A couple of weeks ago, I took a look at my schedule of meetings and such and started laughing: on one single day, I had three meetings at three separate diners. As a native of South Jersey, I knew that this was the epitome of the Jersey diner scene.

First Meeting: Breakfast at Diner #1

If you are from Jersey, you know the story. Huge menu with lots of choices. So I ordered an omelet, subbed out the potatoes for tomato slices, and rye toast. It was fine. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing really right about it. Coffee was decent and plentiful. The service was somewhat friendly, relatively efficient, and reasonably accurate. Overall experience wasn’t not particularly good for the money, but they didn’t rush us out and we didn’t have to bus our own table.

Second Meeting: Lunch at Diner #2

Further down the road, another diner, and again, it was fine. Plenty of parking and the restaurant wasn’t particularly busy, but the staff brought a “charming” (ahem) attitude that practically said, “I’m doin’ ya a favor by being here so you’ll get your food when I’m good and ready to give it to ya, got it?!” I had soup and salad, which were both relatively fine, and came with a big basket of bread. Food was relatively cheap and relatively decent. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing right about it.

Final Meeting of the Day: Dinner at the Silver Diner

I was invited to attend a special event that featured Silver Diner co-founders President Bob Giaimo and Executive Chef Ype Von Hengst. After meeting the others at the event, tasting a few nice treats. Bob Giaimo opened the event.

Next up, Ype shared his passion and introduced what we were about to eat.

Looks like we’re not in the typical diner anymore.

I’m not a food critic, but I do enjoy eating. Compared to the two other diners from earlier in the day, there was no competition. This was delicious.

I think that I managed to cram a little bit of everything onto my plate. Simple things like locally sourced tomatoes (I usually don’t even like tomatoes) made the food taste fresher and better. Softer breads, crispier vegetables, and even locally sourced coffee (courtesy of Lacas Coffee from Pennsauken, NJ) made a difference. It appears that Chef Ype has found a way for franchises to source food locally, provide a broad diner menu, and serve food that just tastes a heck of a lot better than the average diner.

Now to be fair, the Silver Diner was having a special event, the top brass was there, everyone was at attention, so of course everything was going to be perfect. So I went back for breakfast a week later, ordered the Farmer’s omelet to test the system: no coupons, no special requests, just an average guy getting breakfast before the business day. (I didn’t even check in on Foursquare.)

Compared to what I typically get from diners in the area, again, this was simply superior. Food was delivered quickly, service was friendly and lacked the “doing you a favor” attitude, and the food was obviously fresh and tasty. But of course, this was going to be more expensive than my breakfast as described earlier, and it was, by about 50 cents.

So why do people in Cherry Hill tolerate the “typical diner” when the Silver Diner is right across from the mall? That’s something I’ll need you to explain to me.

Nope. Just another advertising program. SuperGuarantee is for sale.

So here is what I can figure out. A business registers themselves (by purchasing advertising with an upgraded package) with SuperPages.com. A consumer goes to SuperPages.com, finds a business, and registers a job in advance with SuperPages.com. If there is a problem with the business (that is a customer of SuperPages.com) and SuperPages.com cannot help resolve it, they will reimburse you up to $500.

SuperPages.com is protecting their customers, that is, businesses that advertise with them. It has nothing to do with being “super” like the yellow capes suggest.

Reading through the FAQ on the SuperGuarantee website, we find this wonderful tidbit:

Q: Are you endorsing or recommending the service providers who participate in the SuperGuarantee® Program?
A: No. We do not endorse or recommend any service provider.

Now that is peace of mind.

Of course, they would have never designed a program that truly benefits the consumers. That would have placed their customers at risk. So instead of allowing the community to act publicly and make recommendations based on our social connections, the SuperGuarantee is actually just a fancy graphic on a sponsored listing.

Also, the $500 limit on the claim compared with the actual process required to get the $500 probably isn’t worth your time.

SuperGuarantee Remix

If I was the consultant for this project, I would have recommended that they build something like Yelp, but targeting the residential contractor market. Let the contractors create listings in the directory for free, but you can upsell them on premium services and featured listings. Create a “basic” paid package (really cheap, like $10/month) that gives them tools for statistics and so they can follow-up with their customers to ask for reviews. Like LinkedIn, they can choose whether to show the customer testimonial on their page. The SuperGuarantee is something that they need their customers blessing to “earn” – the more positive reviews they get, the more “super” they deserve.

I would also let customers add the businesses to the directory, although require some approval process before things actually appear. The approval process might look a lot like a sales lead. It would contain the business name, contact information and type of business. SuperPages could then simply contact the company to make sure that the listing is accurate and offer basic and premium upgrades to the listing. If the customer had submitted a positive review, it will be waiting and ready for when the official listing goes live.

Now both the customers and the contractors have incentive to help in the broadcasting of the “SuperGuarantee” concept. Customers will naturally talk about positive experiences, but retain the voice to have negative experiences “heard” by the community. Contractors that do a good job will see the SuperPages listing as a positive marketing asset. If a contractor is really bad, SuperPages can choose to give them the boot.

SuperPages would then have an asset that contains much better data about current and potential customers, which is valuable to the consumer as well.

5,000. That’s it. Once you hit it, you are done. No more.

You probably didn’t realize this limit when you started. In fact, you probably didn’t realize that you had other options that were designed to do exactly what you wanted in a much more efficient manner. Options that weren’t limited to only 5,000.

I’m referring to a problem that some people are facing on Facebook: A personal account can only have 5,000 friends.

But let’s take a step back for a second. Do you really have 5,000 friends? I might be going out on a limb, but I’m guessing that if you are “friending” 5,000 or more people, you are probably building a marketing asset.

The Alternative: A Facebook Page

Facebook pages are designed for businesses, brands, products, organizations, artists, bands, public figures, and all flavors in between. Facebook pages are specifically designed for building a valuable marketing asset.

Using a personal account, you have to “confirm” each person as your friend; using a page, people can just “like” your page.

Using a personal account, you are limited to the number of people that you can send messages to. Facebook wants you to keep the number of recipients low, so you have to break things up into many many chunks. And this looks a lot like spamming behavior which could flag your account for abuse. Using a page, you can send an update to everyone that likes your page in one step. You can even use demographic or location targeting for the update.

If you want someone to help with your marketing effort, you have to share your private login information when using your personal account. Using a page, you can add other people as administrators (and remove them) to post content, message fans, monitor responses and such.

What if I’m Racing Toward That Wall?

This is a challenge, effort is involved, but it is tactically quite easy to do. You can resolve the situation through a few simple steps.

Step 1: Create the appropriate Facebook Page.
Start the process by going to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php and select the appropriate option. I suggest you browse through each of the options and review the possible choices in each of the drop-down menus. Type in the name of the page, and be very careful about the spelling. Once you name the page, you cannot edit this.

