SOPA Sucks
The fun version: http://theoatmeal.com/ The long version, but important: The Bill – SOPA A good summary on why SOPA sucks by Mashable.
Where Google Search Plus Your World Goes Wrong
Remember the days of searching places like Yahoo to find the best results that fit? I can remember painfully clicking link after link to find the relevant search results on my search topic. Me and the back button? We considered getting engaged. I came across a Search Engine Land experiment on how the new Google Search plus Your World works. Google has done some pretty unremarkable things in the past (Hello turning off sharing in Google Reader!). The one thing they’ve always excelled at are their efforts to try and improve search results. For example, Panda was a huge move and it removed some of the most irrelevant sites from the top search results pool (spam, splogs).[.....]
Awaken Your Superhero – An eBook
Last year, my friend Chris took a long trip and asked a handful of people, including me, to write some inspirational stories on his blog for the period he was gone. Chris took the stories that we told and packaged them up in a free download, I wanted to share it with you – Awaken Your Superhero ebook style (also the name of his blog). Accompanied by some great minds, I wrote a post that pushed the boundaries of my usual writing style and includes the words “invisible pink monkeys”, if that doesn’t make you want to download and read it I don’t know what will. Other than I can promise that it will help[.....]
Top 5 Posts of 2011
Yeah I know it’s 4 days into 2012, so why am I looking back? Because I find it interesting which were my top 5 post last year and would like to share them with you because I know there are nuggets that will make you more productive if nothing else. Stop Using Your Inbox as a Todo List The last to do list you’ll ever need 4 Sanity Saving Tricks for Gmail Social Inbox Zero How Klout Scores Could Be More Useful to Marketers (though this applies to brands giving away perks too) Okay no more looking back, use these to help you jump forward and make 2012 a grand success!
3 Words and Goals for 2012 – Flow Insight and Commitment
At the first of the year, for a few years now, Chris Brogan has inspired me to think of and post three words that I want to strive to define the new year by. I had to think about it a bit more than usual this year as so many things have threaded through my life in the last few months making me question really where I want to go next. It’s been a bit of a challenge, but I like challenges and am ready to meet 2012 with the feistiness it deserves. Flow, Insight, Commitment. Flow There is a common thread running through each of the things that I do professionally. There are many strands[.....]
Social + Tech
About Chel
Geeky digital assistant learning to become more ninja warrior. Magepants, music lover, lead org PCBoston.
Saving small business owners' sanity since 2007.
Things I Highly Recommend
6 small business marketing tips to do right now
There’s a lot to say for practice, but at some point we have to jump out of the plane or into the deep end. We cling to the safety blanket of what it is, instead of doing the things that would get us to the place we envision in our minds. This applies to all areas of life: saying no, learning martial arts, taking downtime, working on our own content, taking a leap from our day job, jumping on the speaking bandwagon, or writing a book. There is one major goal that applies to small businesses marketing online: make more delighted customers. Reputation and word of mouth are kings. If you’re a business owner, you[.....]
How to Email Files to Dropbox
Editor’s note: Habilis closed it’s doors. However you can use http://sendtodropbox.com/ for now! Huge Dropbox fan here, it makes sharing big files super easy which is great, especially for workshifting. I wanted to share a tip with everyone on how to email files as attachments that you want to share with others via Dropbox. First, if you don’t have Dropbox, get an account now. (Referral link!) If you haven’t heard of Dropbox, it allows you to sync your files online and across computers. It also allows you to share the folders that you create with others, see their changes and offers mobile support for phones and the iPad. Check it out, you’ll love the ease of[.....]
Black Lab and Faces of Community
Some of you know I’m a huge fan of black lab and often my tweet contain their lyrics. I have a million favorite songs so pointing you at one album would be difficult at best. Buy all of them instead and then watch all the videos. Their music along with Matthew Ebel’s make up the vast majority of my music collection. A few months ago, they decided to make a video of their community with photos of the people within it. They put out a quick call for photos from the community to feature in a video of pictures of people (lyrics are at the bottom of the post). Of course, I immediately jumped on[.....]
