This is a great little article by Carrie Kerpen  of Likable Media discussing whether Social media is a career.  Many people say that it isn’t and that it will only ever be one part of a job,  some even go as far as to suggest that it will die out at some point.   However I think that this is a short sighted view.  If you truly understand social media and in particular social media marketing,  then you know that it has changed the marketing and advertising sectors. It is certainly here to stay and just like you have specialists in IT you will have specialists in social.   It is vital these days that companies prepare and follow social media strategies. A company without one is increasingly ignoring a large part of the market which will, if not already, become an expensive mistake.

Take a look at what the article says.  I would be glad to hear your views on the subject.  Does social media in the workplace have a future or is it doomed to fail?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/carriekerpen/2013/07/25/is-social-media-a-career/

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Yet another great post from Dave Kerpen . I have no idea how he manages to write such useful and informative articles.  He is well worth following on both twitter and LinkedIn.  Check the article out here: http://t.co/r17kBBDxDJ

The post How successful people think appeared first on The Daily Witter.

This is an interesting article on social media ROI,  something that is becoming more and more important especially in the business world.  Check it out here: http://t.co/J5UOX2X9M4

The post Authenticity and ROI in Social Media: Are Both Possible? appeared first on The Daily Witter.

Currently the BBC is showing their latest series of The Apprentice.  As usual it invokes the need in people (especially me) to shout at the TV.  In fact,  the BBC have surpassed themselves in finding the most inappropriate business people to be on the show.  But at least we can take it as an example of how not to impress in business.

First of all let us make it clear that it seems the show has run its course. Being honest, this happened after the second series.   Think me wrong,  then just take a look at the show’s title.  Apprentice means that you are going to follow someone and learn something from them.  Yet Lord Sugar is no longer giving the people the chance of becoming his apprentice.  Of course this could be because he secretly realises how useless the contestants  are likely to be and doesn’t want them anywhere near his businesses.

But seriously,  how can you expect someone to invest 250k in your business when you not only show no business acumen but cannot even scrape together  enough common sense. To start the series you could have blamed this pressure of the tasks or the challenge that they give.  Maybe they just needed to get rid of the week people or show a bit of entertainment.  Yet now we are into the serious weeks.  Last night they had to design a ready meal.  This was a great challenge and a good one to test the contestants, however it seemed that again,  common sense and business acumen were thrown out of the windows.

One team had a team member who runs a cake business clearly lying and saying she couldn’t cook and thus they decided that they would put the person who actually couldn’t cook in the kitchen.   The other team relied on a father to design and come up with packaging for a kids meal. They did the correct thing and designed a meal that appealed to kids,  they even tested it and the kids loved it.  Excellent you make think,  perfect business logic.  Well no not really;they forgotten take into consideration who would be buying the product. Kids may like something but if the parents don’t, it will not be purchased. If you are trying to appeal to both kids and parents,  how can you design packaging with a skull on it and call it dangerous dinners.

Forget about the parents for a minute,  how can you expect supermarkets and shops to stock something that is called dangerous and carries the international symbol recognised around the world as being a symbol for hazardous and dangerous substances.  This was a classic case of getting to focused and not truly understanding your target market.

Anyway as the weeks go by The Apprentice confirms my belief more and more that if these candidates had truly successful businesses and were actually business leaders then why would they need to go to Lord Sugar for the capital.  If their business plans were credible enough and they were serious about business,  then they should be able and would probably prefer to seek investment else where.  I suppose that point in itself shows that they really don’t have any business knowledge or acumen and all we can take from the show is lessons in how not to impress in business.

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SEO Agency Vs. Content Marketing Agency: The Differences & Why They Matter via @sejournal bit.ly/11GvyI8 #seo #content

Tweeted by @jeffsheehan

This is a great little article. Very informative.

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Inferno  is the latest of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon books.  Ever since The Da Vinci Code, and especially since the Hollywood film of the same name, Dan brown’s books have been very successful even though he is not a very prolific writer and does not release books very quickly.  It is in fact 4 years since his last book, so how does his new book- Inferno – stand up to review?