Step 2: Post a status update with a link to your Facebook page.

While this is a relatively simple process, it is important to note that this is an opportunity to ask your “friends” to share your new page. At the bottom of the left-side column of your new page, click the “Share” button and then include a short note that describes the new page and asks people to “like” it.

Step 3: Send a message to your friends with a link to the new page.
Keep the message short and sweet and make sure to include the link to your Facebook page in the message. Facebook will present the link nicely below your message making it each for people to “Like” the page. Unfortunately, you can only send a message to 20 people at a time, a limit that Facebook imposes to prevent spam.

I recommend that you don’t try to message all 5,000 of your “friends” in one day, rather spread out the task over several weeks, limiting the number of people that you are messaging to 100-200 per day. You do not want to have your account flagged for abuse by Facebook and sending out thousands of duplicate messages is certainly a way to be noticed by Facebook.

Step 4: “Unfriend” the people that are really just fans and not actual relationships.
There is no “rush” for this, but now that you have pointed people to the appropriate page, you shouldn’t feel bad about unfriending people that aren’t actual relationships. The worst part of this is that there isn’t a quick way to unfriend people.

The fastest way to do this on Facebook is to click on the “Account” menu and select “Edit Friends.” Facebook will then display all of your friends and pages. Click on the “X” next to each friend that you want to remove. Facebook will prompt you to confirm in case you clicked on someone by accident.

You can also use this opportunity to create a collection of “Friend Lists” which are infinitely useful for maintaining privacy and customizing your personal experience.

There is no prize for reaching 5,000 friends.

Moving forward, when people that you don’t know want to “friend” you on Facebook, reply to the friend request with an edited version of the message that you created in Step 3 above. Keep this message in a text file so that it is easy to copy and paste.

One thing that I haven’t mentioned relates to trust and believability. When I see a person with many thousands of friends, I make a judgment about the sincerity of these connections. Friendship is a two-sided relationship; friends should be willing to help other friends. Perhaps you are too busy with your 4,999 other friends to help me.

Having more than 5,000 people “Like” your business page is a real asset based on authentic requests for permission.

Simple.

One point that I want to emphasize is regarding the email subject line. My simple advice is to make the subject line helpful for both the recipient and the sender. Here is what I mean.

I frequently get email with the subject “Website.” That’s it, just the word website. For the person sending the message, there is only one website that they could possibly be referring to. For me, it is a slightly different story.

But let’s consider a different example. Perhaps you run a tire store, and your customer sends a message with the subject, “Tires.” Just imagine for a moment, looking through hundreds of emails and seeing the subject, “Tires.” Might make you want to scream. If I were emailing a tire store about tires for my car, I’d add some specifics to the subject. “New Tires for 2002 Hyundai Sonata.” I might even go so far as to include my name with it.

When I write this email, most of the subject isn’t something that I need at all, rather it is something that might help the recipient of my message. But consider the reply that might come in a few days later while I’m in the middle of something and see the reply, “RE: New Tires for 2002 Hyundai Sonata.” And now the reply to my original message is much more helpful to me as well. Fast forward a few months when you are searching through email looking for some detail, and your subject lines become extremely valuable time savers.

Here are some of my least favorite subject lines that I frequently receive:

• Website
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Seminar
• LinkedIn
• Contact
• Follow-Up
• Help
• Status
• Hello

So when writing the subject line (and please, do not write email without a subject line), give the recipient just a little extra context – who, what, where and when – to help us all manage our email inbox a little more efficiently.

What are some of your least favorite email subjects that you receive?

Just a quick post to invite you to the Philadelphia Business Journal’s Social Media Summer Camp. Here is the schedule of the sessions:

• Wednesday, June 2nd: Social Media 101 (featuring me!)
• Wednesday, June 9th: Twitter
• Wednesday, June 16th: LinkedIn
• Wednesday, June 23rd: Facebook
• Wednesday, June 30th: Social Media Strategies
• Wednesday, July 7th: Panel Discussion

Each workshop is $25 or you can purchase a session pass for $125. Sessions are from 7:30am – 9:30am at Peirce College‎, 1420 Pine Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102 (Click for map).

For more information and registration, please see the event page on the Philadelphia Business Journal’s website.

Let’s me take a few steps back. Several months ago, I showed up at my BNI business lunch, checked-in on Foursquare to find that Carrabba’s Italian Grill had a “Mayor Special,” a free dessert with the purchase of an entree. So I showed the manager my phone, he raised his eyebrow, but then asked me what I wanted for dessert. And it was delicious.

The following week, I checked in but didn’t bother to ask for the dessert. The week after that, the very nice server asked me what I wanted because she knew I had checked in on Foursquare. So that day, I got dessert. Again, delicious.

I knew that there weren’t many people checking in on Foursquare yet, the network has only recently past a million users. But I had started seeing more people check in at more locations in the area. The small group of early adopters were now being joined by some more people a little further along the curve.

At our business meetings it became a bit of a joke. Here comes Mayor Howard, ready for his dessert. Except I never asked for the dessert and never got the dessert again. I don’t need to eat dessert during the day. It was about the story, perhaps the honor of being the mayor.

Then over the next few weeks, other tech-forward members of the group in non-tech professions started to use Foursquare. They also check in at the restaurant, as well as other local businesses. The competition was on for someone to oust me as the mayor. Sometimes I specifically wouldn’t check in so that my friends might catch me.

Today, I jokingly said to the very nice server, “what’s the mayor having for dessert today?” She went completely ashen. Apparently, her boss had told her to deliver his message: No desert unless I came to the restaurant at a time other than during our weekly lunch there. She felt bad, and I started laughing. I told her that I wasn’t upset at her at all. (Her boss didn’t have the courage to deliver this message to me directly; nice to put the front-line employees in awkward situations with customers.)

But here is the crazy part. Between the four of us early adopters at our weekly business lunch, there are over a thousand people that see our status updates just on Facebook, not including the numbers on Twitter or otherwise. Our BNI group meets there every week and the bill is easily $350 each time, which accounts for close to $20,000 each year in business. (I know that my lunch dues are around $750 per year.) The cost of the one dessert, even if I was asking for it every week, is practically nothing considering the marketing and branding potential.

By checking in on Foursquare, we were doing exactly what Carrabba’s (@Carrabbas) wanted us to do: share our loyalty and eating preferences with our network of friends. And the promise that Carrabba’s made to the community on Foursquare was simple: If you check in more than anyone else, you deserve dessert.

As a small business, my goal is to have loyal fans promoting my services to their friends, reaching way beyond my own contact spheres. Here I was, a regular patron of a restaurant, sharing with my friends about the great food and experiences, no longer embraced, rather put in my place. All for a piece of chocolate cake.