Lessons from an Oil Spill : Green is the new Black
59 days and counting. The video below is a TED talk by Rob Hopkins on “Transition to a world without Oil“, who reminds us that the time period in which we’ve developed and build our lives around oil dependency is very short and will very shortly come to an end. He touches on how oil production has dwindled as well as the energy we get from oil now vs. the 1930s. “The world isn’t Second Life. We can’t create new land and new energy systems at the click of a mouse.” Rob founded the Transition movement, helping communities take the steps to creatively come up with new ideas on sustainability now, before our world changes[.....]
Want more sales? Make it easy.
When doing business online, one of your first priorities is to make it dead easy to buy. It is the responsibility of a business to provide a flawless experience online for customers when they get into the sales process. The goal of every business should be to convert the sale, yes? As an assistant, I spend a lot of my time managing speaking information, travel schedules and flight/hotel bookings for clients. For example, booking a hotel should be dead easy. It takes at most 3-5 minutes (unless they need a convoluted amount of information). If a site fails me at that moment I click that button to pay, it marks my day. I now have[.....]
Social media isn’t a magic wand
We need to get started on Facebook, start tweeting about our business, stick social media icons on our pages, get social and maybe that will save our business. Um, no. Social media will not save your business. It might enhance it, connect you with others in your industry, and provide some leads. Instead of waiting for the magic to make everything better, take a hard and very real look at where the problem spots are and fix them.
What telegraphing can teach you about competitve intelligence
Recently, I’ve been given the opportunity to learn boxing at the hands of Mark Davis of Boston Martial Arts Center. It’s the last sport I thought I’d jump into, excited to learn, and it’s been helpful in terms of learning about focus and reaction. There’s obviously a lot of training involved before entering any kind of ring, but one of the things boxing teaches is to look beyond the moment and at what’s going to happen next. In boxing, you “gather information” by watching your competitors moves. You can “see” when and where the next punch is if you learn to read in between the lines and adjustments of the body. Reading such is referred[.....]
The Short List : Blog Posts that made my must read list last week
I’m dropping some great links here that I’ve come across this past week. List is by no means complete but every post on this list is worth your time to check out. Wait, no, don’t just check out the post…subscribe to these blogs if you aren’t already. You’ll always be learning something. Thanks to the great bloggers in this list. Ron Ploof – C Level Social Media Ignorance Greg Cangialosi – The Marketers “New Normal” Justin Kownacki – Why I Need You to be a Better Audience Mack Collier – The ROI of Giving a Damn Christopher S. Penn – Three Nearly Guaranteed Moneymaking Twitter Words DJ Waldow – Silent Bob & Southwest Airlines: 7[.....]
How To Market With Google’s Social Search
The past couple days the techiverse has been entertained and/or irritated at Google Buzz, Google’s stab at social networking. This isn’t another post about Google Buzz, but rather the hidden gem of Social Circle and Social Search. Combined with their acquisition of Aardvark, Google is amassing utilities to enable social search to take social media to the next level. What are social search and social circles anyway? What makes up our Social Circle for Google’s purposes: People in your Gmail (or Google Talk) chat list People in your Friends, Family, and Coworkers groups in your Google contacts People you’re publicly connected to through social services that you’ve listed in your Google profile, such as Twitter[.....]
Acknowledging Accomplishments
One of the things we talk about in the social media space is sharing great things that others are up to versus talking about our own stuff all the time. I strive to share some interesting things that others are doing on Twitter but I felt the need to take the time out and offer some of those things up on my blog tonight. Very a la Becky McCray’s Brag Basket I wanted to brag on some great stuff I’m reading, listening to, watching, etc. here on my blog. Josiah Boothby, Evan Flory-Barnes and Acknowledgement of a Celebration A very dear friend of mine who has dabbled in social media emailed me recently about a musical[.....]
