Category Archives: ideas

Consultancy, E-Commerce, ideas, money, work

Wall Street Just Does Not understand Social Media

Kick off your shoes and throw your ties away, forgot rock and roll social media is where it is at.

“oleil-Media Metrics analyst Laura Martin cut her rating on Google to “Hold” from “Buy” and slashed her price target to $350 from $580…saying the company’s practice of giving 10 percent of profits to charity and giving employees one day a week to work on pet projects should end amid the current economic climate.”

We do rate the best Pilgrim Marketing is on our resource list on www.Wcx.me and it is not for nothing. This is a great discovery blog post about Social media right here.

fun, ideas

The Morning After The Office Party – Joke

Jack woke up with a killer hangover after attending his firm’s Christmas Party.

He didn’t even remember how he got home.  It’s 8.30.  What day is it? Thursday.  His wife must have gone to work.

As he struggled into consciousness through the fog of a pounding headache, his stomach plummeted as he wondered what the hell he did last night.
He forced himself to open his eyes, and the first thing he saw was a couple of aspirins next to a glass of water on the side table.  And, next to them, a little vase of sweet peas, freshly picked from the garden.

He sat up.  The bedroom was clean and tidy, – there was no trail of drunkenly abandoned clothes, fresh air was coming in through the window
and all was serene.  He stumbled to the bathroom, also pristine, and, squinting gingerly into the mirror, saw that he had a black eye.  This was not a good sign, but no memories were returning.
 
As he concentrated hard on getting the world into focus, he saw a post-it note stuck on the corner of the mirror.  It was written in red, with little hearts on it and a kiss from his wife.

I’ll ring your office and tell them you won’t be in today.  Breakfast is in the oven.  Try to eat something and go back to bed for the morning.There’s snooker on TV this afternoon.  Take it easy today, hope your eye doesn’t hurt too much.  See you tonight.  I love you, darling!  Love, Jillian. x

He stumbled to the kitchen and sure enough, there was hot breakfast, steaming hot coffee and the newspaper.  His teenage son was sitting at the table, eating. Jack, bracing himself, asked his son what happened the previous night.

Well, you came home after 3 A.M., drunk and out of your mind.  You fell over the coffee table and broke it, and then you puked in the hallway,

and got that black eye when you ran into the door. ‘

Confused, he asked his son, ‘So, why is everything in such perfect order, aspirins by the bed, a nice note from Mum and breakfast waiting for me?’
His son replied, ‘Oh THAT!…  Mum dragged you to the bedroom, and when she tried to take your trousers off, you screamed, ‘Leave me alone you
slapper,
I’m married!!’

Broken Coffee Table £250
Hot Breakfast £3.50
Two Aspirins 20p

Saying the right thing, at the right time……PRICELESS

business, development, ideas, Relationship

Strategies that Health Groups Could Apply to Social Media

There are quite a lot of strategies that health groups could apply to Social media. In nut shell it is all about taking part in the discussion.

You can host a forum in your particular interest or start a group chat about products.

I would imagine that Face book/Linkedin would be a good place to start as it has a diverse audience. You can also use the advertising options available on Facebook.

You might want build a word press blog for the product (www.http://web.web.http://web.wcx.me/).

Or start a community using Ning or Drupal if you can not find a suitable relevant network.

 

business, ideas, Relationship

Setting Boundries and Scoring Points

 

There is always a list of things one should do online if you are using web 2.0, but none our more important than developing your own site. It is easy to caught up with all the tools/options and forgot why it is that you are doing it. Set clear boundaries and stick to it, only now and than going over it, if it is something off particular interest.

I found this fascinating quote today give an insight in social networking:

