Archive for the ‘General’ Category

1. I am rarely as brilliant on the course as I am in my mind. On the course and off there is nothing like a close friend telling you how badly you suck then helping you improve.

2. Tee shots are like business connections – some fly straight and long. Others make you trek through mud and briars and some get so lost you elect to replace them because they weren’t worth the continued trouble trying to find them. The ones to avoid are the ones you can see but take you out of bounds.

3. Playing in bad weather requires dedication and love for the game. Playing in driving rain storms with gail force winds are the times when you own the course – there is little competition in adverse conditions.

4. Playing with a good natured group and scoring badly beats playing with grinches and scoring well.

5. Nothing beats using the combined talents of 4 mediocre players in a best ball match. Pick team members you like and who have talent for the game and there is no stopping you.

Instead of  GOLF think BUSINESS. You’ll get it – hang in there!

Just in case you have not heard this is going to be an awesome event. It’s in Atlanta, Georgia at a very accessible Georgia Tech Research Center at 250 14th Street. The 2 day event promises to deliver in depth, nearly one-to-one exposure to businesses who want to or already understand the necessity and power of WordPress as a CMS and blogging platform.

The Business of WordPress Conference will be held at the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s Conference Center on 14th Street in Midtown Atlanta. Designed as a high-tech event space, the GTRI Conference Center is home to more than 300 events each year; over 10,000 square feet of event space and copious free parking in the attached parking deck – it is the ideal place for this Conference.

Follow this link for full details. Contact me for discounted admission – there are only 10 discounted admission tickets available to you through me at this time so act quickly.

Geek euphoria includes never being disengaged. Clear’s 4G nationwide account, which switches to 3G in areas outside the 4G network, promises a big piece of that. Honestly I have been wanting Clear since a sales rep first popped into my office several months ago but just now found a way to get it included in my corporate budget. Bingo – I’m now wired … er, wirelessed.

My supervisor ordered two 4G dongles and accounts on Monday and they arrived today. Since she is in Valdosta, about 160 miles away, I got to play with mine first. Nanny boo boo. Of course my idea is to make it prove itself and quickly. I’m headed on a 4 hours driving trip on Thursday afternoon, actually I’ll be the passenger, and plan on giving it a try several times on the trip. From right here in my office in Atlanta, however, it is fairly impressive. Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who has opened a business has likely had friendly criticism. Family, friends and neighbors are always available to point out your errors and shortcomings. Occasionally a sage will offer wisdom that is constructive, innovative and empowering. Your competitors and customers may not always be so kind.

What happens when your brand comes under attack?

With today’s powerful search capabilities almost everything posted on line is indexed and readily available for global consumption. The same tools that can lead to your success can also lead to your demise. Just ask United how they have changed the way they handle customer complaints post “United Breaks Guitars”.

So you are not United and you are a local plumbing company. Here is a fictional account of what may happen in a brand attack and a brief on a possible response (the names are fictitious to my knowledge). This?fictional? post may be found on a fictional customer complaints site: Read the rest of this entry »

Back in the mid 1990s when I was approached by Swarovski crystal collector’s club Crystal Fanatics to create their member’s only site I was relegated to tons of hand coding using a mixture of Perl and JavaScript (which as very new) to hack out a fairly advanced site including a forum with trees! Imagine the awe my client would have! Negative. Though Pat King was one of my favorite clients she was just barely awed at my greatness. Which is okay because I do remember her delivering a fairly sizable remittance. Not enough (in my mind) by far too much (in her mind)!

Try out the forum mentioned in this story here

Today is a completely different story. This week alone I have shown you the Facebook “Like” feature, the Twitter feature and a couple of weeks ago the Zemanta feature. Not to mention there is a plugin for almost everything in WordPress … all for free. Now I have another very (did I say very?) simple solution that works on any (almost) website even simpler than some of the other plugins.

Want a forum on your WordPress blog? Call me and I will create one for you for around $3500. Fully customized with membership levels, administrative levels and a bucket full of other features. Or, click here for a robust (yet simple) forum app that will run in virtually any website with no cost, no programming or coding experience and within, no joke, two minutes.

The forum is indeed feature rich and allows the user to insert links, images, quotes and even embed other application calls within posts! The site owner (must be the first to login) has full control with the ability to create categories, make a post sticky, close a topic, ?browse members, assign moderator, ban users, and choose how to let people login. I logged in with my Twitter account but Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and other choices are available.