So I’m done checking in at this restaurant, and I doubt I’ll take my family there or say nice things about it anymore. Someone else can be the mayor, I resign my post. In three months I got dessert twice in 12 visits, hardly abusing my status. I have plenty of other things I can share. Instead of everyone winning, we all lose. I’ll get over it, the owner/manager probably won’t care, and the very nice server who does an amazing job every week with our meeting will probably be blamed by her boss if the corporate franchise contacts the local owner about this post. (She deserves to get a bonus instead for making sure that everything runs smoothly every week.)

What did you say about the ratio of the people you follow to those following you?

Here is the thing about ratio. You want to have the ratio of followers (those who follow you) to those you follow as 1:1 or better. If you have 20 followers and you are following 10 people, your ratio is 2:1. New users to Twitter typically have the reverse – 10 followers and following 20 – 1:2. If you are trying to follow tons of people, Twitter “stops” you at 2000 people (a ton) that you can follow. So once you follow 2000 people, you will need to have 2000 people following you before you can follow more people.

That said, you can always follow someone, see if they follow you back, and then drop them and move on to someone else to keep your numbers below 2000 while your ratio nears 1:1. This is exactly what spammers do: they follow you and then immediate stop following you to generate the email, “SomeDude is now following your updates on Twitter…” including the link to their account in case you want to follow them back. Many people “think” they are supposed to follow back people, so they do and the original “SomeDude” grows a following. It is very deceptive and I strongly recommend against this.

There are a couple of things that you can do to combat this so you don’t end up following people with this deceptive scheme.

Strategy 1: Wait and Check

When you receive the email that someone new is following you, wait a bit, perhaps until the end of the day. Then you can go click on the link to view the person’s account. When you are viewing their profile page, look in the right column under the “Actions” header and you you will see the tell-tale indicator: “Message.” If the link to “message” (send a direct message) is there, then they are following you at that moment. If it just says “Block” and “Report for Spam” then the person isn’t following you.

You can do a bunch of these at a time. I suggest looking at the last bunch of Tweets from the person to decide whether you would appreciate following the content from this person.

Strategy 2: Ignore, Wait and Check

If you want to opt-out of the new follower emails, click on the “Settings” link on Twitter, and then click the “Notices” menu item. Uncheck the box for “New Follower Emails” and click the “Save” button. Now you won’t get emails saying that people are following you.

According to your own schedule, click on the “Followers” link on your Twitter profile and review the list. This list will only show you who is currently following you, from newest to oldest. So the people at the top of the list may have just started following you. I typically skip the first few unless I recognize someone. Then I scroll down the list, click on the account links and review from there.

The advantage of this method is that the known spammers will typically be blocked out already, saving you a bit of time.

Strategy 2a: Wait for @ Reply

As an enhancement to this, I sometimes will try to strike up a conversation with someone that looks interesting that has started following me using the @ reply or mention of their account. If they show up as a real people, then I’m more inclined to be interested in following their updates.

Following Sprees

My recommendation is that you don’t go on following sprees unless you are doing specific research for a particular type of person or profession. If you aren’t sure why to follow someone, don’t follow them. If their Tweets don’t interest you, don’t follow them.

If you are new to Twitter, you might find a directory, such as Twellow, useful for finding people on Twitter based on profession, subject and even location. Another method would be to find people that you respect and look at who they follow and engage in conversations.

If you want someone to follow you back, you need to “show up” by engaging in conversations.

Sorry for the long response to what appeared to be a simple question.

In an effort to improve your email marketing efforts, you need to stop thinking about the size of the list and focus on one perfect customer. Consider the following questions:

1. Is your message consistently interesting, or just recycling last week’s email?
2. Is your message time sensitive, timely, or just at the same time as last week?
3. Is your message unique to the character of your organization, or can I find the same content anywhere/everywhere else?
4. Is your message something that I will want to reply to, perhaps with a follow-up question?
5. Is your message worth sharing with my friends, or worth learning the shortcut key for deleting?
6. Is your message saying what you want to say to your perfect customer, or are you dripping and dripping like Chinese water torture?

(Side note on drip methods, email is a natural place for drip marketing tactics, I just recommend that your “drips” be wildly interesting.)

Attention is the only scarce resource in most of our lives. Please don’t abuse my attention.

And a final note, if you don’t understand CAN-SPAM, please go read the FTC’s CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business. In fact, go read it anyway just as a healthy reminder.

I’ve been using TicketLeap for my events for over a year now and I’ve been very happy. It doesn’t matter whether your event is for 5 or 5,000 people and there are no ongoing monthly fees. They are an Internet company, but located locally in Philadelphia, founded by a couple of Wharton graduates. So if you are having an event, give them a try.

Some of the other features are the ability to embed individual Tweets into your site with Blackbird Pie. For example:

Interesting, isn’t it? I knew you’d be excited.

Better still, Twitter is starting to roll out more business specific features, and I’ll be able to answer some of your questions at my seminar, “What in the Heck is Twitter?” this Friday, May 14th from 12p to 1:30p.

So my simple tip is don’t have a printer.

Okay, so this might be total craziness for some of you (okay, most of you), but I tried it for six months. Here was the result.

• Since the printer wasn’t convenient, I relied completely on paperless options. I created documents as PDF files and did many of the same things that the Mashable article suggests.
• I had access to a printer at home, just not at my office. So if I really needed to print, I printed to a print queue. By removing the instant gratification of printing, I found that instead of printing 3-5 versions of a document, I would barely need to print the final version.
• Documents for clients were provided as PDF files. If the client wanted a hard copy, they could print as many as they wanted. If they handed me a copy, I turned it down and used my PDF file on my laptop.
• After six months, I found that I needed the scanner more than the printer. So I purchased a multi-function printer/scanner. One year later, I have yet to go through the first ream of paper. I noticed that my processes are now designed to shred and recycle paper.

Before you toss your printer out the window, try this. Take the paper out of the tray. Just add a small bit of friction to the process and you might be surprised at how few things you really need to print.

Not a big deal, but I generally don’t like toasted bagels unless the bagel has been frozen. Of course, they toasted it and I was too tired to fight it.

It is hard to fight the default behavior. Most people like toasted bagels. The person behind the counter, faced with a rapidly growing line is looking for ways to speed things up, so he skips a step or two. It is only a bagel.

Imagine if you were Facebook working with 400+ million active users and you noticed that most people never took advantage of all of the options that you have painstakingly engineered into the service. The line grows longer and the options get more complicated. So in an effort to speed through the line, you streamline by taking advantage of the default behaviors.

Just another part of Facebook’s slippery slope.

