Digital Business

Is Klout credible?

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Thu, 17 May 2012 09:11:00 +0000

If you've launched yourself into participating in social media using say, Twitter, it is likely that you have seen a few tweets from people asking if you need help in gaining more followers. You might have heard of Klout too.

The thinking is that getting more followers on Twitter will propel your business or personal brand so that you can influence people more effectively. Klout is a service which launched to measure your influence. This post aims to show whether Klout has any real value.

Influence

Influence is a coveted asset in social interaction which can be superficially satisfied by getting more followers. It feels good when lots of people start to follow you on social networking sites. You start to see the follower numbers rising and you get excited that your influence will follow suit.

But, the reality is that it is relatively easy to gain followers on Twitter by way of a technical fact that many Twitter accounts are set up to automatically follow people back who follow them. You can use tools like Twollo and SocialOomph to do this for you by setting them to follow anyone who use a specific keyword in their tweets or in their profile. You set up these tools, switch them to auto-pilot and watch the followers rise while those you are following rises too.
So, the reality is that you have gained little real influence through the use of automation tools. It's not real influence. Your followers are just a product of a robotic process.

Social Network Analysis

In 2009, a new service launched called 'Klout'. It was was designed to measure your online influence by aggregating all of your social media activity to carry out social network analysis to give you a Klout score. Your score also comes with a description of you which denotes whether you are perhaps a 'Specialist' or an 'Explorer'.

My current score is about 49 and I am described as a 'Specialist'. Klout believes I am influential in the following areas, in descending order: Business (OK, that's good), Publishing (Yes, good), Vanity (what the..?), Bedroom (I hope my wife isn't reading this), and Ocean (I'm feeling sea sick).

Klout picked those words from post I wrote in this blog and other blogs and has taken them out of context. I wrote one post called 'Start a factory in your bedroom' which is where the 'Bedroom' reference comes from.

I asked the well known and truly influential blogger Chris Brogan for his opinion on Klout's and his reply was succinct: "Zero Value". I had a conversation with Thomas Power, the founder of Ecademy, on Google+ after watching one of his tech talks where he spoke about companies that won't hire people with Klout scores of less then 50, and asked for his view on the value of Klout. He said it was not about influence on Klout. Your score is about time spent online. He wrote that it did not matter who you were communicating with online as long as you communicating. Really?

Lucky Escape

I tend to agree with Chris Brogan about Klout and its importance to measuring your influence through social media. The best way to influence people online through social media and offline is to be helpful and open by providing them with valuable content and ideas.

Don't go chasing a Klout score through just spending time online which provides no value to anyone. If anyone asks you for your Klout score in an interview start making for the door. You might have just had a lucky escape. Spend more time working on great content for your followers and sharing it through social media rather the chasing an abitrary score.

Using Weebly with Google Calendar

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:06:00 +0000

I learnt something today about using Google Calendar with the website solution, Weebly, while setting up a simple website which was preventing a key page from being visible to the sites visitors.

The website is for an apartment in England which is let out for private rental for people wishing to rent in Somerset, in the west of the UK. A vital part of any property rental website is the page showing its availability to visitors. The beauty of Weebly is that it lets you integrate a Google Calendar into the pages by simply copying and pasting some HTML from the Google app into the page through the straightforward content management system in the package.

Of course, that is simple to do, but the problem was that visitors to the Weebly based website could not see the Google Calendar which prevented them booking. No Google calendar, no revenue.

Ad-Blockers?

At first I thought my web browser was preventing it because an ad-blocking application was preventing it. But, this was not the case. I checked the Weebly help forums and contacted the help desk, but their response was not very precise and I still could not work out why I could not see the Google Calendar.

Permissions

I eventually tracked it down and it came down to two little check boxes in Google Calendar which dealt with the 'permissions' of who could view it. In the 'Calendar Settings', you need to click the 'Share this Calendar' tab. Then, click the 'Make this calendar public' check box. Finally make sure you un-check the 'Share only my free/busy information (Hide details)' box.

These two little ticks made the Google Calendar in Weebly available to everyone who visits the site. This page is the second most visited page on the website.

Broadcast your Business with Google Hangouts

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Wed, 09 May 2012 09:51:00 +0000

YouTube is famous for enabling millions of people to broadcast themselves through placing the videos they record on their mobile phones and video cameras, of course.

What they are less famous for is their new social media platform, namely Google+. It's relatively new to the world but it is rapidly growing its audience. It has a slightly different approach to how Facebook works but one of the most important components of Google+ is its live streaming service called 'Hangouts'. This is a broadcast tool which, through the use of your web cam and microphone on your computer enables you to run your own TV show to anyone on Google+ or who is watching through your website.

Live streaming has been around for a while but Google Hangouts make it that bit easier. The tools available make it very interactive and easy to use to broadcast You can live broadcast while taking chat messages from your audience. You can swap to the web cams of your audience and listen to their questions and feedback too.

With Google Hangouts on Air, businesses will be able to provide help desks, how-to broadcasts and broadcast journalism anywhere they have internet access, a web cam and a microphone. The almost instant live streaming ability is very useful.

