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Cool Apps: Get A Handle On The Soc-Med Game with Postling

By John Thompson | May 21st, 2010 0 Comments

There are lots of opinions on Social Media and how it can be employed to promote business and engage with our customers. One thing upon which we can all agree, however, is that it can be enormously time-consuming. A time-suck, if you will.

Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. Yelp. FourSquare. YouTube. Tumblr. Flickr. How are we supposed to stay on top of it all and still, you know, do our jobs?

Postling is here to help.

Postling saves you time and frustration. Period. Postling endeavors to help you make social media engagement more efficient. It monitors your presence, and provides you one hub through which you can update your WordPress blog, Facebook fan (or profile) pages, Twitter…you name it. No longer do you need to log into different social media sites every day. Postling does all the work for you. In two simple steps, publish your blog post to your blog(s), then update your Twitter and Facebook status with a link and custom message.

Postling offers unrivaled information curation.

Now partnered with Collecta, Postling will give small businesses a way to track search terms and see its mentions on blogs, in mainstream media, and on social media sites. In addition, they’ve created a custom RSS feed reader, so that you can monitor competitors or blogs that are of interest to you and your business. From Postling, you’ll be able to tweet, comment or post to your blog.

And all of this will happen in real time. Pretty cool, right?

Some of the best features of Postling are the ability to monitor as many different accounts as you like, as well as a great community support feature, to which you can turn for advice when you really need it.

You want to know what people are saying about your business. You want to know what they’re saying right away. Postling will help you listen.

Postling is the tool for small businesses to get a handle on their social media usage. It’s not built for the big boys, it’s built for you and me. Check it out today!

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Cool Apps: Put On Your Blogging Jammies … It’s Embed Time

By John Thompson | May 7th, 2010 0 Comments

If you’ve ever written a blog post (and c’mon … if you’re reading this, chances are that you have), you know how beneficial it can be to include photos, videos, and yes, the occasional tweet, to help reinforce your overall point.

For the first two examples, videos and photos, embedding in blog posts has always been relatively easy. But with tweets? The process is clunky, at best. Up ’til now, bloggers either had to copy and paste them or, if they wanted even more of a hassle, take screen captures of them (this method preserves the integrity of the quote/tweet perfectly), then post them as images.

As of today, those hassles are things of the past, because Twitter has introduced embeddable Tweets (and there was much rejoicing).

Including tweets, if you’ve never done it, is a great way to quote people and in a way that’s much easier to read and follow than with traditional quoting. With an “old school” quote, the writer would include, usually, a snippet of a quote, which might or might not capture the original context.

With embedding, the inclusion of tweets is neater. It’s cleaner.

From now on, including a tweet will be as easy as including a YouTube video. According to Twitter’s blog there will be, “just a snippet of code you’ll be able to use to generate simple, selectable flat-HTML tweets.” The screen capture below (irony duly noted) shows how an embedded tweet will look:

Embeddable tweets. Not tons of bells and whistles, but darned useful. Your blog posts will be better for them.

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Cool Apps: What Do You Like?

By John Thompson | April 30th, 2010 0 Comments

It’s official. Facebook is taking over the world.

A couple of weeks ago, they made a subtle change. You may have noticed that where you once became a “fan” of a particular page, you suddenly “liked” it. At first, this didn’t seem like a big deal. But it was. And it is. BIG.

Last week at its F8 developers’ conference, Facebook announced some changes that will dramatically change the way that people interact online. The biggest part of the changes is something that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, calls “Open Graph”. Open Graph is a new platform that will allow websites to blend their users’ social experiences. They’ll take the information that they have about your likes and dislikes, and make a customized online experience for you.

For example, if you have a Facebook profile and you visit Pandora.com, a popular music service, you’ll find that they are able to recommend playlists for you, based on artists that you’ve “liked” on Facebook. Similarly, if you visit CNN.com, you’ll see if any of your friends have visited the site and recommended news stories that they’ve found helpful. When you click the “like” button on these pages, that activity will be posted to your Facebook profile. It’s pretty nifty.

