Four Destructive Myths Most Companies Still Live By - Tony Schwartz by Tony Schwartz | 11:17 AM November 1, 2011 Myth #1: Multitasking is critical in a world of infinite demand. This myth is based on the assumption that human beings are capable of doing two cognitive tasks at the same time. If you’re on a conference call, for example, and you turn your attention to an incoming email, you’re missing what’s happening on the call as long as you’re checking your email. On average, according to researcher David Meyer, switching time increases the amount of time it takes to finish the primary task you were working on by an average of 25 percent. Difficult as it is to focus in the face of the endless distractions we all now face, it’s far and away the most effective way to get work done. Myth #2: A little bit of anxiety helps us perform better. Think for a moment about how you feel when you’re performing at your best. The more anxious we feel, the less clearly and imaginatively we think, and the more reactive and impulsive we become.
6 Powerful LinkedIn Marketing Tips for Small Businesses Let’s face it, LinkedIn is a very underutilized social media network. Most people believe that it’s too hard to make connections, and therefore use it more as a résumé site. There is so much more potential with this professional social media network. How many of us have created a LinkedIn account and left it dormant for months? It was my goal recently to attend more LinkedIn webinars and teleseminars to learn more about this mysterious network. Here are some interesting facts that I learned about this often misunderstood network: LinkedIn is a search engine and has a ton of authority on Google and other popular search engines. Likely if you Google your name and you have a LinkedIn profile, it will show up on the first page of Google. Here are the top 6 things that I learned about this powerful network: #1: Boosting Your Search Engine Optimization There are three areas to add website links to your LinkedIn profile. For example, I changed my main mortgage website to say Foreclosure Options
Shoutlet Fires Off New Trigger-Based Social Marketing Platform Here’s why social media marketing is broken: my company wants to launch a contest on our Facebook app and website and post about to all our fans and followers, post when we hit 1000 entries, and post again when the contest ends after 5000 entries. Sequencing like this was difficult because marketing team would have to monitor for those milestones to be reached, then manually rotate our apps and publish updates. Social marketing platform Shoutlet today launches a way to turn the cacophony of disparate campaigns into a concerted push. It’s called Social Switchboard, it uses trigger-based campaign publishing, and your marketing department wants it. Social Switchboard lets marketers schedule status updates, tweets, YouTube videos, emails, apps and more to be published when a trigger is hit, such as a Facebook Page reaching a certain Like count or a number of contest entries being submitted. I’m not worried for Shoutlet anymore. [Image Credit: redcmarketing]
How One Company Transformed Its Boring Products | Blog | Daily Dose What color do men paint the Den? CIL Paints is betting it's not Butterscotch. Recently, the Toronto-based company's managers looked at the marketplace and saw an opportunity: Paint-color names are all pretty ladylike. If your industry is full of sameness and you're having trouble figuring out how to differentiate your products, here's an idea for how to inject something fresh. Sometimes, all a product needs is a new marketing angle. More than 15,000 responses later, Fairytale Green had become Mo Money, and Butterscotch became Beer Time. CIL then created a manly dream book of bars, bathrooms, bedrooms and media rooms decked out in the new colors to show how they could style up a man's domain. This isn't just a clever marketing trick. In appealing to men, CIL didn't just man up its colors. What sets your brand apart?
Just Don't Go, the Sequel? - Innovations I regularly teach a graduate seminar on academic labor, but I’ve always hesitated to teach William Pannapacker’s, aka “Thomas H. Benton’s” inflammatory—and now classic Chronicle article—“Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go” (January 30, 2009). I always felt that its compelling combination of cold logic and cynicism would depress my graduate students beyond recovery. But a Ph.D. student recently did a presentation on it in my current seminar, working up the courage to look into the abyss. The class seemed to take it in stride, but it led me to wonder about an even bleaker piece of advice: “College: Just Don’t Go?” I’m willing to include a question mark because the scenario I’m about to relate has yet to unfold completely, so I’m not willing to venture as certain a set of answers as Pannapacker did about graduate school nearly three years ago. Graduate school aside, I believe one now has to wonder if going to college is a sensible decision. Return to Top
Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn to Find a Job Searching for a job can suck if you constrain yourself to the typical tools such as online jobs boards, trade publications, CraigsList, and networking with only your close friends. In these kinds of times, you need to use all the weapons that you can, and one that many people don’t—or at least don’t use to the fullest extent, is LinkedIn. LinkedIn has over thirty-five million members in over 140 industries. Most of them are adults, employed, and not looking to post something on your Wall or date you. Executives from all the Fortune 500 companies are on LinkedIn. Most have disclosed what they do, where they work now, and where they’ve worked in the past.
