use robots.txt where necessary.
• Security/Penetration test.
• Turn-off verbose error reporting.
• Check disk space/capacity.
• Set-up email/SMS monitoring/alerts (e.g. for errors, server warnings); consider internal and external monitoring services.

Performance

• Load test.
• Check image optimization.
• Check and implement caching where necessary.
• Check total page size/download time.
• Minify/compress static (JavaScript/HTML/CSS) files.
• Optimise your CSS: use short image paths; make full-use ‘cascading’ nature of CSS, etc..
• Check correct database indexing.
• Check configuration at every level (Web server, Database, any other software e.g. Content Management System).
• Configure server-based logging/measurement tools (e.g. database/web server logging).

Finishing Touches

• Create custom 404/error pages.
• Create a favicon

Post Launch

Content and Style

• Social Media Marketing: Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Facebook, Stumbleupon, etc.
• Submit to search engines.
• Set-up PPC/Google Adwords where necessary.
• Check formatting of site results in SERPs.

Ongoing

• Monitor and respond to feedback (direct feedback, on Social Media sites, check for chatter through Google, etc.).
• Check analytics for problems, popular pages etc. and adjust as necessary.
• Update content.

Yes, it’s a very long list that will save you a lot of headaches after promoting your website to production. It will also reduce doing changes in the middle of doing other changes especially if you’re in an environment where sometimes testing happens when your website is already in production.

Related articles

• What should a developer know before building a public web site? – Stack Overflow (stackoverflow.com)
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Today, Facebook announced the next evolution of Messages. Yes, this is the space where you receive email-like messages from your friends and of course spam from sellers and service providers alike. With Messages, the user will decide how they want to talk to their friends whether via SMS, chat, email or thru Messages.

The person on the other end will receive your message through whatever medium or device they are already using. Cool thing about Messages’ next evolution is that you don’t have to remember your friends’ preference or technology they are using. Just type their name and send a message.

Facebook began to offer a few thousand U.S. members an e-mail address that consists of their user name followed by @facebook.com. It will take a few months to make it available to all of the social-networking giant’s 500 million members.

Looking at Messages on top-level, it will be an all-in-one messaging platform within Facebook that promises characteristics such as seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short for its users. Messages was modeled closely with chat, no subject line, cc, bcc. Just send a message and hit Enter. Facebook’s goal is to make this more like a conversation.

Should It Matter?

With 500 million users, and most of them have Facebook as their homepage, I believe this makes sense. One of the things I tell people who are starting their social media initiatives is to think of centralization. I think this is what Facebook is doing today, slowly making the platform a central hub for its users.

Mark Zuckerberg did mention that email is past its prime in an era of SMS and instant messages but Messages will not be an email killer. But will all the layers of conventionality that the world introduced; I don’t think email will be obsolete soon. Just imagine how Blackberry users will feel.

I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these days we can pay our bills thru Facebook. But that will be another conversation in the future.

I’m still waiting to get my invite to try the new Messages. If it has more value than what Mark is saying, it will indeed change the way we communicate within the platform. If you want an invite, CLICK ME!

Related articles

• Facebook unveils new Messages service, integrating email, SMS, chat (business.financialpost.com)
• Get Your Facebook Messages Invite (thetechscoop.net)
• Facebook Email Launched as Hybrid Messaging Service (dailyfinance.com)