Jobs’ letter could be rewritten from a developer to Apple, and I hope someone takes the time to do just that. Turn this sentence from Jobs: “We cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.” Into this: “We cannot accept an outcome where our apps are blocked from using innovations and enhancements because Apple doesn’t approve.”

Nicely said.

Right now, people are questioning whether the benefits of Facebook (finding old friends, extending relationships, casual communication, entertainment, social recommendations, and the spread of ideas through a viral network) outweigh some of the privacy settings.

You might recall that Facebook began as an entirely closed network. Unless you had a .EDU email address, you couldn’t get an account. The default settings all leaned in the direction of private. Contrast that to today where the defaults for a new user are completely public.

If you are one of the over 400 million active users of Facebook, be responsible and define your own use. Devote the time to understand the controls that you have that customize and personalize your experience. It requires that you take ownership and be accountable.

Most people won’t do this. That is the problem that Facebook should be addressing. Facebook should engineer its interface to encourage users to understand the power of its privacy controls. It might not make short-term business sense, but it might just save them from a mass exodus.

Think back to the dominance of America Online fifteen years ago and MySpace four years ago.

Warning, tech-geek moment: If I were trying to think of a business start-up idea, I’d be creating something that lets people and businesses own and manage their identity with a standard protocol that can run on your own basic web server. The idea is that we (individuals, organizations and companies) can own and control our identity information, rather than trust for-profit companies with our data and ideas.

Last week I watched many people post and re-post about the latest concerns over privacy on Facebook, encouraging everyone to change yet another setting. This was a knee jerk reaction that reminded me of the virus hoax emails that often get forwarded from one person to another.

If you took the time to understand the new feature, and then decided to turn it off, both on Facebook and on the participating sites, I respect your decision because it is informed. If you simply opted-out without understanding why, you encourage Facebook to continue to set the defaults of its new features in ways that might make people uncomfortable.

Two Problems

Facebook gives users amazing granular control over privacy settings, global all the way down to a single status update. The problem is that no one takes the time to learn how to use these controls. Facebook should make this easier to manage and maintain.

Facebook knows that most people accept the default settings. So they are pushing the envelope, trying to become the keeper of the official social graph on the Internet. By default, Facebook wants you to make everything public so they can sell advertisements and make business deals. (They are a for-profit company.)

Instant Personalization

The program that everyone was reacting to is a pilot program called “instant personalization” and it is currently with three partners: Microsoft Docs.com, Pandora and Yelp. Imagine that you can see restaurant reviews on Yelp written by your Facebook friends, and Yelp is able to show you this information even though you aren’t yet connected with these people on Yelp itself. This is what the “instant personalization” is for – your friends travel with you to other sites and you benefit from a relationship that is already defined on Facebook.

The opt-out process is two steps, one on Facebook and the other on the partner site, if you happen to use that site. So, if you turned off instant personalization on Facebook but neglected to turn it off on the partner sites as well, you probably skipped a step. Go back and read the details, then finish the job if you are so inclined.

You may have heard that according to Morgan Stanley, “the mobile Internet is ramping faster than desktop Internet did, and we believe more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.” And as futuristic as it may sound, you might already be carrying around a device that would make Gene Roddenberry drool feel validated that his futuristic vision of the tricorder has come true.

What makes an App an App?

An App is nothing more than software running on a device, like a desktop computer or smartphone.  Traditionally, to install software, it was a complex process. Put in a disk, run a program, answer questions you don’t understand by clicking “OK” a lot. If there’s an update to the software, you download and install the patch. Then if you want to uninstall it, it is a whole process and then you have to clean out all of the garbage left behind.

But the idea behind the “App Store” is that software installation, updates, management and removal are all amazingly simple: 1-click and done. It is a very consumer-friendly process, no longer requiring a “techie” to manage or maintain the process. Apps are also often “single purpose” tools that are task oriented. “I need to do THIS so I have an App that does exactly that.” The concept isn’t new, just the technology to make it seamless from end-to-end is now widely available for average consumers at reasonable prices.

Open and Closed

When thinking about the mobile platforms, one issue that comes up is whether the platform is open or closed. Most consumers don’t quite understand this, so let me explain.

In a closed environment, there is end-to-end control of the entire system. Companies control the distribution and sale of the applications, which will be deemed “safe” or “approved” with the hope that this leads to stability (fewer crashes) and overall consistency in the user experience. I can pick up anybody’s iPhone and the experience, other than different apps, will be the same as my phone.

In an open environment, you have the ability to “tweak” or customize. Developers can create applications that do anything that the devices and operating system will support, which can lead to amazing innovation and creativity. But developer ability and code standards will run the gamut, from really great to awful. The overall experience of the device can be compromised, resulting in slowness, crashes, freezes, and restarts. And the experience from device to device and user to user will fracture as the result of different versions of the operating system and different features of devices.

Mobile Device Use Cases

What really interests me (and hopefully interests you) is precisely why a mobile device like an iPhone or BlackBerry can make your work life better: more productive, more flexible, more relaxed, etc. So let me give you the basics.

Mobile device Instead of a desktop computer – Both can effectively do the same thing, but you would rather use a mobile device.

Mobile device to Extend a desktop computer – You use the desktop computer as the primary application, but the mobile device can access information from the desktop and provides some or all of the same functionality.

Mobile device allows New Functions impossible with a desktop computer – the combination of portable, hand-held, phone, SMS, GPS/location, Internet-enabled, camera equipped, battery powered, bluetooth, WiFi, motion sensor, voice recognition, speakers, microphone, music player, push notifications, etc. provides functions in combination not easily possible with a desktop or laptop computer.

Mobile device allows a Quick Check, Convenience or Capture – checking of email, snapping photos, voice recording, anywhere access to the Internet and even getting push notifications that allow your brain to deal with the “If I knew that this was happening right now, I could resolve in 11 seconds” problem.

Time Kill Central – mobile devices have delivered tons of games which can be very fun and extremely addictive. Clearly these are not for business productivity, but sometimes you do need a mental break.

Application Categories

Now since there are close to 200,000 applications, I’ve broken things into specific categories and I just want to talk about one or two specific “Apps” in each category. There is no reasonable way that in the span of a single post I can be comprehensive, but I want to give you some starting points to go search the “App Stores” for your own favorites.

Also note that in this post I focus on the iPhone because that is what I have in my pocket at the time of this writing. However, many of the same or similar applications are available (or will be) for the Android and other platforms.

Phone Power Tools

• Skype uses your existing data network (WiFi or 3G) to make VoIP calls. Verizon had a press release about this a couple months back and Skype is showing up on all of the mobile platforms.
• Line2 gives you a second number for your cell phone, especially useful where your 3G signal is weak but you have available WiFi. It can turn an iPod Touch into a cell phone in a WiFi environment and with the microphone enabled earphones.
• Free Conference Call allows you to manage conference calls, see/manage participants, etc. So if you use Free Conference Call for your conference calls, go get this app.