I was recently asked to be part of a BBC show called 'World Have Your Say' where the producer of the show started a Google Hangout asking people to share their stories about 'Dark Tourism'. This came into my stream of updates on Google+ and I responded through the chat saying I had some experience of it. The producer connected with me through their web cam and we chatted about the topic. An hour later, I was speaking on the show. Live streaming like that provides levels of interactivity which, ten years ago, businesses would never have thought possible.

For any business that wants to get to know their customers better, or to provide them with support and help, Google Hangouts are a great way to make it quick, cheap and easy to do so.

There's a good Google video below which explains more about how you can run live broadcasts too and a good post on Fast Company by Amber Mac called '3 Ways To Work Smarter Using Google+ Hangouts'.

Search Engine Optimisation for Beginners

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Mon, 07 May 2012 10:01:00 +0000

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is one of those phrases which, if you are in business, you will hear mentioned increasingly often. It's a phrase which is describes a skill and practice which more people involved in sales and marketing need to understand if they are to succeed in the hyper-competitive world.

Search engine optimisation is the very necessary activity which is going to help people looking for what you supply find your business more easily when they search on the internet through search engines like Google and Bing.

But, if you are running a small business and have little time to learn about search engine optimisation in detail, it's useful to know some basics so that you can, at least, have a sensible conversation with someone in your marketing team, or with someone you hire to carry out your internet marketing.

Firstly, search engine optimisation sounds complicated, but the basics of it are quite simple. The first thing you have to get right is knowing which words or phrases your ideal buyers or visitors will use to find you. These are known as keywords or key phrases. Any seo company that you hire will start asking you to do this as part of your internet marketing plans.

So, if you supply people with fishing tackle in your local town and you want to attract more customers for your products, you might want to use the following keywords in the text you use on your website's homepage: 'fishing tackle Oxford'.

The next thing you need to know about search engine optimisation is that search engines look through websites (called crawling) for text to understand whether your website is relevant to what people are searching for. But, you have to balance the keywords you use to show your relevance to search engines with writing good content which is easily understood by humans. It's no good stuffing your web pages with keywords which don't make sense to people.

In addition to this, it's important not to put keywords onto your web pages which can be seen by search engines but not by humans. So, you might write some keywords in white on your web page which is a white page. Search engines know about this trick and it will get you penalised by them, which means your website could be so far down the search results page that you might as well not exist. This practice is one of a number of tactics which would be carried out by a spurious seo company and it is known as 'black hat SEO'. Don't do it. Insist on honest 'white hat SEO' practices.

'White hat SEO' is being honest with your customers and the search engines. Write good content which is relevant to your customers and don't try any 'black hat seo' internet marketing tricks.

Another SEO lesson to learn is that search engines don't look for relevant websites for the keywords. Search engines look for relevant web pages. So, when you are planning your website, you need to select keywords which are relevant for each of your web pages. For your seo plan, think at the page level and this will help your enormously to get your web pages to a higher level in the 'organic search results' (the search results which are below and to the left of the 'cost per click' advertisements.

It's also important to know that for good SEO that search engines, as you can probably guess by now, look for text on web pages. They don't see images. Images are good for people using a website, but you need to make sure that images are 'described' in the code which makes up each of your web pages. These descriptions in the code are known as 'tags'. The tag for an image in a web page is called the 'ALT' tag. Use relevant keywords in your 'ALT' tags so that the search engines understand the relevance of the image to your web pages.

Finally, probably the most important search engine optimisation lesson for beginners to know is another meta tag on each web page which is the 'TITLE' tag. Each of your web pages should have a unique description relevant to the web page. This is one of the first items that search engines look for. Without this description your chances of getting your website presented in the organic search results is greatly diminished.

In conclusion, SEO is a vital part of internet marketing. Proper keyword research is the basis of successful search engine optimisation. If you get this right and do some basics right, such as tagging each web page correctly, you are going to get better results. There is a lot more to SEO to get right too (which I will cover in posts to follow) but, if you understand some of principles behind it you will be in a better position to do some of the work yourself or to speak sensibly with a SEO specialist.

Computer Data Loss is a Thing of the Past?

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Wed, 02 May 2012 17:31:00 +0000

Not so long ago, when your PC or laptop had a hard drive crash or file system you were likely to lose most of, if not all, of your computer data.

The anxiety and stress that you feel when you know you have lost your computer data is immense. It may not be a stressful as getting divorced or moving house but it must be somewhere near the top of list of bad things that happen to you when you had forgotten to backup your computer. Your precious collection of photographs, documents and videos would have been lost unless you had remembered to carry out a physical back-up of it all onto an external hard drive or USB mass storage device.

Most large companies have a computing infrastructure which is supposed to help you recover your data by backing it up automatically. But, my experience of these services is that they were not always as reliable as you would like them to be, and you had to wait an awfully long time before you could shut down your computer while the back-up of your personal folders was completed through your network connections.

There have been back-up services available for a while, such as Microsoft SkyDrive, but they were never that easy to use and the ability to share documents or files within them was fiddly at best.

The public cloud environment has made the stress felt after a hard drive crash and the arrival of Google Drive last week marked how serious the market now is for storing your computer data online. Google Drive is what used to be called Google Docs and is a free service which allows you 5GB of online storage of your files which can all be synchronized automatically, backing up data without you even realizing it. All you need is Google account to get hold of this service for storing computer data.

A hard drive crash may be something you just laugh about in future.