Now, what this means for each of us, personally, is a big question. Whether to opt in or out of the instant personalization functionality — deciding what you do and do not want to share — is a personal choice, and an important one.

What it means for businesses, however, is, as I said earlier, big.

The “like” button, which you’ll see popping up on sites all over the place (if you haven’t already), is exceedingly simple to add to your own website (if you have someone manage your website, they can make the addition in about 5 minutes’ time). It’s a simple addition that has the power to expose your site or business to vast numbers of people who mightn’t have been aware of it before.

When one of your Facebook friends “likes” any of your blog posts (or any other items to which you’ve added the “like” button), that activity will be posted on their personal profiles and in the news feeds of their friends.

This new functionality is controversial, make no mistake, but the possibilities that it opens for businesses are myriad and fascinating.

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Cool Apps: Google It!

By John Thompson | April 16th, 2010 0 Comments

When we highlight great business tools here, we typically focus on things that are new. Things that no one’s heard of. Things that are bright and shiny and full of fresh, cutting-edge awesome.

Sometimes we focus so intently on this “new-ness” that we can’t see what’s right under our noses.

Case in point: Google Apps.

A month ago we reintroduced you to Google Apps. Is Google Apps new? No. Is it shiny and sexy and fun? That’s debatable. But is it cool? Is it just dead useful? You’re darned right it is.

With Google Apps, you get a huge suite of tools, each of which can easily stand up against some of the biggest names in enterprise software. For small business people, there are few options that are better. And the price? Sweet. Less than $50 per user per year.

With Google Apps, you get:

Gmail for business: web-based with 25GB of storage and one of the best SPAM killers on the Web.

Google Calendar: Get your stuff together! Know where you need to be and when you need to be there. Scheduling, shared online calendars and sync-able with your smartphone.

Google Docs: Hands-down, one of the best document-sharing applications that there is. Work collaboratively online without attachments and share your documents, spreadsheets and presentations. It even has integrated chat, so you can work with your team members, no matter where they are.

Google Groups: Share content easily with user-created mailing lists and searchable archives.

Google Sites: Super-secure, code-free web pages. Great for intranets and team-managed sites.

Google Video: Secure, hosted video sharing.

Google Apps is the perfect suite of tools for independent contractors. It’s accessible anywhere, you can add as many users as you like for less than the cost of dinner for two at most restaurants. Did you know that you can get 80GB of storage with Google for less than DropBox charges for 50GB? No joke.

It’s 100% practical. It’s 100% useful. It’s 100% easy-to-use. Is it 100% sexy? Not really. But you’re gonna love it. I’m 100% sure about that.

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Cool Apps: Get Mobile, Get QIK!

By John Thompson | April 2nd, 2010 0 Comments

When you stop to think about it, mobile technology is pretty amazing. The things that we can do with our phones these days are truly mind-boggling.

Communication is faster and more efficient. Mobile applications allow us to run our businesses from the palms of our hands. We have access to pretty much anything at anytime. Like I said, amazing.

So, aside from the obvious things like email, access to social media outlets, and other glaringly-business-oriented applications, how can these little powerhouses best be used to benefit our businesses?

One of the most interesting uses I’ve seen is with QIK, a mobile video and live streaming application that can be used on more than 140 different phones. QIK allows you to record video on the fly. It lets you do it wirelessly. It lets you stream events with people as they’re happening.

“That’s cool and all, but how could I use that for my business?” you might ask.

Here’s one way: have you ever had clients whom you were helping to relocate? They arrange trips to see homes, you schedule as many showings into one weekend as is humanly possible, and they feel pressured to buy something, even though they might not have found *the* house, simply because they’re there. With QIK, if there’s a home that they’d like to see, you can arrange a showing…and live stream it to them, no matter where they are.