Productivity

• There are a lot of task list applications. ReQall goes beyond a simple task list, rather it is a voice enabled memory aid, that will transcribe your voice, and remind you about things to do when you are at specific locations. It also helps you remember things that you might have forgotten about. See David Pogue’s video review of reQall.
• Evernote is probably the best cross-platform digital junk drawer anywhere. The free application gives you desktop and mobile access to the same database. Evernote will scan images for text (even hand-written) and attempt to index it for search.
• Dragon Dictation allows you to start speaking and it will convert what you say into text. You can then copy/paste into other applications.
• ZipNote makes sending yourself an email much faster. You just open the app and type your message. It fills in a time-stamp in the subject line and pre-configures your email account information. Yes, you can do this with the built-in mail application, this just saves a bunch of steps.

Desktop to Mobile and Back

• Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite gives you access to your Microsoft Office documents (among others) and can connect with multiple cloud services. You can create new Word and Excel files, and open/view PowerPoint, PDF and other file types.
• For remote desktop use, you can either go with Citrix Receiver or LogMeIn Ignition depending on your specific corporate network setup.
• Salesforce Mobile gives you most of the goodies (dashboards, companies, contacts, calendar, lead conversion) that you would want from Salesforce in a native application.
• Time Master + Billing + Quickbooks gets you all of the reporting, invoicing, import/export, etc. that will extend Quickbooks data to your mobile device. Remember that you won’t be looking at live data and you will have to sync each time you get back to the office. Still, you are able to track time for clients, projects and tasks and the timers keep running even when the app isn’t.
• SplashID helps you manage your passwords, credit cards, accounts, and such in a central encrypted application. It has versions for Android, Palm, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Nokia Series 60 and desktop versions for Windows & Mac.

On the Road Again

• If you use a car for business, Milebug should be required issue. It tracks the mileage for your trips, allows you to track different cars, save frequent trips, save presets for frequent locations and trips, and easily email reports for specific date ranges. You can include expenses related to the trips as well.
• Hoover’s Near Here gives you location based results for standard Hoover’s search, showing potential customers right in the area. LeadTurbo does the same basic thing, but with a different database.
• Tripit is a combination of website and mobile application. You forward your travel plans via email to TripIt and the website organizes everything for you, and the mobile application gives you access to the information plus some added goodies. They have a pro account ($70/year) with notifications and alternate flights, point tracking, and sharing with select people.
• Yahoo Sketch-a-Search lets you draw a shape on a map and then it will show you business results in that area. You can then do a bit of filtering by categories. The application is a bit of a gimmick, but useful when in unfamiliar areas.
• Trainboard is a simple SEPTA application that shows when trains are coming at a specific station and how late they are. Very simple to select your station using your phone’s location functionality and the train schedules work without a network connection. Trainboard does this one thing exactly right. It is simple, fast, and useful, and costs less than the price of a fare. (Please note that the developer provided me with a code so I could download this application for free in order to try it.)
• WorldCard Mobile is a business card scanning app. Process to scan and correct works nicely (some cards scan better than others), but the awkward part is when you would use it. Imagine being in a public situation, “This is my last card…” so you quickly scan the card and then go into edit mode. Desktop versions of business card scanners allow you to do stacks and stacks and you have a full keyboard to make changes and corrections. I used WorldCard Mobile a couple of times at the beginning, but rarely find the need to use it.

Additional Resources

Double Twist (PC & Mac) gives you an iTunes experience for devices other than iPhones. It syncs music, videos, etc. and converts videos to compatible formats. It offers Amazon MP3 store support and it is free.

If you use your iPhone as much as I do, you might find that your battery doesn’t quite make it all the way the day. I always have a Mophie Juice Pack in my bag, which gives me an extra battery in the form of a case. Slip it on and it starts charging. It holds a charge for well over a month, so you don’t have to use it all of the time and worry weather you will get battery life. I especially like that I can charge it separately from the phone itself.

Since I’m on AT&T and I don’t always get good coverage (ahem). The MiFi Mobile Hotspot gives Internet connectivity to my iPhone, my laptop, and others at a conference table. Basically, you take one of the broadband connect cards but instead of connecting it via USB port, you put it on the table and up to 5 people can connect via a standard WiFi connection. I’ve used it to make Skype calls when the “map for that” wasn’t as good as hoped. There are new 4G versions from Sprint coming out over the next few months with faster connection speeds, but my MiFi has been very reliable and reasonably fast.

So, what are your favorite business apps for your smartphone?

Sorry, Jennifer. No more orders from me.

I’ve always had a quote: “Water is for drinking, viewing and bathing.” I guess my poor vision has kept me out of the pool. Once I’m allowed, perhaps I’ll try a few laps.

That said, I hope if any of you are considering getting LASIK, you take a look at my doctor (also my client), Dr. Cary M. Silverman, M.D. of Eyecare 20/20. In working for him, I’ve researched his competitors far and wide. Dr. Silverman is a rare gem in this industry and I trust him with my vision.

And a special thank you to everyone who has reached out to me with words of encouragement. It means a lot to know that your friends are thinking of you, if only for a moment.

Spring allergies certainly affect people in lots of ways and for me it has been my eyes. Now add a contact lens into the mix. This means working in front of a computer, driving a car, riding a bike, or simply looking at someone across a table aren’t “comfortable” actions.

Last year my solution was to wear my glasses for most of the Spring. I hate wearing glasses.

Just another reason that LASIK is really going to change my world. A lot of very simple things add up to give reasons to this profound change.

I’ve had all flavors and sizes of glasses and contacts, some good and some garbage. My latest contacts, Acuvue Oasis for Astigmatism, have been excellent: long wearing, very comfortable, good vision, and almost zero maintenance fuss.

However, I spend many hours in front of a computer screen, so inevitably my eyes get tired and if vision is even a little sub-par, I get minor headaches. I’ve never had really great vision with glasses, I’ve had better luck with contacts, but I’m simply tired of fighting with this.

So next week, I’ll be changing my approach: LASIK here I come.

Right now, I’m both excited and scared. Fortunately, I’m working with a great eye surgeon, Dr. Cary M. Silverman M.D. of Eyecare 20/20. It is a bit of a drive up to East Hanover, NJ for the procedure, but these are my EYES that we are talking about.

Permission on Twitter is strange.

You start following me. And then someone else. And another.

Paranoia strikes.

People follow other people for so many different reasons on Twitter. For me, if I choose to follow someone, I don’t expect an automatic follow back.

That said, if you do start following me on Twitter, at least send me an @ reply and say hello. Otherwise I might not have any reason to follow you back.

Experimenting with a tweets of the week post, I think that I’ve found a format that grasps the random tweet with some of my personality.