SEO tips for landlords

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:44:00 +0000

Landlords need to know SEO basics

Not everyone needs to be a search engine optimisation expert (Justin Walmsley is just one such SEO expert) but it helps if you have a basic understanding of SEO if you have a business and you get business through the internet.

Here's why:

Recently, I have started helping a family member to start generating further bookings for their flat in Frome, Somerset which they rent out when they are not in the UK to supplement other marketing of the property. The flat is already being marketed on three sites which specialise in holiday rentals, namely Cottages4You, Holiday Rentals, Holiday Lettings and AirBnB.

But, the bookings from the major rentals sites are disappointing overall. The site which is producing bookings is Holiday Rentals. The others are not. The owner complained to Cottages4You about the lack of bookings and they came back with a message which suggested he changed the photographs of the property to get more bookings. The problem not being addressed was that nobody was getting to the property's page on the site, so having different photos was not going to make much difference.

Furthermore, what was particularly interesting was that Cottages4You (owned by Hoseasons), according to the local area manager of the company, "spends millions to guarantee that Cottages4You is at the top of Google".

Of course, the member of the family owner of the flat does not care what Cottages4You spends on Google. They only care about the bookings for their flat; which are none.

I decided to take a look at the different sites by looking at the underlying code of the website (you can see this by 'right-clicking' the web page and clicking the 'View page source' link which appears) which can tell you a lot about how each website is likely to be viewed by search engines.

I looked at one aspect of each site and that was the keywords which they use in their photographs of the property which can be found by looking for a code which reads 'alt='. This is a 'tag' which helps search engines to identify the image and relate the keywords in the tag to the content of the web page (i.e. if your content is about a bedroom in a property the tags in the photograph on the page should be relevant to the content on the page).

In short, it was clear that Holiday Rentals had done a better job. They had made sure the webpage for the member of my family's property was optimised for search engines to know the relevance of the content to the search terms used by potential customers looking for a property to rent. The optimisation of the webpage on Cottages4You was pretty much non-existent when it came to the tags in the images, as was it for the other rental websites.

The tags on the photographs are not the only aspect of a webpage's search engine optimisation which will bring in relevant visitors to a page. There are many more details which need to be addressed to make help grow the visibility of the pages on your site.

However, it is a good indication of how much business you are likely to attract if you use one of these online rental specialists. If they don't do the basics of search engine optimisation (SEO) for your property on their site, how can you expect to get any bookings? Search engines look for web pages with relevant content to the search term being used.

To get your property noticed on these big websites relies much more on the internal search engine being used on the site than search engines like Google and Bing being able to find properties on the site. If I was a property owner wanting bookings, I would prefer to find it through Google or Bing than through the search engine on Cottages4You, for example.

That's why it's important it's important for landlords and landladies to know some basic SEO techniques.

Six minutes to sell

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 21:01:00 +0000

photo by @waynemah

Imagine that you have been given six minutes to stand in front of 200 prospective customers and that you have to convince them that you have a solution to their problem.

How are you going to make those minutes count?

To make those minutes be as productive as possible, you have to know something about the audience in front of you, at least.

You also need to understand the environment they are in. For example, are you facing them in a webinar or at a conference? Are they there having been invited by you personally? What are you going to show to persuade them that you can help them? How are you going to show them what you can do?

These are all vital questions to ask as you plan to turn six minutes into sales. Those 360 seconds are often all you get these days when you have sponsored an event and have a window of opportunity to get people interested in your solutions.

So, still what would you do? What is going to capture the imagination of the audience enough to motivate them to pay you a visit?

You will have seen product demonstrations or Powerpoint slides full of bullet points trying to spark your interest. And yet, your six minutes is usually tucked between two long sessions of presentations already. Your audience is likely to have reached their limits already in their ability to absorb any more information. They will have cognitive overload by now and will want to stop for the upcoming break and all that sits between them and a cup of coffee is your six minutes of persuasion.

Let's think about it like this: The presenters before you are likely to have required their audience to do something difficult. They will have asked them to do three things at once which human brains were not designed to do, namely read, process and listen at the same time.

The presenters will have shown them a set of information in the form of lists or bullet points, or graphs which they are likely to be struggling to understand the main point being made. The human brain is not designed to handle this multi-channel information blast.

So, here's your chance to capture their attention, make what you your point clear and to engage your prospects.

You stand up and show them slides which have one sentence which clearly states your point for the slide, with one simple graphic to illustrate the point. You reinforce your point by speaking. No bullet points; no crazy, complicated diagrams and no images which just fill space but don't help you get your point across.

You tell a story which has a beginning, a middle and an end. It's a format we've all been brought up with and which we understand.

You spend 30 seconds or less on each slide which means, in six minutes, you can show 12 to 16 slides containing glorious images to support your points and to tell a story as if you are film director.

This approach works. I know. This happened to me last week and prospects came to see me straight away when none had come before. My presentation is below.

If you want help with creating presentations like this, I'd be delighted to help you.

Going viral with slideshow webinars

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:30:00 +0000

Why are people still cramming their slides with text and then reading them to you?

Once again today, I sat through part of a webinar where I was crushed by a slideshow which was a tsunami of information in which I had no hope of absorbing while listening to a monotonous set of speakers. Slide after slide came through stacked with bullet points and flowcharts which flowed about as much as a frozen, Arctic lake.

