My Virtual Blog

There is heated debate in the Social Networking circles about those who completely “outsource” social networking response maintenance to another person or company. Recently, comments such as “I just don’t have the time to do it myself” have been made by those doing the outsourcing. Also, comments like “They pay me to do it, so I do it” came from some in the industry who perform this service and believe this is an administrative task and a way to generate revenue.  Others strongly believe that this is a core ethics issue and misrepresents the intent of social networking.

There is no law against hiring someone to represent your social networking initiatives, so the playing field is wide open to do whatever you like in this situation.  However, remember that your social networking presence is all about YOU, who YOU are and what YOU think.  Nobody else in the world can represent your thoughts, opinions, and personality like YOU can, that is, unless they dictate every word to you beforehand. 

The result is that everyone looking at your online presence will not know the real you.  They may not even like your online personality, as it is represented.  To quote Jeffrey Gitomer, author of The Little Black Book of Connections, “All things being equal, people want to do business with their friends.  All things being not quite so equal, people STILL want to do business with their friends”.

Can you afford to take that risk?  Personally, I think NOT.

What do you think?

If you’ve ever created any documentation for a procedure, you know that words are sometimes hard to come by. Pictures, as they say, can express a thousand words.

When creating a “How To” scenario, a picture can mean the difference between a user “getting it” or not. Some people are highly visual and only learn that way. So, if someone were trying to show you how to get from Point A to Point B through a document, which way would work better for you?

Let’s use a simplistic procedure like saving a Word 2007 document to the desktop as an example:

First Example:

Click the Windows looking button on the top left and then click Save As from the File Menu. Then, under “Save a Copy of the Document”, click Word Document. In that box that opens, find the place you want to save it to, and then click save.

Or, perhaps this Second Example might work better:

Click the icon (the Office Button) in the top left of your Word screen that looks like this:

You will see a window that looks like this:

Make the selection as shown by the red arrows by first clicking “Save As” and then “Word Document”.

Now choose the location where you’d like to save your file, such as the “Desktop” as shown here.

Make sure you have the file name that you prefer, as shown in the “File Name Field” and indicated by the green checkmark.

Click the “Save” button indicated by the red arrow.

Your document is now saved to your computer’s desktop.

 As you can see, the second example may be easier to interpret.

One way to capture an entire screen is to use the ALT+Print combination on your keyboard to capture the screen, then use the CTRL+V combination to paste it to a Word document. This is limited, however, to the entire window you are in.

A more robust way to create documentation like this is to use a screen capturing tool. My favorite tool for this is SnagIt by Techsmith. It is very robust allowing you to not only capture windows, but regions, objects, scrolling windows, time delayed menus and more.

Happy documenting!

It used to be that when we wanted to locate goods and/or services, we would look to the Yellow Pages to find local businesses. They were alphabetically listed by category and once a potential was found, we would call or visit them for what we needed. But this is now a virtual world and more times than not customers will turn to the internet to locate their goods and services. Some have turned solely to the internet for all their purchasing needs. Typically, they will choose a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, type a few keywords based on what they’re looking for, hit enter and BAM, 10,000 – 100,000 hits are brought back in the blink of an eye with websites and related items based on what they entered in the search line. A quick scan down the list for a possible choice, a click on the link and you’re instantly visiting the related website. This is today’s shopping experience. It is uncommon for this type of customer to look past the first few pages of the returned result.

If you are a supplier of goods and services, and you have a website, you want YOUR website to show up on the coveted first page of the potential customers search and the one that is clicked on. This is a tall order and most times, your website is found 10, 20 even 50 pages down the list and because of that, it is basically never seen. So how do we get our website viewed by those that don’t already know it exists? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the answer. SEO is a technique of designing your website to be search engine friendly. When you publish your website to the search engines, they use what is called a “Spider” or “Crawler” program to examine your website for things like material content, keywords, links in, links out, links within, age, frequency of maintenance, and this program finds all the places your website is referenced throughout the entire internet. The better your content, the more links and external references that are found, the higher the score assigned to your website and the higher the ranking in the pecking order of results.

A great many business owners are unaware of the potential marketing impact that exists with a website. You should take advantage of all the capabilities that the internet has to offer. This includes not only website design and SEO tuning, but also blogging and social networking. If you invest the time to learn and set up accounts with networking sites like “Facebook”, “Linkedin” and “Twitter”, AND take the time to maintain the information there, it will not only help with your social networking efforts to build contacts and business relationships, but it will also help with SEO for your website. At the end of the day, you want your name and your website mentioned online as often as possible and in as many places as possible.

If you don’t have the knowledge or the resources to do these things on your own, you should enlist the assistance of someone who is trained in this area. You’ve spent time and money on putting up a website, now go to the next level and actually use this tool and the internet to your maximum advantage.

Thoughts?