I will admit from the outset that whenever I read a Dan Brown book, I find it very hard to put down.  In fact, I seem to go off into the world of Robert Langdon whenever I read the books.  The last of Brown’s books- The Lost Symbol – I read on the beach in Nice during our summer holiday the year it came out.  Inferno came out on the 16th May this year and I admit I forgot that it had come out until I saw piles of the book being sold for £9 at Tesco in hardback.    I had read a taster a few weeks before and was very close to buying it there and then.  Being the adult that I am, I managed to control myself and check whether it was cheaper online in Kindle or electronic format.  I like reading paper especially hardback books, however the electronic version was £2 cheaper and I thought it would be easier to read on the train.  This would have been of concern had I taken time to read the book and had any of it left to read on the train.   This was not the case.  I started on Saturday and finished on Sunday,  like all the others I was unable to put it down and took every opportunity to read it, stretching long into the night.

So apart from appealing to my addictive nature for a good book, is Dan Brown’s book really a good read or just one for the fans?  As you can probably guess, I really enjoyed reading this book, and although it had similar features too all the other books; the mistrust, the running from authorities, the symbols, and the questions, this had something different.  For a change it seem not to be overtly religious.  It did not espouse a moralistic view, well not entirely and seemed to be based more in science and art than secret societies.

What it did have in similar to the other books were all the twists and turns.  Just as you thought you had worked out the baddies and worked out what was happening.  Just when you thought yourself extremely clever for working everything out, Dan Brown changed it.  As usual, it was also very fast paced and never really stood still for long.

Many reviewers have criticised Dan Brown for his writing style, complaining that it is not very skilled and could never be considered a literary masterpiece, however I think these people miss the point.  I have said it before and will again,  for be what makes a good book is not the technical brilliance of the writing or language but rather the ability of the author to transport you from the real world to the world of their book.  For me the whole point of reading is to act as an escape from our real lives good or bad; to allow us to dream and to think in a way that we would never normally think.

I hate books that make us think too much and conversely I hate ones that treat the reader like they are idiots.  Like on TV, as in modern literature there is a great dumbing-down in standards and a tendency to treat the modern reader like an idiot.  For this reason, I often really enjoy classic literature.  However, occasionally – as with this book- there are  some modern books that treat the reader with respect and don’t really seem to care whether they make money or not.  You get this feeling with Dan Brown.  He writes because he wants to tell a story and he wants to get a message across,  although it is usual a blockbuster book, you get the feeling that this is the least important aspect.

Anyway I will not go on as I am not a good reader and unlike Brown, I am sure I am not keeping your attention very well.  I highly recommend picking up a copy of this book whether it is in hardback or electronic format.  One thing I would suggest is not to get it in audio format as it is so much nicer reading it for yourself.  You can pick up a hardback copy for around £9 and the kindle version is available from the link below.

Inferno – Kindle Format 

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Supposedly our NHS service is the envy of the whole world.  It is free at point of source and you can get treated for anything.  Well to be honest this seems to be the biggest and best “Doctor,Doctor” joke there is.  The NHS was a wonderful idea, don’t get me wrong.  When it was originally thought of in the post-war years, it was a marvelous thing providing free medical care at source whether you were rich or poor.   However we all seem to have forgotten that it was designed for a population that was greatly smaller than it is today.

Why am I complaining about the system when people have been complaining for years and saying the same thing without change.  No reason really; just that I thought I would put my penny’s worth in.  So here goes.  I have been trying to get an appointment with my GP for a while now.  First of all you cannot get an appointment for the same day unless you call at 8:30 on the day and try your luck.  Second if you want to plan in advance you now have to wait between two and three weeks for an appointment.  Look I know I can wait and my need for the doctor is not urgent, but why do they have to have such a long waiting list.  My surgery thought they would be really clever and allow you to book an appointment up to six weeks in advance over the internet.  Why would anyone know that they need the doctor six weeks in advance.  It seems that this system has only made it harder to get an appointment at a regular time.  Maybe people have decided that it is better to book appointments just in case.   You never know when you might get a cold and need to see the doctor.

So I decided yesterday that rather than calling in the morning, I would try in the afternoon.  I must admit I was lucky I got straight through.  The only problem was that they had one appointment left that afternoon and it was at 4:15pm.  Who can make an appointment at that time?  Certainly not the working population.  Maybe it is only for those that are elderly or who don’t work?  I asked how late they were open in the evenings.  They said until 6pm.  Great, so for most of the population who work, they have 30 minutes to be in with a chance to get an appointment.