It seems that people forget why we enjoy films or movies so much and often feel moved by them through the use of images, action and narrative. Whenever you see text in a movie, the camera focuses on a single line where the surrounding text is a blur.

That's done for a very good reason.

Most people cannot absorb that much text in a film. But, they can listen, watch the actions and understand what is being said. People can rarely read and listen at the same time.

This is a huge wasted opportunity to engage with the audience. And, if you are in business and want more customers, the last thing you want to do is bore your prospects. You need to persuade them through your presentation to take an action like decide which of your products they want to buy.

In fact, presentations are so important these days that, if you design them well, they can be shared by hundreds or thousands of people on the internet to enable your business to get noticed for very little money compared to the amount you would have to spend on traditional advertising.

So, you have to be pretty lazy not to make your presentations dynamic these days. Tools like SlideRocket when combined with techniques extolled by Cliff Atkinson in 'Beyond Bullet Points' can help you create highly effective presentations to publicise your business.

Take a look at how you can slideshows to promote your business through the internet and, potentially, through viral marketing.

I help businesses deliver PowerPoint presentations that have impact and help them gain more business. For more information, take a look at the Effective PowerPoint Presentations page on this site.

Why you should think seriously about Google+ for your business

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 17:47:00 +0000

The impact of sharing ideas, photos, products and more via the internet on businesses now is undeniable in its importance to generating new business or bad PR, if you get it wrong . So, why should Google's 'Google+' service be taken seriously and not just thought of as "just another social media platform"?

To understand why, take a look at this online presentation below and see why. It's pretty compelling (and, by the way, the new interface on Google+ has just gone live on many people's profiles today, so the screenshots are a little out of date, but good, nonetheless).

QR Codes Don't Connect Offline to Online

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:30:00 +0000

QR Codes don't connect offline media to online media. They are far bigger than that. 2-D codes, QR codes, Microsoft Tag, Nokia Point & Find are talked about in articles I read and articles I write in a very tactical way.

'Where can you use them?', 'How can you use them?', 'What do they do?'. These are all valid questions which people ask now while people become aware of them in the world excluding Japan, which has been using the technology for a while.

But something has always been missing when I think about how I could use them in the business I work in to generate revenue. By their nature, 2-D codes are simple to set up and pretty much free to use. The value our business would get from them is in developing mobile web sites for clients, of course. But, my business is a digital agency. We don't do print.

But this morning, I had a meeting with a local creative agency I know through a business networking group. I was asking them for some quotes and feedback on some projects I am working on, when I started talking to them about 2-D codes. They had never heard of them. I explained what they were and that's when it hit me.

The bigger picture for 2-D codes is the opportunity they represent to connect partners together to develop solutions for our clients. Not only do they connect offline media to online media. They connect service providers together too in new ways to provide new solutions and approaches to clients and their customers.

When you look at 2-D codes this way, you have the opportunity to expand beyond the limitations of your own business by working with other service providers. Suddenly, a potentially sceptical creative print company to our digital agency becomes a partner.

Of course, there is still some way to go before 2-D Codes become commonplace here in the UK, but working like this with them will make the technology more tangible for clients who increasingly want to reach their customers in ways which suit them and not ways which suit the company.

People Like Lists. So Use Them.

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:44:00 +0000

When God gave Moses the Ten Commandments written on those stone tablets, he started something which has captured people's imagination ever since . He started a fascination for lists.

Perhaps one in every ten tweets that I see on Twitter has a link to a list of some description. It might be a list for the top ten Twitter tools, or a list for the top things to do when looking for the best way to find new customers. It might be top tips for learning to how to be a better manager.

Why do people like them? Some of it is due to their easy access. People can read them quickly to learn new things and then decide whether they want to read more detail. Lists are easy to remember. They can be amusing. They can be serious. You only have to look on popular web sites like Amazon to see lists in action. Bestseller lists, music charts, video charts. There are numerous web sites that are dedicated top ten lists of just about any subject, item or product you can imagine. The list goes on.

A list is often passed around to friends and contacts too. People like sending lists to people with whom they share an interest. People feel happy to send them to their contacts because they are quick to read and easy to pass around.

For anyone who has their own blog or web site, then lists are a surefire method to attract new visitors to your site. You can use lists to show your expertise in your field. They are a good way to provide fresh material to your web site and to build mailing lists.

Lists can be incorporated into documents which visitors download from your web site in return for their email address. When you use this method, you can identify their interests to help you send them relevant news and information if you have a newsletter.

Promoting a list is important to get right. If you have no marketing money to promote the list, then make use of tools like Twitter, LinkedIn Groups and Facebook. Share the link to the list with your friends and contacts through email too. Let as many people as you can know about the list. If it's a good list, they will pass the link to your list around.

I recently put together a list which was in a document and which could be downloaded from my blog in return for their email address. It was on a particular subject, namely 'QR codes and 2-D codes'. I promoted it through specialist groups on LinkedIn as well as through Twitter and Facebook. As a result, traffic increased five-fold on the first day of the promotion on my blog and it continues to be a popular link.

So, if you want a simple and effective way to build your mailing list nd vistors to your web site, start thinking up a list on your area of expertise, place it on your web site and promote it. It's an effective and cheap way to bring visitors to your web site or blog who share your interests and value your expertise.

