• Click here for the main plugin page
• Click here to download the plugin

We’ve added a number of few features and fixed a number of painful bugs. More importantly, we’ve done lots of ground work that will allow us to roll out new versions faster.

Bug Fixes

• Recurring Events now shows the date and time of the current event rather then the original event.
• Events posted across the Daylight Savings time line were wrong. That’s fixed.
• We’ve globalized the date picker (Thanks josjo!)

Improvements

• Added IE9 support
• Corrected a bunch of HTML validation errors
• Optimized the plugin for better performance (more optimization coming soon)

New Features

• New recurrence rules
• Translated recurrence rules to make it make it human readable and allow for localization
• Globalized the date picker
• Added filter by Categories and Tags to Widget

Up here in Nelson, BC, our beautiful little mountain town is 2 weeks away from an historic* city election and we are supporting 2 remarkable women, Paula Kiss and Candace Batycki, because of their stances on the environment and support for small business – two issues we care a lot about.

On Thursday evening, we threw a small party at the studio for Paula and Candace. It was a chance to rally supporters, raise money and have fun. We also wanted to give our fellow citizens a chance to meet these ladies and talk about the issues. School Trustee candidate Curtis Bendig and incumbent councillor Donna MacDonald also stopped in to share a few words of inspiration. Here’s the Seed’s Evan Aagaard‘s great video of the night:

*the first real social media election for our city.

But to this dear reader we cry foul!

Social Media and the entire process of social networking has indeed gone through a flux stage where people have become intensely immersed in it but as we explore it’s boundaries- or lack there of- and discover how big our new networks really are we inevitably experience a contraction. We begin to seek more niche outlets for our interests, we find people we relate to, we follow people who share the information and opinions we individually connect with. We find groups (hubs) that unite under the causes we believe in and eventually we discover that we are not so fractured after all but rather more potentially connected than ever before.

The operative word here is “potentially.” It’s easy to look at all the choice available in social media and feel overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of it all. Where does one start? How does one find their perfect little niche in all of that rollicking madness and then somehow translate it into real world encounters?

Stop. Whittle it down. Who are you? What is your speciality? What is your passion? What kind of people do you want to meet? These are not rhetorical questions! Write them down and take some time to answer them. Know yourself and what you want to find, be it professionally or socially.  Now explore what’s available via the online world and choose your groups accordingly.  Here are a few key places to start:

LinkedIn Groups:

LinkedIn Groups provide a great place to join professional conversations related to your profession.  Because everyone’s credentials are easily viewable via their public LinkedIn profiles it’s easy to see who you’re really talking to, what their background is and whether their qualified to be answering your question or participating in your conversation. Moreover you can easily start your own professional discussion group and attract potential clients and peers into it by offering free advice and opinion, thereby  promoting your expertise to a wider audience.  Check out add on applications Lunchmeet and Sonar as they are great tools for meeting up with members of your Linked In network in the real world.

Posterous Spaces

A share-anything-style Blog service turned niche Social Networking platform, Posterous has been re-designed from the ground up to allow users to literally start their own mini social networks centered around specific interests and topics.  It’s this re-envisioning that has made Posterous truly relevant to the new age of niche social media. Imagine Facebook but with a focus exclusively on bird watching, or small engine repair or ear wax sculpture, whatever suits your fancy there’s probably a Posterous Space for it populated by users of a certain ilk and if there isn’t you can start one and welcome you’re brethren into it.  While Posterous Spaces are not meant to create real world encounters per say, the niche nature of each network makes this almost inevitable. After all wouldn’t you want to meet that special someone who can really appreciate your ear wax Venus di Milo?

Meet Up:

Now here’s the pinnacle of them all when it comes to social networking as a means of real world encounters. Meet Up’s sole purpose is to arrange just that- meet ups, actual face to face interactions, usually with complete strangers (at least initially) who share a common interest, sports, philosophy, movies, business, you name it. When you create an account you’ll be asked to input your location and postal / zip code. Meet Up will then give you an entire overview of all the meet ups happening in your area and you can then browse through them based on topic.  A calendar on the home page provides you with the upcoming dates of different meet-ups and a Facebook integration option shows you which of your Facebook friends are attending which meet-ups.   When you create a meet up you’re even asked to check a box stating that you “pledge to create real face to face communities.”

Ultimately we are all looking for more intimate and common relations with each other, social media hasn’t detracted from that it has only given us a staggering amount of choice to accomplish it. But if you know yourself and your personal and business goals your online network can become a tremendously powerful referral source to achieve those valuable face-to-face experiences.