Oh well I thought, don’t get stressed just take some time off tomorrow morning to get an appointment in the morning.  This is what I did,  I was told that the only appointment available was at 11:30,  and this was only after having tried to get through for 15 minutes (maybe the internet is not so bad).  It seems clear to me that these days the NHS is for people who are either elderly, looking after children, or on benefits.  So in other words, the NHS is for those who either no longer pay taxes or who have never paid taxes.  Don’t get me wrong,  I am not against this, but why can’t the Government and the population at large just admit this to themselves so that we can begin to rebuild the system and sort the problems out.  The solution seems simple to me.  Those who are not in work should be able to use the NHS for which we contribute (after all pensioners have contributed all their lives), and those that work should be given private health care schemes paid for as a benefit from their employers.

This might provide a two-tier system, but it seems that the one-tier system is not working and on its last legs.  Why don’t we take the strain off the NHS can have a private system that employers are encouraged to use. They could be persuaded to do this if their contribution to employee NI was reduced.

Anyway I think something needs to be done, either private health care or raising a specific health care tax.  As for me, hopefully the Doctor may call me at some point today, as arranged.  Let’s wait and see.

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For those of you who, like me, try to write a blog, this is a very useful quick read for your journeys home from work.

How to Write a More Sucessful Blog Post – Dave Kerpen (CEO of Likeable Media)

Dave Kerpen, as usual, makes some good points which although fairly obvious, we all often forget.  When was the last time you considered the share-ability of anything you posted online? I for one, cannot remember.  Did you know that on most sites, and especially Facebook, even your comments can be shared and liked.

This is just a short post with a heads up.  I hope to do these sort of posts more often for the daily witter section of my blog.  I hope you will find them useful.  Let me know what you think of the articles I post to and whether you agree or disagree with the author and myself. If you find anything which you think others might find useful, please feel free to put into comments on relevant blog posts here or send me the link to info@thedailywitter.co.uk

If you are on twitter I would highly recommend following Likeable Media’s handle @LikeableMedia and @DaveKerpen.

Please also take the time to leave a comment here, subscribe or follow me on @p_s_macphail

The post How to Write More Successful Blog Posts appeared first on The Daily Witter.

As I will be travelling a lot in the next  few months for work, I have had a conundrum to solve.  My Samsung Galaxy 8.9 is a really good tablet and very light, perfect for carrying on the metro and travelling around.  However the office support on android is sorely lacking especially if , like my company, we use a non-standard font.  So I decided to invest in a new windows 8 device, but which one?  I had a choice either to continue with a tablet or to move to a netbook.  I needed something light but that I could easily work on for fairly long periods of time.

So eventually after some research, I knocked it down to either the new Asus windows 8 table, or the Asus S200E.  Well this isn’t quite truthful.  I kind of stumbled upon the genius that is the S200E.  I was in the computer shop looking to up the RAM of a little Asus netbook, when I came across this gorgeous touchscreen netbook.  Although I wanted the tablet, the netbook seemed to tick all the boxes and was much more powerful than the tablet.

I have been using Windows 8 virtually since its release.  It is an interesting system but before having a  touchscreen I really did not see the big deal.  It was good but not spectacular.  Having used it with the touchscreen,  Windows 8 has definitely been designed to cater for the touch aspect of new devices.  It is amazing!  I have also got Office 365 which again I thought was just an upgrade for 2010. Oh how I was wrong, every office programme can either be set for use with a mouse or touch, and in touch mode it is stunning even if you have less room for typing,  You can even pinch zoom the documents.

I am still exploring the device and what Windows 8 truly has to offer, and I must admit I am rather impressed, however it would be nice if the high quality apps were slightly cheaper and more free versions.  The prices are set more like Apple apps than Android Apps.

So down to specifications:  Intel i3 Processor of 1.4Ghz, 4Gb RAM, 320GB HDD, 1.4kg, 3USBs, HDMI port, VGA port. stunning sound, 5 hours battery life, 11.6″ touchscreen. The netbook has only thing missing which is a dvd drive and frankly, who uses one of those these days.  Oh another very useful thing is that the plug has no huge block as most laptops do by a charger like the Nexus or other small Asus computers.

In the UK this gorgeous, sexy, slimline device retails at around the £400 mark.  Although on the expensive side, if you look at its nearest rivals especially in the touchscreen market you will see how reasonable it actually is.

Anyhow, I want to go off and play some more with my new gadget, so I will be back to post very soon.  Hopefully sooner than normally given how much easier it is to use WordPress on this netbook than on my tablet.

The post Asus S200E Netbook – My new toy appeared first on The Daily Witter.

You may notice some changes, hopefully subtle ones to my website.  Please let me know what you think of them and whether I should keep or change them.  I would be really grateful for any suggestions or opinions left in the comment section below.  The more I get, the better I can make the site.  Thank you for your continued support.

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