I contributed to the GoPetFriendly “Do You Speak Pet-Speak” contest: [View]

Do you speak pet-speak? – http://bit.ly/c0xFBh #contest – my contribution was “yapsolutely”

I posted about Patrick Flanagan: [View]

From the files of VERY COOL – check out this composer making drum music with a Wii remote – http://bit.ly/cxHzjd

I celebrated the return of Rick Astley’s infamous video link: [View]

Okay, so I used to have the hair like this in the 80′s, but never the coat or the dancers. http://bit.ly/cxSyR

I made a suggestion to Conan: [View]

@ConanOBrien wondering if you are going to produce a show straight to the Internet. I’d subscribe.

I stuck up for a friend on Twitter: [View]

@RidePATCO What’s up that has @jerseyshorejen upset?

I tasted my own medicine: [View]

Spent the day working on my own website for a change. Almost there, but still need to make my content better. Tastes of my own medicine.

I posted a rare quote: [View]

Quote from the Age of Google: “Search first, ask questions later.”

I asked you to mark the date for a special “Bark in the Park” game: [View]

Mark your calendar for Sunday April 25: @TrentonThunder is doing the “Bark in the Park” and @GoPetFriendly will be there with a group.

My client got mentioned on Lifehacker.com: [View]

Did you see that @GoPetFriendly got mentioned on Lifehacker today? http://bit.ly/dx1Lwb

I got soaking wet, and checked in at a kids party using Foursquare: [View]

Still soaked from the rain, but another weekend, another birthday party. (@ International Sports, Skating & Fun Centre)

After watching, I immediately thought back to the Honda “Cog” commercial, another beautiful example.

And if you like this kind of this, how about a nice “Falling Water” cocktail…

This one, Sticks and Stones, is rather impressive given that everything is setup in nature.

And let’s finish this post out with MythBuster’s Holiday edition Rube Goldberg machine.

What are your favorite Rube Goldberg machine videos?

The argument presented is important, especially for the future of journalism. Plain and simple, the advertisements support the sites and when you block them, the advertisers don’t see the investment in Ars Technica as worthwhile.

But very important to notice: Ars Technica offers a paid version of their site which does not have ads. So if you care about the content and don’t want ads, you have an option to be a paying subscriber.

So think through this a bit. If you are willing to pay for content online, should you still have to endure the advertisements? Perhaps this is what upsets people so much. If the content is free, I expect to be advertised to. However, if I pay for online content why should I tolerate the advertisements. In the move to online, perhaps more sites should consider the model that Ars Technica presents.

Here is the gist of the article. Guy with an iPhone used an application to snap a picture and the application overlays a “ghost image” on the photo. He submitted the photo and the UK’s Sun and Daily Mail newspapers ran with it. Now they feel a little bit silly.

News organizations have a journalistic responsibility to readers to check the facts. Otherwise readers will stop trusting and go elsewhere, regardless of the medium.

From the Official Google Blog: Stars make search more personal

We’ve long believed that personalization makes search more relevant and fun. For nearly five years, we’ve been tailoring results with personalized search. Today we’re announcing a new feature in search that makes it easier for you to mark and rediscover your favorite web content — stars.

What this means is that search engine results are very different from person to person. Google gives you the tools to make your search experience better. Stars is clearly there for this particular use case: You find a site one day, give it a star because you want to remember it, and then days/weeks/months from now when doing a similar search, your starred results are given priority. It is a great tool that improves your personal search experience.

That said, it is harder and harder to find the silver bullet that will get your business website onto the first page on Google, especially if you are trying to be first for everyone globally. Google is now (and has been for a while) delivering results based on your IP address, geography, and in some cases, social connections. However, on the local level, it is getting easier for smaller businesses to be relevant online in the same ways that they are traditionally relevant.

The new date is Saturday, April 24, 2010 from 9am-4pm. Hopefully it will not snow at the end of April.

The second video shows Patrick performing/improvising with the instrument.

If you know where my brain is, you can figure out why this is SO AMAZINGLY COOL!

SunGard is looking for a CEO for Availability Services – http://bit.ly/axDOzg – Go ahead, make me an offer SunGard.

After a couple of posts back and forth between @SomaCowGeoff, I suggested a feature for Tweetie to it’s developer: [view]

@atebits Great idea for Tweetie feature… allow me to see Tweets of those that I follow within a specific radius. (Help from @SomaCowGeoff)

I asked the Weather Channel for mercy: [view]

Hey folks at the Weather Channel, enough with the snow for the month. Please nothing until March. Send it to New Mexico, much funnier there.

I shamelessly promoted my seminar: [view]

“Online Marketing Day of Thunder” – http://bit.ly/1cuHll – First person to use the code “THUNDER30″ when registering saves $30. Go!

I welcomed a friend and seminar attendee to Twitter: [view]

Welcome to @kenkelllaw, a Twitter newbie from my seminar this morning. Hey, say hello to the “attorney that makes house calls.”

I replied to @nametagscott‘s fill in the blank: [view]

@nametagscott You don’t need permission to spam the heck out of people that don’t care about you. You can get hate for free this way!

I congratulated Chad Hedrick, one of the Olympians who was given free LASIK by Eyecare 20/20, on his bronze medal: [view]

Congratulations to Chad Hedrick on a Bronze Medal! One of the athletes that @LASIKfortheGold treated… Awesome.

I retweeted an article link from Frank Canna: [view]

RT @MirrorFinish Honestly, there’s more to buying a new car than just signing the papers! http://tinyurl.com/yzvxqk9

I shared a thought: [view]

Remove the term “Email Blast” from your vocabulary. No one likes to be hit by shrapnel, even if it is digital.

Perhaps out of sheer morbid curiosity (or that these people could be potential clients), I let the emails continue. Drip, drip, drip. I could easily unsubscribe, but I wait to see if the company decides to actually do something interesting. Usually they don’t. And they don’t for a very long time.

Week after week, the same tired, boring content. Over and over and over again. What a waste of pixels. Even worse are the newsletters that pack so much content into the message or provide no mechanism to respond to the content. Seriously, I just don’t get it. Once, just once, read your own email as someone who doesn’t care about you yet.

Here is the problem: someone somewhere convinced you that the person with the biggest email database wins. You fall into that trap rather than doing something worthy of attention.

Here is my suggestion: Only add someone to your email database that asks to be on the list. If this means that no one wants to subscribe, perhaps you should rethink your email marketing strategy.

Since you probably won’t trash your existing list, why not create a new list with people that asked to be there. Now change the message content for each list. To the big list of people that don’t know you, invite them in. Talk about why you are worthy of attention. To the small list of people that like you, engage with them rather than broadcast to them.