Social Media in Action - The Hotel Inspector

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 08:30:00 +0000

If you ever wanted to understand the importance of social media but were too afraid to ask, then watching this program - The Hotel Inspector on the UK's fifth channel, 'Five' would have been a fine lesson in its power.

The Hotel Inspector is one 'Alex Polizzi' who is described as "no nonsense" although she's no Gordon Ramsey in her type of frankness despite the odd 'F word'. Alex Polizzi's first task in the series was dealing with a 'The Crown Inn' in Lewes, Sussex. I had a certain nostalgia for the place because I used to go to school in the town up to the age of sixteen and 'The Crown' was where I occasionally went with friends when we were trying to persuade the barman that we were eighteen and we did have enough money for a pint.

Getting back to the point, the hotel was simply filthy, slovenly and uncared for by the owner. It was losing guests at the same speed as it was growing bugs in the bathrooms and it lost its 'three star status' with the local tourist board (On a side point, I think the tourist board needs to rethink it's star system. If The Crown dropped from three to two stars, God help anyone whose establishment has two stars).

The key point of the programme was that guests were leaving their comments about the hotel not with the owners but on 'TripAdvisor', the web based hotel review site. The owner of the hotel, Karen Lloyd, was dismissive about people who left their reviews on it - "Haven't they got better things to do with their time?". But the fact remained that the negative reviews were the truth about her business and reviews from previous customers are taken seriously by would-be guests.

As I write, the reviews about The Crown show the following results:

Out of twenty-two reviews, fourteen of them were couples.

Four say it is excellent

Three say it is very good

None say it is average

Two say it is poor

Thirteen say it is terrible

The reality of the web and social media is that whatever you do in business nowadays, if you don't get it right, there is nowhere to hide. The feedback you receive as a business owner today is immediate, honest if not brutal, and worth it's weight in gold. Whether your business is large or small, you will soon know if you are doing a good job of it or not.

In the past, you would be asked to fill in feedback by the hotel owner on a piece of paper with no way of knowing if the hotel cared a jot about your feedback. Good hotels and businesses would follow up your feedback. Most would not. That's history and now the reticent British public has a way to vent their frustration, disappointment and delight with ease.

To be fair, the owner did turn the hotel around and regained her third star which is much to her credit. The morale of the story, nevertheless, is that social media and the web are now driving up the quality in the market of many products and services. If you don't take the feedback seriously then your competition and prospective customers will do.

Design in your work space

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:04:00 +0000

Inspiration at work through nice design

Where you work makes a large difference to how you work.

The number of corporate offices I have worked in that felt like a cross between a sheep market and a building which is running on emergency lighting (i.e. dim and just light enough to escape) still amazes me.

In their desperate bid to save money, those companies managed to make their offices somewhere that I didn't want to be and where I felt as though I could never be creative.

The difference between an office space where you feel invigorated rather than crushed is very important. Dull furnishings and dim lighting are not conducive to productive work, especially if you are in a highly creative role.

When I came across Design Public, I thought how good it would be to have some of their furniture in my work space to make it more than just a square room with a computer in it. For instance, why have shelving that looks like something from a warehouse when you can have something like their 'Brave Space Design Bamboo Stagger' (pictured above) shelving which would immediately give life to a dull office?

And yet, the most important furniture in an office is my chair. My work involves a lot sitting down and the number of times I have complained at work at about an uncomfortable chair only to be given lesson by the 'ergonomics expert' in how to make 100 adjustments to it to make it something which didn't make my legs go numb I can't begin to recall.

Complaining about your chair seems pedantic but the difference between a good and a bad chair at work can be noticeable to the amount of work you can get through and how fresh you feel.

In this age of information, making a workspace conducive to work is important. The more I can concentrate on my work rather than how much my back is aching, the better.

Online Presentations Create Interest in your Business

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 10:54:00 +0000

You can't escape PowerPoint presentations in business these days, so you might as well embrace the technology to the benefit of your enterprise to help put you in front of more prospects.

I see more online presentations (or webinars) than I do while sitting in a room as companies reach out to customers, partners and colleagues who are not close enough to be able to come to a presentation in person. Running webinars is an effective way to market your business because, like offline presentations you can speak with a number of individuals who have expressed interest in how your products or services can help them to solve a problem they have.

However, you can never present live to everyone because of the challenges your prospects have with being in different time zones or their availability, for example. So, why not make use of your presentation to connect with people when it is convenient for them?

There are some great online services out there which help you both create your presentation and make it available to the viewers. I use two of them, namely SlideShare and SlideRocket. SlideRocket is a superb online tool for creating eye-catching and impressive presentations. Some of its features include the ability to use 'creative commons' images from Flickr in your slideshow which gives you broad choice of images.

SlideShare is another online presentations service onto which you can upload your slide decks for people to view. Both of these services have analytics tools so you can track how many people are viewing your slide shows over a month or more, for example.

I put a presentation onto SlideShare a month ago and I have had 259 views of it since then. The viewers have been based in the US, UK, Thailand, Korea and Germany to name a few countries.