  1. Social Messaging – Twitter, Plurk, Friendfeed, Pownce…. (add your favorite micro blogging/social messaging service here). Each can suck up your time if you don’t get focused and put some boundaries around them.
  2. Social Bookmarking – many bloggers become somewhat obsessed with writing posts for and then gathering votes on social media sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Yahoo Buzz, Reddit etc
  3. Social Networking – building profiles and interacting upon Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace etc – all useful in building a brand and profile as a blogger, but potentially a distraction.
  4. Blog Design – blog design is important at creating a first impression but when you find yourself tweaking it, reworking it, planning your next one more than actually writing content for your blog you might be in trouble.
  5. SEO – like blog design there always seems to be something you could do a little better when it comes to optimizing a blog for search engines. It can be worth your time to do some of this, but one of the most effective ways of doing SEO is to write content that hits the spot with readers.
  6. Reading other Blogs in Your Niche – yet another great use of time, but many bloggers spend so much time on other people’s blogs connecting, leaving comments and even writing about them that they fail to write anything unique on their own.
  7. Reading about How to Blog – this might seem strange coming from a blogger who writes about blogging, but from time to time a blogger comes to me for advice on how to improve their blog who has done so much learning about blogging that my encouragement to them is simply to stop reading about it and start doing it.
  8. Guest Posting – I am a big fan about using guest posting on other peoples blogs to expand your profile and grow your readership – however the best way to utilize guest posting is to have great content on your own blog for the new readers you engage with to see when they come visit.
  9. Interacting with Readers – this is one that I hesitate to write about because I’m a firm believer in allocating time to spend one on one with readers – however as a blog grows it gets more and more difficult to do. There comes a time where most bloggers need to decide how to strike a balance on this front – boundaries and processes can really help.
  10. Networking with other bloggers – another great way to build brand and traffic to your own blog is to connect with other bloggers in your niche – however there are millions of blogs ‘out there’ and it can be an endless task.
  11. Monetization – finding and testing ad networks and affiliate programs can take a lot of time. Then optimizing them for your blog and tracking the results and extending your earning potential by finding private sponsorships and ad sales can really eat up even more of your time.
  12. Starting New Blogs – diversification is an important and worthwhile part of the journey of many bloggers development, however I come across some bloggers who start too many blogs too quickly and don’t give their early ones time to get going and develop before they branch out.
  13. Analyzing Stats – one of the biggest potential time suckers, that many bloggers become distracted with at different times, is analyzing your stats. Sure, you can learn a great deal from looking at who is coming to your blog, from where they come and what they do when they arrive – but at times, when you do it all day everyday, it can be a habit that takes you away from your blogging.
  14. Projects/Competitions/Memes – many bloggers wanting to run a competition or project on their blog don’t realize just how much work it can be to manage (or how hard it can be to get them working). They can bring a lot of life to a blog, but they can also be suck you (and your readers) attention away from your core blogging.
  15. Dealing with Trolls and Trouble makers – it is SO easy to get drawn into passionate (yet pointless) arguments with other bloggers and readers that can leave you emotionally drained and having wasted hours upon hours of your time. While at the time it seems to important to respond – many times it’s best just learn to hold it in.
  16. Tracking down copyright violations – unfortunately in the medium we operate there are people who scrape the content of others, whack ads on it and call it their own. While it can be important to track down these copyright violations down – the statement ‘how long is a piece of string’ comes to mind and some bloggers spend so much time tracking splogs down, issuing DMCA legal notices and attempting to get the content removed that they have little time for much else.

    17. Darren Rowse, 16 Important but Potentially Distracting Blogging Tasks, Sep 2008

You should read the whole article.

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ideas, Marketing

Smart Marketing – Arigh Nam Beist

3 Comments

While leading a a truly balanced life now, I make sure that I have time for reading a broad selection of material. The IOD magazine has come up trumps again in the March issue of this year. Yes, I am aware that it is 5 months later, but like I say balance is the key word in life. That is what I try to do now, and probably should have done earlier.

There is an article about Scotland Glenmorangie distilleries that accidently mixed the wrong sort of whisky. Faced with a dilemma they come up with a clever campaign; they used a direct mail marketing  to ask for an official pardon and sold the whisky as a collectors item. The campaign generated a 23 percent response. 8 percent above what you would normally expect.

The best bit is still to come; their direct mail marketing grew. When they launched a special whisky called Arigh Nam Beist (shelter of the beast) for Halloween in 2007 their response rate was 69 percent. Virtually unheard of. A little clever marketing can go a long way. Do you know any such stories? I am sure that Richard Branson could tell a few, how about you?

ideas, Marketing, Relationship

Running For Gold on Style and Grace

With the Olympics almost over I was catching up on some of the events last night. The running events always amaze me. Some of these long distance runners, in fact all of them, run with such grace. They run long distance events the same time I could do 400 meters when I was at school and I was one of the best runners in the North West aged 13. These athletes run with such grace that it almost looks like no effort at all. There is a lesson for us all there. I am sure that America and many other countries have much better resources and trainers. But it is the Africans that dominate this sport. While I am sure they train very hard I think they have something more.

Do you run your business on Style and Grace? Would you like to?

ideas, Personal

Sex and Money – Balanced and Focused?

I am sure that I have written about this before but after having conducted one or two searches I cannot find it…Anyway perhaps in state of exhaustion last year I imagined that I had done it. Which brings me around to what this blog post is about, I could have called it “Work and Money” but how interesting would have that have been. Work is not something that is going to grab our attention. Sex and money our primeval forces in the market. Often people that seek money understand the power of sex. Which we all must be aware of. Can cause great off balance and out of focus realities. I want to focus on the other side in this blog post.

Are you Balanced and Focused?

Often new ideas can grip us so that we will become engrossed in the carrying them out. Which is fine as that’s what new ideas is all about. Focusing on your goal is a key ingredient in bringing anything to life. There are also a number of other ingredients.

If one works all the hours that god sends us one will eventually dry up on ideas, and work becomes a core. Which also translates in to the same for anybody having to work with you. To over work is never good. We all want to get ahead and achieve the goals we set. By ignoring everything else, what will be the price we must pay when we achieve it. Will we be able to enjoy it? Fundamentally it is about having you cake and eating it. Very easy to say but much harder to implement.

Planning is also a key ingredient. You may have 2 free hours in the evening but filling those up after having worked all day may not really help yourself at all. There are very few things in life that we have to do. By this I mean if we do not do them would the world stop. The events and things that we want to do, we will always do. The trick is to do them in the most enjoyable way we can.

Hence one good conversation, blog post, client can be hundred times more effective than the reverse of this equation. Being balanced and focused will achieve that. Does that make sense?