And remove the term “Email Blast” from your vocabulary. No one likes to be hit by shrapnel, even if it is digital.

On the surface this stinks. Especially if you are a song writer, a band or the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).

This doesn’t mean that you stop selling the music. It just means that you cannot bank on it. If all that someone wants is something to listen to, they don’t need to pay for anything. But people like to “connect” with the music that they listen to.

The Grateful Dead had it right: “Please bootleg our concerts. In fact, here is an output from our mixing board. We are never going to play it the same way twice.”

That created loyalty and love for the group. Enough loyalty that people (Deadheads) would buy albums, t-shirts, concert tickets, etc. for any price. The purchase of anything “Grateful Dead” was an expression of love for the group, not just a purchase of a t-shirt or CD. In fact, the Deadheads would follow the band around from show to show.

So imagine for a moment a local band. They have a few hundred followers on their Facebook or MySpace page. So they call the owner of a restaurant and say the following:

“We’d like to do a show at your place. Don’t pay us to play the gig, rather give us 20% of the bar revenue and donate 20% to a local charity. And we will give you 20% of the merchandise and CD sales and we will donate 20% to charity as well. We’ll bring our fans.”

What the band should realize is that its real assets are loyalty and love from its fans. The bar or restaurant is a place to monetize it and a place for the fans to express their love. The band can bring hundreds of people to a usually barren place without any financial risk to the bar or restaurant.

Everybody wins.

And just for a moment, think about how The Grateful Dead would have used Facebook and Twitter. A lot can be learned from the way they connected with their followers.

So if you are the band in the above scenario, ask people that come to the show for their email address and send them an MP3 file of the show. Or even better, find one of your fans that wants to be your ambassador and can organize this for you.

Update: Here is an article from The Atlantic Magazine – Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead

The war was waged on Twitter, and on blogs, and on podcasts and onto CNN, Los Angeles Times, People Magazine, etc.

Ouch if you are Southwest Airlines. Apparently they didn’t realize that celebs sometimes fly coach. To their credit, they are handling this in the open instead of trying to hide.

Thank goodness you aren’t a large company, right? Wrong.

Every business, be it a solopreneur, SMB, franchise or Fortune 500 company, works with customers. Customers are people. All people have some form of social connection, both online and traditional.

Marketing is a double edged sword. The forces that create lines at the Apple Store for whatever the latest i-Product may be are the same forces the Kevin Smith tapped into this past weekend.

Again, an example of the “Collective Mind” that Twitter often displays. Trending topics now has localization for some cities. Of course you can always Twitter search to see very specific things in your area and related to keywords.

My question for the day is whether someone has rigged a snow thrower to Tweet, along the same lines as the Twittering Office Chair.

(Again, a shameless plug) Looking on more insight into how you can use Twitter for business, please register for the “What in the Heck is Twitter?” workshop on February 16, 2010 at 8:30a. It is only $15.

As expected the top trend was “Hope for Haiti Now” and people were tweeting comments about the performers. Sometimes people would name the wrong person, but overall, the crowd answered the question within seconds of the next performance starting.

That was a global event and the collective mind was hard at work. But that collective mind happens all of the time: you can learn from it or you can ignore it. As a business owner, I’m more inclined to try to find a competitive advantage using this resource.

And after using the collective mind that is Twitter, I’ve used it to prototype a new variety of my service, which I’ll be announcing mid-February.

(Shameless plug) But if you want some insight how you can use Twitter for business, please consider registering for the “What in the Heck is Twitter?” workshop on February 16, 2010 at 8:30a.

Happy Holidays to everyone. Wishing everyone happiness and success in the new year.

(Go checkout more great photos from Whipped Bakeshop’s Photostream.)

A bunch of good suggestions were posted. My answer to this was as follows:

It isn’t so much about the features. Instead it is about the engagement with customers. Many users do not want to install additional applications so if your fan page requires this, it may potentially turn off users.

Post content that your audience wants and can engage with. Be there and respond to questions and feedback from customers. Make sure to balance the number of posts and updates so you don’t annoy your audience and send them away.

Finally, if you have created a really great piece of content (video, article, etc.), encourage your audience to share the content to their own networks. Remember that a Fan page isn’t about broadcast; it is about stimulating natural conversation.

What are your suggestions?

If your work involves sitting in front of a computer for any amount of time, take a moment to read the following post from Lifehacker:

• Top 10 Ergonomic Upgrades for Your Workspace

From personal experience, I have done everything but the software enforcers, but that is what I’m going to be trying next. I see so many people working with laptops on plain desks which puts your wrists at a bad angle, you back in a strange position, and your eyes staring down. So consider that the perfect holiday gift to yourself is to get a real mouse and keyboard that you can plug into your laptop, and a stand to put your laptop up at eye level.

We are all strapped for time. For many businesses, the thought of adding another task to their already full schedule is frightening. So the thought of posting interesting, compelling, original, worthwhile content on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. could practically suffocate a person, that along with the unfamiliar technology.

Consider this, who is the best voice for the company?

• Option 1: the company president, CEO or founder, possibly the marketing director or customer service director.
• Option 2: an intern or low-cost outsourced person with a script.

Option 2 is convenient, a short-cut, a “let’s try this to see if it is actually worth our time” tactic. So the intern will post safe/boring content that is totally harmless and risk-free.

But the intern lacks the genuine passion for the business that is actually compelling. In other words, option 2 practically guarantees mediocrity.

The Internet has given us the opportunity to create real conversations with prospects, customers, vendors, friends, and even competitors. How will they feel when they realize that they aren’t talking to the person they thought they were? Trust breaks down.

This is the reason that I do not ghost post for my clients. Rather, I teach them how to post themselves, to get over the small hurdles, to learn how to listen an engage in real conversations, build real relationships.

• 16 Lessons in Customer Service from a Car Salesman

My favorite point from the post was at the end:

“So, Lesson #16, don’t treat your customers as opponents to be beat. If you do, they’ll eventually think of you that way, too, and eventually move on to someone who’ll work with them instead of against them.”

For me, I take a collaborative approach with clients, which isn’t the easy route. But when a client relationship becomes adversarial, neither client nor vendor win.

In advance of my seminar, “What in the Heck is Twitter?” on November 18th, the theme for the links this week is Twitter.

• Tweet Cheat Sheet: article from Scott Kirsner (@scottkirsner) of the Boston Globe that gives a good overview of Twitter and some basic advice for understanding the language. Perfect for those new to Twitter.
• Twitter and Status Updating, Fall 2009: from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the study claims that now almost 19% (up from 11% in December 2008) of Internet users share updates about themselves using Twitter or another service. The article also talks about the median age of users for the social networks: Twitter – 31, MySpace – 26, LinkedIn – 39, Facebook – 33. Interesting to note the significant change was for Facebook which has risen from 26 to 33 over the last 18 months.
• Twitter Lists – Frequently Asked Questions and Strategies: article from Mashable that covers the new Twitter lists functionality very well.
• Tweet Blocker: free resource for Twitter users that catalogs and ranks the top spammers on Twitter. It scans through your followers and scores based on the account activity, follower ratio, and age of account. You can preview each account, click a checkbox and block users directly from Tweet Blocker.
• Twitter for Business FAQ: article from Web Worker Daily that answers some of the common business questions surrounding the use of Twitter.