QIK could be used to do virtual tours for homes. It could be used in the great wide world of hyperlocal marketing, allowing you to capture video of interesting happenings in your market area. You could even use QIK to record VLOGs, which can be automatically uploaded to YouTube, Facebook, or your blogs hosted on WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and many others.

With a little creativity, a simple little tool like QIK could really be a game-changer for your business. How do you think you might use it?

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Cool Apps: Goin’ Mobile!

By John Thompson | March 26th, 2010 1 Comment

QR codeEverywhere you turn, everyone’s going mobile. Smartphones are everywhere, and not just in the hands of “business” people. Soccer moms, NASCAR dads, and yes, even kids, have them, and more users join the fray each and every day.

Now that the technology is really going mainstream, finding new ways to capitalize on it and monetize it is what everyone is clamoring for.

Raise your hand if you know what a QR code is. Anyone?

Outside of the world of tech-geekery, few people do, but I’ll bet you’ve seen one. See that little square up in the left-hand corner? Well, that’s it. But what is it? What does it do?

The answer is, “Quite a lot!”

Most smartphones — BlackBerry, iPhone, Palm Pre, Droid … you name it — have applications available that read those handy-dandy little codes (they read regular barcodes, too, but that’s not germane to this conversation). The neat thing is that you can use those apps (as well as countless web-based apps) to create QR codes. Even neater? You can make them to hold almost any information you’d like.

Code them with a link to your website. Or a website for your listing. Create a coupon that they could use for a discount on a particular service. Include a special message just for people who’ve got a QR code reader.

Think of the possibilities.

Once you’ve generated a QR code, you can place it on just about anything. Include it in property flyers. Put it on your business cards. Embed it in your website. You can even put them on t-shirts, mugs, or just about anything else you’d like.

All your potential customer has to do is point his phone’s camera at the QR code, snap its picture, and his code reader will send his “secret” message. Pretty cool, right?

This is still emerging technology, but being an early-adopter is cool! Take a look at QR codes. How could you use them to help your business? We’d love to hear your ideas!

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Cool Apps: Rediscover GOOGLE Apps!

By John Thompson | March 19th, 2010 0 Comments

Yes, yes. I know. Google Apps, the search juggernaut’s super-smart, everything-rolled-into-one-for-a-nifty-little-price business solution, isn’t exactly new.

Not exactly, anyway.

For while Google Apps has been around for a few years, an announcement last week merits your attention – in fact, it merits a good long look!

Google has completely upped its game by expanding Google Apps’ capabilities exponentially. They’ve done this by launching the Google Apps Marketplace.

If you’re at all familiar with the iPhone App Store – the collection of some 200,000 small applications that run on your phone – this news will seem familiar to you.

What this new Marketplace has done is to offer products and services that integrate fully with Google Apps. From accounting and finance tools, like Freshbooks, to image editing, like Aviary, as well as payroll tools, CRM, expense reports, and analytics tools for your websites. For the most part, these tools include single sign-on (so you don’t have to log in again and again and again), as well as Google’s universal navigation.

And you can count on the number of apps in the Marketplace to continue growing as programmers vie to make their latest creations available to the millions of Google Apps users.

In effect, what Google has done is make it possible to run your entire office from any location. Where you are doesn’t really matter.

In order to use the Marketplace, of course, you have to be a Google Apps user. If you’re not, take it out for a spin; you won’t regret it. If you’re already using Google Apps, then good on ya’. Step into the Marketplace and give it a try.

“New” doesn’t always mean “best” … sometimes we just have to look at something seasoned in a new way to find something that’ll change everything.

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Cool Apps: Sending Letters is a Cinch with MailFinch!

By John Thompson | March 12th, 2010 0 Comments

mailfinchFor all the high-tech tools with which we’re bombarded each and every day, sometimes it’s the simplest ones that make the biggest impact.