If you’re a business owner you have to strike a balance between these two extremes. On the one hand you want to be careful about what you’re publicizing online as everything can have a potentially positive or negative impact on your business, on the other hand, today’s online consumer expects you to be forthcoming and transparent with your information as a sign of credibility and so you must have an easily searchable and consistant online persona.

So what’s a business owner to do? Here are 4 tips to help you groom the most professional online YOU:

1. Create A Global Avatar:

Nearly every Social Network requires that you upload a profile photo to your account. Putting a face to the name creates trust and
says you’re a real person and not a fly-by-night huckster. Now you could just use that snap shot of you doing that awesome keg stand from back when you were in college… but you’re a business owner remember? Everything (yes everything!) you put out there reflects on your business so choose a photo that conveys the personality and professionalism of your company. If you’re really serious about this, hire a portrait photographer who can really capture you in your best light. Once you’ve got your perfect photo, sync it across all your various social media accounts, particularly Google+ (more on that later). Finally create an account with Gravatar, a web service that creates a globally recognized avatar (photo) that follows you from site to site, appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog.  This will help identify your posts on blogs and web forums and give credibility to the content you’re posting.

2. Unify Your Bios

Spend some time crafting the perfect, universal bio. It doesn’t have to be long, maybe just a paragraph but it should describe your education, interests, and what led you to your field of expertise or the creation of your business and don’t be afraid to boast a little, you’re selling your business in your bio as much as you’re selling yourself. Upload this bio to all of your public social media accounts and take particular care with Google+ the newest of the social networks and perhaps one of the most relevant for business owners as your Google+ profile will usually be the very first hit that comes up if someone Google’s your name, which brings us to our next tip:

3. Google Yourself!

As the great rhapsodic philosopher ‘Ice Cube’ once said, “Check yo self before you wreck yo self.” Or in other words know what’s out there about you so that you can catch anything out of date, or erroneous. We’re getting to that stage where social media is beginning to build up a strata, old accounts on old networks, perhaps created years ago and since abandoned but still very easily discoverable by potential customers or business contacts have the potential to paint a very inaccurate portrait of who you are today. So conduct a Google search of your name or business on a routine (i.e. weekly) basis to see what comes up. Since Google now includes social media results within it’s regular search results you will get an instant snap shot of everything you’ve put up online as well as everything people are saying about you, hopefully catching anything inconsistent or out of date before it becomes embarrassing.

4. Share the Story of Your Business

Last but not least adopt the mantra that everything you share should progress the story of your business. Every business has a story or some might say a “personality” that changes and evolves as it grows yet always retains a few core elements.  Apple is known for it’s unique design philosophy, Nike upholds the resilience of athletic determination. What you share, be it comments, photos, videos or links should in some way extend the brand identity of your business even if you’re not directly promoting your product or service. If you own a landscaping company then share photos and videos of your favorite local gardens. If you own an art gallery post your thoughts and insights about your favorite painters. Creating a well groomed online persona is about sharing the best of who you are and if you’re a business owner that should extend easily into who you are as an entrepreneur.

True story:

His name is Gordon. I requested to change the date, Gordon happily accommodated with a flurry of quick taps, informed me of the additional surcharge (less than I expected) and wished me a happy flight. Total talk time from dial to disconnect: 1 minute 38 seconds.  The service was fast, succinct and delivered with a warm and familiar cheer as though he knew me as an old friend. I’ve spoken with other Flightcentre.ca agents in the past and they’ve given me a similar level of care and familiarity.

A funny smile crept across my face and I realized I was beaming with that bemused afterglow that comes on when things go exactly your way and the service or product you’ve payed for actually delivers on all of its promises (sometimes described in the businesses world as the Holy Grail of good customer relationship management).

Using my iPhone (and the airport’s free wi-fi) I jump on to Facebook and look up FlightCentre.ca’s page. I find it immediately. They have 8500+ likes. I not only like their page but I leave a positive comment on their wall:

I’ve had a great experience, super friendly customer service and no hassle bookings – thanks to Gordon at the Vernon office.

I sign off and board my flight. Total transaction time from phone call to Facebook feedback: under 5 minutes.

(Anecdote’s Caveat) I have NEVER given positive customer feedback before to any company, about any service, product or experience. EVER.

Why?

Well it”s not that I haven’t been treated well before in my various dealings with theconsumer world. Certainly the opportunity has existed in the past, mentioning that helpful store cashier to her manager, dropping off a heart-felt note in the company suggestion box, emailing the client support account etc etc. I guess the channels available to me never piqued my interest nor the time delay and murkiness of what actually happens to my correspondence once it’s received. But a social media response offered me an entirely different avenue.