Digilinx Magazine Advertising - Trade Secrets Written by David Knarr If you ever come across a magazine that will only quote the readership figure or the distribution figure for the magazine, ask if they are ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulation) audited. If they are, ask for the most recent copy. This will give you a lot of information about the magazines sales, including the number of paid subscribers. If they are not ABC audited, there is another way to find out the number of paid subscribers. At the end of the year, most magazines have to publish a "Statement Of Ownership, Management and Circulation". So what does this Statement Of Circulation tell you? These are the real numbers. A while back, magazine sold that were in a bookstore, drug store or at a newsstand actually sold. For example, I have been told by several of the larger bookstore chain managers, that only about 5% to 10% of the magazines they have in the store actually sell. The distribution agreements have change too. Now you are probably wondering why they would do that? Qualified Subscribers
How Old Spice Revived a Campaign That No One Wanted to Touch The Modern Media Agency Series is supported by IDG. Ad agency JWT has used mobile marketing for two brand name clients. During a marketers’ panel discussion, John Baker explained the important role mobile played in a promotion for Zyrtec and for a campaign across media for Macy’s. Maybe advertisers should stop hoping that their new campaigns should be super-successful and instead wish for them to be moderately well-received. After all, almost no one has been able to create a second act for ad campaigns that become cultural touchstones. Remember Budweiser's "Wassup" for instance? If anything, adding a social media layer to a successful campaign only raises the stakes as bloggers, Tweeters and Facebookers pile on to celebrate and watch to see if new ads live up to the set standard, then mercilessly scold it for not doing so. "It was definitely daunting," says Jason Bagley, a creative director at Wieden. But who would play Mustafa's foe? Eventually, they found a rhythm.
HOW TO: Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile With more than 85 million members in more than 200 countries, LinkedIn is a professional social network worth using, understanding and optimizing. After you've covered the basics of setting up your LinkedIn presence, features including recommendations, applications, LinkedIn Answers, and the Resume Builder can add value to your profile. Many of these highly useful features, though, are often overlooked or underused by newcomers. We spoke with four LinkedIn aficionados to get their top advice on making the best use of these tools. Cover the Basics The first step to spiffing up your LinkedIn profile is to fill in as much information about your work experience as possible. Sharlyn Lauby, president of Internal Talent Management, HR blogger and guest contributor for Mashable, believes that a person's LinkedIn profile should, at minimum, reflect his or her current situation. "[A status update] is a great place to share an article of interest or something new you’ve been working on.
"Sur Facebook, même une entreprise peu glamour peut construire une communauté de fans via son application" Le co-fondateur de l'agence de social media KRDS dispense ses conseils aux marques désireuses de lancer leur application Facebook. Quelles questions doit se poser une marque qui veut lancer son application ? Parce que c'est la mode, nombreux sont ceux qui veulent à tout prix créer leur application Facebook, sans prendre le temps de se demander ce que celle-ci pourrait leur apporter. Il est important de s'interroger sur les raisons qui justifieraient un tel développement. Cherche-t-on à développer sa notoriété, à créer de l'engagement avec ses fans ou à les qualifier ? Comment peut-on détecter le potentiel de viralité d'une application ? La concurrence étant de plus en plus rude, les canaux de viralité se sont sensiblement restreints. Qu'est ce qui pousserait l'utilisateur à partager ses interactions avec l'application ? Dès lors, il faut d'attacher à créer une application apportant une véritable valeur ajoutée pour l'utilisateur, que ce soit en le divertissant ou en l'éduquant.
Software architecture Software architecture is the high level structure of a software system, the discipline of creating such structures, and the documentation of these structures. It is the set of structures needed to reason about the software system, and comprises the software elements, the relations between them, and the properties of both elements and relations.[1] The architecture of a software system is a metaphor, analogous to the architecture of a building.[2] Software architecture choices include specific structural options from possibilities in the design of software. For example, the systems that controlled the space shuttle launch vehicle have the requirement of being very fast, and very reliable, in principle. Therefore an appropriate real-time computing language would be chosen. Scope[edit] Opinions vary as to the scope of software architecture:[4] There is no sharp distinction between software architecture versus design and requirements engineering (see Related fields below). Motivation[edit]