Catch? Yes! Only the 15 most recent topics are available (plenty), only the first 200 replies to every topic are viewable (a lot) and you can have only 5 forums (cool) without upgrading. Biggest drawback? I haven’t seen an affiliate program to pay me for my space writing about them. But hey!

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For well over a decade the web has been powered in great part by three pieces of server side software: Apache, PHP and MySQL. If you knew (know) how to use these tools you should expect to be able to create amazing server side solutions for yourself, your company and your clients. (Learn PHP in 17 hours.)

Back in 2000 I was hired to create some pretty amazing things online using PHP/MySQL in combination and one of my favorites was for a company named PC Vision in Lawrenceville, Georgia. They needed a web interface for their monitoring cameras placed in day care centers, fast food restaurants and other facilities. They needed security so the parents of the day care children could log in and view the children remotely or the owner of the laundry mat could watch their facilities.

That venture took some weeks to create but it was fun and very rewarding! It also lead to many other PHP/MySQL solutions which got really interesting. The point is knowing PHP early on and learning how to use it to satisfy the needs of my clients created a very rewarding business for my growing small staff and me.

Those solutions were done mostly on PHP 3 and PHP 4 but now we are well advanced and Rasmus Lerdorf’s simple set of Perl scripts has turned into a powerful server side machine. While it works well alone it can also work with JavaScript, Flash, AJAX and many other powerful tools. PHP can run on Windows or Linux machines and is very easy to configure and manage. Read the rest of this entry »

Dull speeches, mundain jokes and self-absorbed tirades end up where they belong: forgotten. How many times have you repeated a stupid joke (unless it is utterly and hopelessly stupid)? Nobody says, “Did you hear the one about the tomato? It got canned.” At least it doesn’t get repeated.

Twitter is life without a script. It is simply a written form of the same things you think in your “real life”. Twitter is, like Facebook and others, simply your thoughts or the thoughts of others shared with a larger public. The difference is the author of the tweet is generally not in physical proximity of the readers and therefore play on the disconnect which has plagued social media since the early days of usegroups and chatrooms. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t write copy, write for the algorithms. Copy writers fail at writing content for search engine optimization and it is proven regularly. I have a client whose daughter is a fantastic copy writer. She can wordsmith some of the best brochures you have seen in your days. Ocassionally the man will insist the verbiage on his website needs to be more like what she writes so I let them do it. Then we watch their SERP (search engine results page) standings drop until he is out of number one, lower than number five, off the first page.

The last time they tried it their SEO was so bad they sank to number 18 on Google and not listed on Yahoo and Bing. It took me almost a full week to get them back into the top three on all three. Read the rest of this entry »

On August the 9th of 2010 at seven seconds past 5:06 AM another one of “those dates” will pass. Why this is of such great interest to people I’m not sure but as you can see one of the most read topics on this blog is 04:05:06 07/08/09 – so why not talk about what comes up this year?

What can we all do together at that time to make it count for something?

What would be very interesting would be to do a study to see what important events over the years may have coincided with these “epoch” dates? After all, it happens once a year every year.

Another time coming up on the same date is 08/09/10 11:12:13 – either can count for something. What are you going to do special?

This year another important date is coming up. That date is November 2. On that date we all, in the US, have a very important commitment. Make sure you are there to fight in the revolution.

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Be sure to chime in on the poll in the sidebar.

Lately I have participated in more and more chat forums conducted in the public stream on Twitter. For over a year I have been hosting the occasional game of trivia on Friday nights but these are full blown round table style discussions with industry professionals.

There are, as with any other activity, pluses and minuses to holding these discussions in the open stream. The obvious plus is more eyes. The obvious negative is more eyes.

Of course if you are hosting an “event” you want as many people as possible to be aware of the event and join in. The question is how many “outsiders” do you want peering in on your discussion? For example what if the discussion is between graphic designers and it turns to negative comparison of “idiot customers”?

Obviously we are all followed by our customers, clients and family. So the question, then, would be, “is the open Twitter stream the place to host round table discussions among industry professionals?”

My take is that there is room for this and it can have a global presence advantage by exposing all of the participants to the open stream. Private discussions, however, about industry experiences may be better off line or moved to DM as opposed to in the public.

Certainly the reason behind hosting these forums in the open is to attract more users and possibly build community even for non-industry observers. Care and concern need to be a part of the rules of engagement so as not to open any gaps between the ultimate consumer, as casual observer, or to be a little “too transparent”.

I know you’re listening to Social Media Edge where we discuss topics like this every Tuesday.