The flightcentre.ca Facebook page gave me a forum where I could not only express my satisfaction of the company’s service but publicly reward the specific agent who helped me (remember people do business with people not companies). Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the entire transaction was how easy and accessible it was. I was already going on Facebook, checking up on the Flightcentre.ca page was just an afterthought. They had presence in a social space I was using anyway and that made it incredibly convenient (for me) to translate my positive experience into valuable customer feedback for them.

Now here’s where it gets really interesting: when I went back to check on the Flightcentre page later I discovered another user, one who had not had such a positive experience, had left a disparaging comment on my post accusing me of working for Flightcentre and calling my positive comment bogus. I engaged her and explained that I was simply a satisfied customer from my own personal experience. Maybe she did have a bad transaction, it’s really not my concern. I only know what happened to me.  But in this context I am now not only leaving a great response for the company but actively defending it from its detractors within a public forum. The day before I couldn”t have given two licks about Flightcentre, now I’m acting as its surrogate PR champion.

Are you beginning to see the importance of maintaing a strong  PR presence within the social media sphere? I am perhaps the world’s most apathetic consumer and yet here I am actively participating in a public conversation available to all my friends and the thousands of people who officially like this company, generating the sort of word-of-mouth headwind most companies would die for, and it didn’t cost Flightcentre a dime!

Good customer service + active (and savvy) social media presence = self-generating marketing powerhouse.

On the surface this doesn’t seem terribly ingenius, Google has been tracking our search requests to better target advertising at us for years but when you search something like a tweet you’re getting access to a much more intimate expression of a person’s sentiments, not to mention whatever detailed info they might have in their account bios and how many people are following them.

DataSift serves both big corporations and individuals. Customers can define sophisticated filters, for instance to find all tweets by men who are interested in a new product and live in London. Charges for DataSift depend on the filter’s complexity and the amount of data delivered.

Privacy addicts may cry foul but these companies aren’t searching for anything that isn’t already public, they’re just doing it on a much bigger scale than any individual user could ever do. What’s interesting is that along with data aggregation firms like DataSift and Gnip there are also offshoot, sub-industries forming like Lexalytics that specialize in analyzing the data to try and extract meaning from all those zany hashtags and RTs.

As I’ve always said the use of social media data is already starting to mirror how financial firms use commerce data:

Financial firms have become interested in feeding such data into the algorithms they use to make investment decisions, says Chris Moody, Gnip’s president. And corporations are increasingly keen on combining social-media data with customer information.

Along with services like Klout and the SBI we seem to be moving ever closer to an era where social data will be measured and valued just as much as financial data and may even become synonymous for some businesses.

Here at the Seed, we’re fond of LastPass, a handy password manager that can be installed on your Mac, PC, iPhone and iPad. Since it synchronizes each device to a central Password Vault, which can be accessed by one password, it’s a pre

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Keychain Access (Mac Only)

Sxipper

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4865

1Password

Keeper

http://www.callpod.com/products/keeper

RoboForm (Windows)

KeePass Password Safe

http://keepass.info/

LastPass

LastPass is a free online password manager and Form Filler that makes your web browsing easier and more secure.

LastPass supports Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari for Mac as a browser extension (and Opera, Safari for Windows, Opera Mini and more via Bookmarklets).

Browser Password Managers

Google Chrome

Firefox

Internet Explorer

Do you get panic attacks when you go on to Twitter? Does the thought of reading (or writing) yet another blog post make you’re eye twitch involuntarily?  Does your brain clench up in a vice-like mental seizure when you scan through your Facebook newsfeed? Does the thought of becoming a member on yet another Social Network make you pee just a little bit?

If any of those symptoms sound accurate you may be  one of a growing number of SMOS sufferers- good intelligent people trying to make sense of the avalanche of information being dumped on them every day courtesy of the exponentially expanding Social Media Universe.  But fear not! For this is a benevolent universe well aware of the challenges of it’s own consumption.

As membership and content sharing have exploded across the various networks the major players have been responding by helping users sort through the content, manage the information and keep the SMOS symptoms to a minimum. It only requieres a little leg work on the individual user to customize their social media accounts and turn the gushing spray of words and pixels into a nice manageable trickle.

The key, is to know your niche.

