Social Media as a Paradigm Shift Back to Old-Fashioned Trust-Based Business

There is an excellent article in the North Colorado Business report discussing how social media fit into the business marketing spectrum.

http://www.ncbr.com/article.asp?id=100250

In agrarian societies throughout history, business was done through word of mouth and referrals. If you needed to buy a pair of shoes, you didn't look in the sale paper or shop around -- you asked your friends which shoemaker they used and trusted their advice.

Only since the printing press have businesses been able to "mass market" their products. Due to factors such as the industrial revolution at the turn of the 19th century and the move to the suburbs during the mid-20th century, and implementation of automated technology systems, businesses have been increasingly isolated from their customers.

I believe that the social media represent a paradigm shift back to the agrarian society model, where business will once again be done through networking and referrals. Businesses will need to relearn how to directly interact with their customers.

I personally welcome this shift and am excited about what it holds for the future of commerce.

Track Your Clients and Prospects with Google Alert

[This is a wonderful idea I received from Patrick Williams at You Rock Communications. What a great way to keep current on what people in your network are doing!]

If information is power, you have to know where to get the most up-to-date information to help you become a powerful sales professional

To get the latest information about your prospects, customers, industry and trends, let me recommend Google Alert. You can tell Google to pay attention to certain phrases or names and every day you will get a report on anything new that has been posted on the internet.

If you want to know about a CEO's activities, background, and affiliations, set an Alert for his name.

If you want to know the latest about a particular company, set an Alert for it's name.

If you want to stay current on industry trends, set an Alert for whichever industry you want to serve. Or maybe, you can set an Alert for the industry you are in.

This is a tool I use to keep track of my consulting clients, as well as trends in sales and marketing.

Use the information you get from Google Alerts to help you be an expert in your industry (or on your customers), and you'll be ahead of 90% of your competition.

Alternative Marketing Experts To Be Featured As Thurston County Chamber Media Sponsor

On May 13, Alternative Marketing Experts will be the media sponsor at the Thurston County Chamber's montly lunch Forum. Russ Alman will have a booth on display, and also give a short presentation to the audience.

This month's Forum topic is the use of social media for business marketing. This is a hot topic right now. Social media are a cost-effective way to keep in touch with prospects and customers, and also develop community, regional, or even national awareness of any size business.

I know first hand the effectiveness of social media. Since I have become actively involved in Facebook, Twitter and Biznik, I have seen an increase in referrals. I have also found that people in the community who know me find me more approachable -- like they know me better. As most experienced salespeople know, building a customer and referral base is all about building a trust level with those in your sphere of influence. The social media are a highly effective tool for doing this.

The Chamber Forum is hosted at the Worthington Center at St. Martin's University, 5300 Pacific Ave., in Lacey from 11:30 am to 1 pm. Cost is $18 for members and $30 for non-members, and includes lunch. You may purchase tickets at http://www.thurstonchamber.com.

Social Media in Plain English

Here are some great videos by Commoncraft explaining many of the social media/Web 2.0 types in plain English. (Thanks for the tip, CreativeTechs!) If you'd like to see all of Commoncraft's great "plain English" videos, you can find them on YouTube.

Social Networking



Social Media



Social Bookmarking




LinkedIn



Twitter



Blogs



Podcasting



Photo Sharing



RSS

iPhone backups and Time Machine

Today I was working with a Mac client who has been using his iPhone for 4 months. He had been adding all of his contacts into the iPhone, but had not synchronized them. Unfortunately, when I configured his computer, his iPhone and Marketcircle Daylite to sync, I misunderstood and forced the first synch to overwrite the iPhone's contacts and calendars. Needless to say, when he realized the error, he was pretty anxious.

I tried doing a restore from the existing backup, but since we had already synched, the backup also had the incorrect data. I was about to tell him that his 4 months of data entry had gone down the tubes.

Then it occurred to me that we had set up a Time Machine backup on his computer, and I had an idea: Since the iPhone is backed up to the computer, those backups must be part of the Time Machine backup, which must mean that there are historical iPhone backups on the backup volume. I just had to figure out where to look.