Think about this. For all of the @ message you might receive on Twitter, and for all of the umpteen thousand indistinguishable emails at which you barely glance, how many personalized letters have you received?

The answer is, most likely, “not many”. But isn’t it great when you do?

Think about how something like that might make your customers feel.

The idea of sending letters, or any sort of mailing, to customers isn’t exactly new. With the advent of instant communication on the Internet, it’s been written off as passé, and it’s always been kind of a pain in the neck. Stamps, printers that run out of ink at exactly the wrong moment, paper cuts, you name it.

All of that has changed with MailFinch.

A simple service that allows you to send as few as one or as many as … (how high can you count) letters, MailFinch can help you extend that personal touch while still making things Internet point-and-click easy.

Do you have a list of client birthdays or anniversaries? Set up pre-scheduled mailings to go out on your customers’ special days. If you have a newsletter, MailFinch will print and send it, up to four pages, to everyone you can think of. Any PDF that you can dream up can be uploaded, printed, and sent … all with just a few clicks. You don’t have to lick any envelopes or get pesky paper cuts, and your clients get actual, real-live mail, beautifully printed on high-quality paper and delivered in linen envelopes with actual stamps (no postage meters here).

MailFinch has several pricing plans, depending on your needs. They start with a pay-as-you-go option, and extend upward to an enterprise-level program that gets you 525 stamps per month. Regardless of the plan you choose, printing and shipping is all-inclusive, and you can schedule mailings as far as a year in advance, so you’ll know your letters will get mailed, even if you’re busy doing other things.

We live in a world of “do it faster”, tweet this, bump that instant gratification. MailFinch offers a service that rises above that din and makes your message get noticed.

Give simple a chance!

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Cool Apps: Get Smart With Smart Draw!

By John Thompson | February 26th, 2010 0 Comments

Let’s face it. VerSmartDraw logoy few of us are good at everything. Oh, sure … there’s that guy with whom you went to college who was great-looking, and the quarterback of the football team, and graduated summa cum laude just after rescuing a troupe of old ladies with puppies while on his way to donate blood to an orphanage, but most of us have to face the fact that we’re just … not that guy.

This means that while we might be great salespeople and that we might be great at taking care of our customers, we mightn’t also be great at blogging, or math, or <gulp> creating presentations.

That last one is something over which I stew all the time.

I have great information to share but I just don’t have that certain … something … that allows me to turn that information into moving, powerful visuals. And for most people, visual representations of information are much more striking than any other form.

So, what’s there to do?

I could hire a graphic designer, but that takes a lot of time, and can also run into a lot of money. Drawing something by hand is out of the question (I can make a mean stick figure, but that’s about it). Even using my mouse to create images on my computer can get frustrating, because as much as I nudge things around, the graphics never look as clean as I’d like.

But there is a solution. And a darned good one, at that.

For the software gods have given us SmartDraw. Unlike most of the applications about which we write, SmartDraw isn’t free. However, it’s less than $200 for the full version, and that’s less than one hour’s time from most graphic designers (the math here should be pretty obvious).

So, what does it do?

Put simply, with just a few clicks, SmartDraw can create more than 70 different sorts of diagrams and presentations, including maps, flowcharts, organizational charts, calendars, graphs … you name it. If it’s a graphic that you need, odds are that SmartDraw can make it. And there’s no dragging and dropping. Just click and type. That’s it. The graphics come out professional-looking each and every time. I don’t know many people who can turn out quality like that without losing lots of sleep, or without ripping out the bulk of their hair.

Want to hear something else that’s really, really cool? SmartDraw works seamlessly with Microsoft Office, so once you create your graphics, you can click once, and have all of them transferred directly into PowerPoint and have your presentation ready to go, and, more importantly, ready to knock the socks off of your clients.

You can check SmartDraw out with their free trial download. Unless you’re a graphic designing, quarterbacking, honors grabbing puppy saver, I promise that you won’t be disappointed.

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