1. Aggregate!

Google Reader, the gator of the aggregators is a great tool to filter the news and blog content that you’re most interested in. By subscribing to the news sites you want to gather content from and even the specific categories within those news sites (i.e. Health, tech, arts etc) you can narrow down the stream of information to just the topics you’re interested vs. slogging through a heap of sites and articles every day just to find one that wets your whistle.  Try subscribing (via RSS) to 4-5 of your favorite news sources and Google Reader will aggregate them into an orderly list of headlines for your quick perusal. In this new age of social information networking we each have a responsibility to be a curator of the information we feel is the most important to ourselves and our peers. When you aggregate news streams you start this process, what you share from what you aggregate filters the information down even further, makes it more niche and thus more relevant to a smaller more engaged group of people (and they’ll thank you for it)

2. Customize your accounts

Recently many of the major Social Networks have released updates to their systems to help users manage the flow of information coming across their news feeds. Facebook has improved the friends list feature so that you can choose which friend’s updates find their way to the top of your feed, so instead of 400 different updates streaming across your newsfeed every day you can select just your 10 closest (and presumably most relevant) friends. They have also added a feature called “Smart lists” which will auto generate a list of the people you converse with the most.

The list feature in Twitter is a great way to group the most important or relevant people you follow into nice tidy categories (i.e. your favorite thinkers on the subject of sandwich making or Scottish politicians with beards). Thus by reviewing your lists you can get a nice succinct news feed of your most important… er sandwich and beard conversations for the day.

The Circles feature in Google+ was a core component of the service when it rolled out and it has essentially spurred most of the other social networks to rethink how users group and sort through their contacts.  Circles, similar to lists, allow you to group your contacts by association and control what info comes through your news feed, what goes out and to whom, thus a privacy and content management system all in one. Lately we’ve taken such a liking to Google Circles that we’ve created a special “Seed Circle” to act as a team message board, sharing interesting links and productivity tips (as well as inside jokes, embarrassing photos and hangover cures etc).

The important point to take away here is that the major networks recognize their users are starting to feel overwhelmed and are rolling out new features and updates to control the tide of information (and presumably will continue to to so) but it does require each user to take some time (20-30min) to explore the new options and decide how they would like to customize their account.

3. Only Join the networks that provide you with real value

There’s an urge to jump on the bandwagon when a new social network comes out, the hype and marketing machines behind these new services can make it seem like you’ll be the only one out if you don’t have an account but with over 200 social media networks available now and more popping up every day it is simply unrealistic (even for us pros) to be actively engaged in all of them. The best strategy is to take a quick review of new services as they come out, see what others are saying and decide whether the network in question might really be useful to you.

As Twitter becomes more ubiquitous in the business and personal communication landscape it’s almost inevitable that some unscrupulous individuals (or perhaps even organizations) will try to subvert this service for their own gain. Lately we’ve heard from a few clients who have had their twitter accounts essentially hijacked with false tweets posted by someone other than them and when you’re using twitter as one of your avenues for building trust and dialogue with your customers this can be a very scary situation indeed.

This is unfortunately the evolution of spamming, or in other words spamming has now gone social. As the internet has become more secure the bad guys have started to play dirtier and Twitter hacking is on the rise, often with some very high profile sneak attacks as when the NBC News twitter account was hijacked by the Hacker group Script Kiddies days before the recent 9/11 anniversary.

So what should you do if you think your twitter has been compromised and suddenly you’re @You account is spewing out links to Chinese herbal sex pills and free iPad 2′s?

First, don’t panic- twitter is aware of the problem and they’ve got a support process for just this very scenario. There are essentially two scenarios you might encounter 1) Your account has been hijacked with rogue tweets but you still have access to it or 2) your account has been hijacked and you’ve been locked out because the “Twerrorist” has changed your password.

First, let’s look at the steps to take if you still have access to your account.

1. Change your password

If you still have access to your account (i.e. the sinister party in question has not locked you out of it by changing the password) then change the password immediately in the Passwords tab in your Account Settings. You’re best advised to choose a strong password that contains both letters, numbers and even symbols.

2. Revoke Connections

This is where people often get into trouble, there are now so many ways to link our twitter accounts to other online services that we can easily loose track of what services and applications we’ve granted access to and this is “the backdoor” that hackers often use to gain access to our accounts. While logged into your twitter account visit the applications tab  in the Account Settings and review which third-party applications have access to your account and revoke any you don’t recognize.

3. Update your new password in your trusted applications

Of course many of us use trusted third-party applications/services (i.e. Hootsuite, Tweetdeck etc) with our twitter accounts so be sure to update your new twitter password with those applications. Otherwise you may be locked out of your account when those applications make too many failed login attempts.

If your account has been compromised Twitter also recommends taking these additional precautions:

• Delete any unwanted Tweets that were posted while your account was compromised.
• Scan your computers for viruses and malware, especially if unauthorized account behaviors continue to be posted after you’ve changed the password.
• Install security patches for your operating system and applications
• Always use a strong, new password you don’t use elsewhere and would be difficult to guess.
• Visit the Safe Tweeting page for more information on avoiding hacks and phishing.