After seaching the Apple discussion boards and Google, I found this article: http://bit.ly/QaZhI. It turns out that the iTunes stores the backup in the user's home folder at /Library/Application Support/MobileSync/ There is a folder full of backup data there.

I opened the MobileSync folder and launched Time Machine. Sure enough, there were regular backups! I went back to the morning backup, restored the files (replacing the newer ones). Then I ran a standard sync from iTunes, and voila: the iPhone was restored with all of his contacts, calendars and photos intact.

I wish there was a more intuitive way to restore your iPhone from historical backups, but it was exciting to learn that they are there.

Have a MacBook Pro that won't sleep? I may have a cure...

I have had erratic sleep behavior with my MacBook Pro 17" since I bought it. Sometimes I lift the lid and the screen stays black, even though it powers up. Then it goes to sleep again after about a minute, and if I press any key, the screen comes on and I'm able to enter my password.

Other times, the password dialog comes up, but when I enter it, the computer goes to sleep again.

Other times, I enter my password at the dialog, and then the dialog comes up again!

And occasionally -- maybe once a week -- I just can't get it to come out of sleep properly at all and have to give it the 10 second power button salute...

After doing some online reading tonight, I learned that although Apple does not build it into the GUI, there are terminal commands that allow you to control the type of sleep mode invoked by the computer.

You can disable the "safe sleep" capability and go back to old-style sleep. There is an excellent article on this at:

http://www.windley.com/archives/2007/10/fixing_macbook_pro_sleep_problems.shtml

I have changed my MacBook Pro sleep settings back to the old style sleep mode (setting 0), and so far my laptop seems to be behaving perfectly. I may have lost my ability to hibernate and battery swap while asleep, but I don't have to wait 2 minutes for my laptop to fully go to sleep, and it seems to be waking up correctly every time.

I do still have problems with it coming out of sleep if it gets bumped with the lid shut. I've read this is a defect related to the magnetic latch slightly disengaging when the computer is bumped. I may try disabling the automatic wake-up when the lid is opened to resolve this issue.

I hope this helps someone else. It's been driving me crazy for almost 2 years now :)

As a followup, here is another article with a list of all the "pmset" commands you can tweak from terminal: http://www.askdavetaylor.com/disable_wake_on_lid_open_on_macbook.html

Hardcore Online Networkers -- Take a look at Yoono

I'm fairly new to the whole online social networking thing. I know this sounds crazy for someone who has been in the computer industry for 20 years -- I had my own business website up in 1995. I made a conscious effort to stay out of mySpace and similar services because I knew it would suck up a lot of my time... and I already have enough of a problem managing that!

But we're certainly at the point now where online social networking is a viable way to connect with others professionally, which was my trigger to jump on the bandwagon.

I've been working on my online presence on Facebook and LinkedIn for a couple of months now, and am starting to develop the other aspects of my online social arena, including blogging, tweeting and bookmarking... and I'm quickly realizing that it can all become difficult to keep track of.

Yesterday I was looking for an IM client that would also feed me my Twitter connections, and came across this nifty service called Yoono (www.yoono.com). It's part social networking site, part Firefox plug-in, and it's primarily touted as a convenient way to share online links with your network.

But what I am particularly interested in is how Yoono connects and integrates all of your social networking, IM connections, blogging, and tweeting into one convenient sidebar. Visualize one feed displaying all of your activity in all of your online connections, and you're starting to get the picture.

I've been playing around with Yoono today, and while there are still a few holes, I think it's going to save me a ton of time. Now I have my IM access for AIM, Yahoo, and Windows Live right in my browser. I have my contact list from all my IM accounts, Facebook and Myspace in one searchable list. I can post a tweet to Yoono, Twitter and Facebook simultaneously. And I can drop blogs into Blogger right from my sidebar, including images, videos and other multimedia files.

There's a lot more to it than this, but these are the features I'll immediately use.

The only major drawbacks I see right now are lack of support for multiple IM accounts on the same service, and a limited number of services supported for both IM and social networking sites. Hopefully they'll add support for LinkedIn, Plaxo, and some of the other, newer services soon.

If you're a serious online networker, you should really take a look at this. I think it will help you get better organized, and save you a lot of time keeping all of your connections up to date.

You can download the Firefox plug-in from the Yoono home page.