Category Archives: Quality

business, development, E-Commerce, ideas, money, Relationship

Content Is No Longer King, It Is Who You Know Offline

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I have been thinking for a while how to differentiate ones self from the super competitive internet market. The closely held maxim that content is king deserves to be re-examined.

I have recently been doing a lot of research and study into Law. While it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, the amount of information on the internet relating the subject is more than sufficient. In this academic study where there is little commercial interest and expertise in generating Law content, I found the internet has more than enough sources.

My bet is that if you created a website which is well written and has truly informative content, you may have already missed the boat. This is purely in regards to search engine traffic and becoming an authoritative source on the internet.

Go any to any search engine and type in these words; blogging, How to blog, biz development, I would be very surprised if any blogger came on the first page except possibly A listers, or a blog that has been around for some considerable time.

There is no hard or fast solution here, first it is important to get to the facts.

It is no longer possible with millions of pages being created on the internet for Google to index yours at the top.

We must ask ourselves some questions:

If a tree falls in a forest with no one to hear it, does it make a sound?

My own suggestion is that we possibly have to start moving to a more local applied use of blogging and use of information on the internet.

For example, small offline groups/communities in your particular area brought online by people they know. It is so much more interesting when you have met the person. You may than be able to gauge your audience and ultimately interact much better. So in my case it would a sales/business development that I would find and bring it online. Connecting to local people.

Thoughts?

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.

development, Personal, Quality, work

Blogging to Assess an Employees Performance

A couple of years ago I was applying for a job by a company in the UK. After the usual first get to know you meeting. They asked me to write a report about their website and what I thought about it.

I knew that this was a part of the job interview process so I wrote as honestly and as diplomatically as I could. Back then, I did not blog at all. Writing is not an obvious choice for me, I am much better orally speaking. I know why that is so, having kept a blog for over a year now. I am beginning to understand why writing is entirely different from speaking. It uses different parts of the brain. Which parts I am not entirely sure, but the more you activate a brain center the better it will perform. It is not as easy as it looks, but then again neither is it that hard. Without doubt, it does wonders for any plan to be able to take the effort to set it out on paper before you take any steps to put a plan into action. In fact I would even go so far to say that if we to do that with all important decisions in our life we would probably have a very different view point and live very different and probably richer lives, qualitatively speaking. If you are going to assess your employees on their writing skills you will have to create the right atmosphere. A free mind can develop very quickly (in children) unfortunately somewhat slower as an adult. So it is important that the employees do not feel that they have to write in certain way. Indeed that would be against the very essence of blogging. Forget having brain storming sessions, ask each employee to write something for you instead, that is a least the ones that cannot justify a better use of there of time than picking their nose. You will be amazed what you find…. this of course assuming that you have the more or less total confidence of your staff.

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

Ask a Question, Quality

The Story With No Moral Featuring Persistence and Microsoft

An interesting incident happened today when I tried to delete a printer driver from my xp computer. For some reason or the other it gave a fault and said that it could not delete the HP LJ 5550 driver. This caused all sorts of problem as I needed to print a booklet. Now a colleague of mine managed to delete the printer by clicking delete another 20 times.

To actually solve the problem we had to install a driver for the previous model HP LJ 5500 so it would then print the booklet. I can see how they wrote the installation guide. “Please install driver from another printer etc….”

I am not sure what the morale of this story is…what do you think?

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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