So, the challenge is this: This is simply too much of a good opportunity to miss to get your business in front of prospective customers. You need to make sure your presentations are compelling so that viewers can easily understand what you offer and how they can get in touch with you. You have to treat each presentation as though you are showing them a short film or advertisement. A great guide for helping you to design your presentations so they are compelling is Cliff Atkinson's 'Beyond Bullet Points'.

I have put my latest presentation which I designed using 'Beyond Bullet Point' principles in Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 and then uploaded to SlideRocket (below) and SlideShare.

I now have two services quietly working away to help my business communicate with prospects who will get in touch if they like what they see.

Is this what technology will soon be like?

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 21:39:00 +0000

I've today seen some interesting things on the web, and this one really caught my eye from Google. Their 'Project Glass' is looking at how technology can be used to help you in every aspect of your life. I like the look of some of it, but the thought of having to rely solely on my smartphone and a heads-up display for navigation is something I would not be too keen on.

However, being able to communicate and share things I saw in the street, at work or in the countryside would be fun.

Here's the Google video illustrating what they are thinking about:

How to work from home effectively

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 11:04:00 +0000

Working from home is not for everyone. And, the primary reason that people who could work from home but don't is, according to my anecdotal evidence, that they would get distracted by non-work activities.

That's a valid point. But, if you could avoid the distractions, why wouldn't you work from home for one or two days a week?

Home working is surprisingly productive when you get into the routine of how you organise your day and, more importantly, making your family understand that you are, in fact, working.

Your daily routine is something you might have to change from when you work in your office. I find that I start work earlier than when I go to the office purely because I am not spending that time driving or travelling.

And most people's concern about being distracted by domestic chores or activities when working at home are, in fact, the very reason why working in your home office can be so productive. Working in an office environment has to be one of the most distracting places to work. There are no interruptions from colleagues or announcements on the 'PA system' about the sandwich van turning up.

At home, I tend to work in concentrated burst because there are fewer distractions. When I stop for lunch, I don't take my sandwich up to my office and eat it there. I stop and take a break. The, I do another burst until my kids come home from work. After this invariably noisy time, I stop and catch up with them before doing another couple of hours of work until about 7pm.

Of course, it's good to go into the office to meet colleagues or clients. That's vital. However, I tend to get more work where I need to concentrate when I am not in the office.

The other aspect that you have to get right is how your family responds to your home working. At first, my family did not understand that, although I was at home, I was not available, physically and mentally, for non-work related discussions and chores. The temptation is for your family to request you to run errands or to put the washing on. It is important that you set ground rules with your family about when you are available or not. My simple rule is that if my home office door is shut, I am not available.

Finally, I have recently bought a set of digital headphones (HP Premium Digital Headset) which are absolutely perfect for shutting out noisy distractions while working and listening to music while I work. They allow me to work in a quiet zone which works well.

Home working is very effective when you have rules and change your habits to adapt to the different non-work space of your house. It is more productive than office working if you need peace and quiet. You also need to be disciplined in your approach to make sure you make the most of your time.

Using morse code to communicate with Gmail Tap

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 06:58:00 +0000

If you've ever felt overwhelmed by the number of buttons on your smartphone, then Gmail Tap is for you.

It's an ingenious way to type emails on your smartphone using only three buttons with Morse code. In other words, if you want to type an 'A' you just use a dot and a dash. For 'N', you just type a dash and a dot. Simple.

No more will you feel panicked by the number of keys facing you on that smartphone. It's bound to change the way we type on our smartphones.

Take a look at this great video, taking note of when it was released.

You're using Linux more than you think

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 18:36:00 +0000

There are many things that you can't do with in life such as oxygen, water, food and shelter. Then, you need comfort and companionship before you get to the top of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs which is self-actualisation.

But, before you get to the top this pyramid there are a number of items which you use everyday without realising what makes them tick. These are items which we've become so used to using in the last twenty years that we now feel that we can't do without them.

I'm talking about computers, mobile phones and websites, of course. Most people know about Microsoft's Windows operating system or Apple's operating systems, whether on their Mac or their iPhone.

But, you say the word 'Linux' to most people and they will look at you blankly. Linux is an operating system which is designed and developed in a very different way than the others systems. And, you use it everyday without realising it. You use in your smartphone, or on your favourite website without realising it.

Take a look at the video below to see just how often you use. Write a comment at the bottom if you never imagined that you were using Linux.

Do your expenses in a snap!

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 22:54:00 +0000

Makes doing your expenses a snap

I always get a thrill when I save something, such as time, money or effort.

Saving money on a purchase or putting some money aside gives a good feeling. Saving time is so very satisfying that I positively revel in the chance to do so whenever I can, such as find a route to my office which may look longer on the map but which cuts out sitting in a traffic jam on the short route.

And yet, there has always been one thing which I loathe about working life and that is submitting my expenses at the end of the month. It is one of those mind-numbing but necessary tasks to get back the money I spent doing my job which needs to come back into my bank account (and pronto while I am at it).

I have worked for numerous companies and all of them have had expense regimes which, subtly, discourage you from submitting your expenses because of their complex measures to make you account for every last detail about why you bought that pencil or bought a cup of coffee which was a penny over the allowance.

A recent company I worked for had an expense system which was online and in which I had to attach images of my receipts, account for the VAT, list who I had eaten dinner with, print off a copy of the report, attach the paper copies of the receipts to the printed report, number the receipts against the report and then send it to the in-tray of the finance department, as well as submitting the online report to my manager for approval.

I was beginning to wonder what on earth the finance department did when I was not doing their expense accounting for them.

A year ago, over dinner with friends and family, we were talking about our invention ideas and I submitted that I would like to start a service which handled people's expenses. There were groans of how boring that would be to run. A few months later, I saw a few companies online that were doing just that.

But, today, I came across a business which has answered all my 'expense related prayers', namely 'ABUKAI'. In short, you install their free app on your iPhone, Android phone or Blackberry, and add some settings such as your email address and default currency. Then, using the app, you take a picture of each of your receipts. Next, you 'submit' them to the service and a few minutes, they email you a spreadsheet containing a standard template with all of your expenses itemised. It even converts currencies for you into the template.

ABUKAI also emails a PDF document containing the images of the receipt photos you took to provide evidence to your accounts team or accountant for the tax-man.

I was a little sceptical about whether this would work or not, but it worked beautifully. My only challenge was getting one particular receipt which I could not get into focus at first. You get to try it for free and then pay a one-off fee each year for the service.

This is one of those rare apps that takes away the time take to do one tedious chore and gives you back to the time do something more interesting or fun.

(By the way, if you like the service when you have trialled it for free, let them know I sent you their way by submitting my email address: arryawke@gmail.com )

Watch the video below of one company who have just started to use ABUKAI.

The way ahead for computing in schools

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:14:00 +0000

The recent report by the UK Government that learning IT (or ICT - Information & Communications Technology) in schools was boring and focused mainly on teaching students how to use Microsoft Office has been swiftly followed up with a solution.

The solution is a £26 computer designed to encourage students to learn how to program them. It's called the 'Raspberry Pi' and it is designed to start students off in the world of programming which I remember helping my brother with in the early '80s.

My brother was the techie. I was the one reading out the code from a magazine while he typed it into his home made computer, made up from parts he had bought from a catalogue. My brother went on to university to take a degree in microelectronics and then went into industry where he ended designing mobile phone software.

Since then, things changed making it increasingly difficult for young techies to learn software programming and many students of computer science arrive at university not knowing the basics.

The Raspberry Pi computer could have a dramatic impact on the 'grass roots' of Britain's software industry.

See the BBC video below to learn more about.

Microsoft Office could soon be a new iPad app - Guest Post by Molly Mitchell, EconomicsDegree.net

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:20:00 +0000

According to an article posted today on The Daily.com, a Microsoft Office application for the iPad has been completed and will soon be submitted to Apple for approval.

The site that files for Word, Excel and PowerPoint can be created and edited locally or online with the new app.

The prototype of the software is said to have a similar interface as the current OneNote app, but it also has a design that is reminiscent of the new Windows Phone and as-yet-released Windows 8 desktop operating system.

Although the exact release date is not yet known, the site says that the project has been completed and that the app is expected to be submitted for approval very soon. This makes editors at TheDaily.com believe a release date could be as soon as a few weeks.

Sources for TheDaily.com article also say that an Android version of the Microsoft Office application is not in the current plans. They also say that an updated OneNote iOS app will be released that reflects the Metro design language used in the new Windows Phone and the forthcoming Windows 8 system.

Although TheDaily.com has been reporting for quite a while that Microsoft has been working on an Office app for iPad, ZDNet.com says that these claims have yet to be confirmed. ZDNet.com says that if there is a Microsoft Office app, it won’t be made available for download until sometime after the late 2012 release of Office 15 for Windows on ARM.

ZDNet.com does say, however, that Microsoft CFO Peter Klein was quoted last week saying that, “Microsoft believes it has a great tablet experience with Office.” Klein did not specifically mention which tablet product the company believed it had a great Office tablet experience with, though.

Even if an Office app has been created and submitted to Apple, Microsoft has yet to confirm this story.

Look to the coming weeks for the truth.

Article written by Molly Mitchell, owner of EconomicsDegree.net.

Sources:

http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/02/21/022112-tech-apps-office/

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-office-for-ipad-separating-fact-from-fiction/11952

Alternative to the iPad

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:52:00 +0000

If you are looking for an alternative to the Apple iPad, then take a look at the Asus Transformer Prime TF201 Tablet PC. It's a tablet PC running the Android operating system which comes with a detachable keyboard.

It's slim and, with the advantage of a good battery life, it stacks up as being a device which you can carry around with you and be as productive as using a laptop with the flexibility of using the tablet.

Ebuyer is selling them for under £500.

See the video below for a glossy overview from Asus.

Everything is now online for business

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 15:28:00 +0000

Why have your big hard drive when you can store your business data online?

I have a PC at home which, in its time, about three years ago, was the 'bees knees'. It had a lot of memory, great storage, a good graphics card and sound card. It runs on Windows Vista (Why did I ever install that?). But, now, it is a behemoth which is slow, noisy and in the way. The only reasons I keep it are for the bar code software that my wife uses for her book production work and iTunes for my kids with which to sync their ipods. If it was not for those two pieces of software, I would have installed Ubuntu (a Linux operating system) on its months or years ago.

I have no need for it for my personal work and my own business work. I can do everything else online. I listen to music through Deezer (to which I swapped recently from Spotify which, although excellent, requires you to install software onto your PC or Mac to use, and I use Ubuntu), which is a browser-based music streaming service with a smartphone application too.

I have all of my email, calendar, contacts, documents and document creation tools online with Google Docs. My photos are online with Flickr. Creation of logos and manipulation of photos is done with Picnik. The only piece of software that I had to install on my laptop was 'Kompozer' which is free webpage creation software. But, now, this is no longer tying me to installing software because I have started to use the online website creation software, Web Studio Live.

I can run my business accounts online through Kashflow, my CRM through Base, email marketing with Mailchimp and promote my websites through Google+, Facebook and Twitter, Google Adsense and the other search engines.

Therefore, I have no need for a laptop which has a massive hard drive to store all of documents, photos, websites and information. All of that storage on your local hard drive becomes obsolete.

That's why I am now considering purchasing a Google Chromebook. At first sight, they look underpowered and underspecified compared to what we are used to when buying a WIndows based laptop or a Mac. For instance, they have small hard drives (e.g. 16GB). They have 2GB of RAM. But, there's no need for all of that local power when you can store everything in the 'cloud'.

Granted, if you do a lot of higher powered graphical work on your computer, then a Chromebook might not be for you. But, if you are in business and you travel a lot for work and you need flexibility with how you share your information or create documents, then a Chromebook is worth considering. The first generation is out and looks a little pricey for what you get. At CES 2012, the second generation was launched which look to be good improvements.

Keeping track of customers easily

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:08:00 +0000

If there's one thing that salespeople in most organisations know about, it's their customers. Salespeople are good at relationships, on the whole, and those relationships are often what differentiates them from their competitors.

And yet, as a salesperson, you are always having to find new customers to replace those that inevitably stop being your clients. It's a natural occurrence. Businesses want to keep existing customers because it costs a lot of money to find new ones.

Keeping track of what you said to whom is a daily activity for salespeople because, unless you have an incredible memory, you will forget important details such as how much you quoted the customer, when you last contacted, what they said and whether there are any other obstacles in the way of them buying from you.

To keep track of all of this activity a whole industry has developed with tools to help you cope. In the past, it was the Filofax. Then came computers, personal digital assistants, time management courses and software like SalesForce. They are all lovely and have improved the process of looking after your customers and getting more business out of them immensely.

However, if you are a small business then a solution like SalesForce can be quite overwhelming. It's so powerful that you can often get sidetracked away from the simple thing you want to do - To keep track of things you have said, sent or suggested to your customers and prospects, and to monitor how much business you can land with all of this activity. These big systems will let you gain insight into anything you put into them and you can customise them to your hearts' content, but they still answer the fundamental questions about who, what, where, when and why about your customers.

Enter 'Base'. Base is an online and smartphone based tool to help you do all of the above and nothing else. It's a delightfully simple system to use and helps you collect leads from your website, keep track of contacts, record quotes, forecast sales and run simple reports, thereby letting you get on with the sales activities and not get distracted by the system itself. Best of all, it's free for your first 50 (or 150 if you promote it to your contacts to use) recorded deals and it's pretty cheap thereafter.

So, if you are considering a 'customer relationship management (CRM)' tool and you want to focus on productivity rather than features, then consider Base. It's CRM at its simplest.

Selling through the internet without breaking the bank

noreply@blogger.com (Will Hawkins) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 17:59:00 +0000

Without doubt, your business has to have a website. Without one these days, you are missing out on sales, prospects and marketing opportunities.

The challenges for any small business owner that wants to get their enterprise onto the internet to find new customers or to sell to existing customers are firstly the cost of getting a decent website designed and then marketing it so that customers know it exists.

In my experience, when getting my delicatessen business onto the internet some years back, the cost of getting the site designed, eCommerce ready and launched put my small business' finances under great strain. I had little money left for marketing it. (I had a designer build it and incorporate Actinic as the shopping basket system).

Of course, there are plenty of internet service providers who will provide you with an eCommerce ready website for a few pounds per month (e.g. 1and1). They are good but their templates tend to be too generic and does not easily differentiate you from competitors.

Therefore, setting up your business' website is a balance between going for a bespoke, high cost solution or going for something which is cheap and looks cheerful but similar to lots of other company websites. I now always set up websites with the impact that it will have on the 'bottom line' and the business' cash flow.

You need a website, you need it to start working for you quickly and you need it to be contributor to your profits as soon as possible. You need it to be simple to set up and to be able to customise its look easily and cheaply so your business website looks like your business.

There are many good providers of services which help small businesses get onto web, and one I particularly like is BaseKit. Firstly, it includes lots of templates which are specific to different types of businesses such as car dealers, estate agents, plumbers or electricians, for example. You can easily customise it and features or elements relevant to your business.

It's also cheap. You can try it free for a couple of weeks and then choose between packages which costs either £6, £12 or £24 depending upon how many features you need. You can set up an eCommerce website using it too. Finally, it makes it easy for you to make it search engine friendly, which is an important factor for making the website work for you.

Even better, BaseKit is running an offer for January where you can obtain a domain name for free and get the 'business' package for £1 per month rather than £12 per month for the first three months. With the money saved, you could spend that on Google Adwords to attract some new customers to your site.

Here's a video about the BaseKit service.

To get the discount, use this code at checkout during January 2012 when you decide to buy: XYZ123.