What are your best links for advice or resources about Twitter?

Google has a long history of changing it’s logo to commemorate historical events. And some have been quite elaborate. Certainly, they always get noticed by its users and the media.

Consider that Google’s main source of revenue is from its AdWords program, a product that displays contextual advertisements that cost the advertiser only when someone clicks on the ad and only as much as the advertiser is willing to bid for the click.

But what if Chevrolet wanted to commemorate a historic milestone with its Corvette by introducing a new model. Would Google be willing to sell the homepage doodle logo?

It gives Google a product similar to a Super Bowl commercial, but can be sold on any day of the year.

Here are some issues to consider:

1. Doodles are a special event, so Google couldn’t sell the logo every day. Maybe once a month otherwise it would lose its power.
2. Superbowl commercials cost around a million dollars for a 30-second commercial. Google’s doodle would probably reach an audience about 10-20 times the size, not including the residual PR.
3. Would Google only allow “iconic” brands or “historic” companies to effectively hijack the doodle for the day?
4. How would your impression of Google change if they infrequently sold this prime ad placement? Would you start questioning the validity of the unsponsored results?

Funny that when making the image above, there happened to be an Ad for the new Verizon Droid below the search box. First time I noticed that.

I admit it, I was never one of those popular kids at high school. In fact, I was in several of the less glamorous groups: the smart kids and the music groups. And I was quite proud of this, because it was actually in line with my personality.

With networks like Facebook exploding, I’ve noticed that the popular kids are still popular on these networks for one simple reason: popular kids are good at being popular.

So what do you do with that popularity? After all, if you have a large network of people who want to connect with you, you have a lot of opportunities presented to you. Why not change the world.

The Internet enables the spread of ideas at extremely high speeds and popular kids can really amplify this spread. Oprah is the perfect example. When she blesses something with her approval, everyone notices. To her credit, she also wants to make the world a better place.

Oprah is insanely popular and we all want her to notice us. Perhaps she might notice if we simply get more popular? If you want to get Oprah to notice, take a deep look at yourself and ask the following question:

“Why should anyone care about me?”

If you obsess over the number of connections, followers, friends, fans, etc. and your goal is to be popular, the answer is that no one really cares about you. Sorry, but we don’t and Oprah won’t either.

In thinking about Chris Anderson’s book, “The Long Tail,” I’m reminded that in every category someone or something is “The Most.” Each category gets divided into smaller subcategories again and again. At each level, someone or something is “The Most” in that particular niche area.

Oprah is simply “The Most” in the category of influential media personalities. Subdivide that category down to technology podcasters and you get Leo Laporte. Subdivide that even further to podcasts about Ruby on Rails and you get Ryan Bates. If you develop for Ruby on Rails (which you probably don’t), Ryan Bates is “The Most” in exactly the same way that Oprah is, just further down the tail.

If your goal is to be popular, consider that you need to compete with Oprah, Barack Obama, Paul McCartney, Steve Jobs, etc. Each person didn’t get popular because that was their goal. Their goals were all different and personal and focused.

Do something that you care about and be insanely great, insanely generous, insanely caring, insanely prolific. But don’t do it to become popular.

Twitterfeed is a service that allows you to link the RSS feed from your blog to automatically create Tweets. It can be a huge time saver, but it does come with a downside. Automating posts like this feels a lot like shouting to me.

Seriously, how hard is it to create 140 characters. If you are posting something to your blog, you already have a good title (cut and paste) and you can create a nice short link through Bit.ly to track the number of clicks. And that is the whole process, unless you add a couple of extra words as editorial.

When Twitterfeed made some programming changes and flooded Twitter streams with mountains of old posts, sometimes several times over, one realizes the danger of automating conversation opportunities.

A couple of days ago, I decided to give Pingdom a try. Pingdom is a service that monitors the uptime and performance of your website.

Signing up for the account was simple and setting up the first site to monitor was also quite simple. The only quirk with the setup is this. You tell it how long a “cycle” is, that is to say, how often it will check your site. So I set the cycle to 5 minutes. In the notifications area, it asks when and how often to send notifications of down time in terms of cycles, rather than minutes. So if I want to only receive a notification when the site is down for 15 minutes, I have to select 3 cycles. Once you save the form, they translate this, but it would be nice to work in terms of minutes rather than cycles.

Usually, these services are things that I look at and then ignore. But of course, my site went down one day after setting up the monitoring. Turns out, my hosting provider had a problem with a router and thankfully fixed the issue quickly.

Pingdom worked perfectly. I received the appropriate notifications which corresponded exactly to the hosting company’s post about the outage. It happened while I was sleeping and traditionally I wouldn’t have noticed or cared.

If you only need to monitor one site, they have a limited free account that will probably be all that you need. They do have paid accounts for monitoring multiple sites and services with deeper reporting and such.

So let’s say you purchased the one popular track on iTunes for a buck. Why not allow me to purchase one more B-side track for a small marginal cost, say about $.45.

iTunes already allows you to complete the album. This would just be a small step towards convincing me that it is worth it.

When Wacom announced the new Bamboo Pen & Touch tablet, I was very eager to get my hands on the product. This was to be the perfect enhancement to my MacBook Pro setup at the desk where I already have a great external keyboard and a tolerable mouse. My goal was to have the multitouch that I love so much on the laptop alone extend to the desktop setup and replace the mouse.

As soon as my local Best Buy had it on the shelves, I rushed out and slapped down the $100. (Yes, Mr. FTC, I paid for this myself and was not provided a review unit.) Wacom has made the packaging and setup quite good, and the additional tutorials for learning how to get the most from the Bamboo were helpful.

Houston, we have a problem.

The Bamboo Pen & Touch supports both touch with your hands and the pen stylus basically simultaneously. When holding the pen, your hand will rest close enough to the large touch sensitive area that you get errant taps and clicks. So this amazing feature is actually the biggest problem. I think that the problem would be resolved if the unit ignored touch while it was tracking the pen, or at least some sensitivity or timing setting to prevent these errant clicks.

This all said, I love the Bamboo touch, it is just not what I expected. If you are in the market for a drawing tablet, this is a fantastic choice. If you are in the market for a mouse replacement, move along.

“You don’t get to choose whether people talk about you or not, but you can choose to be part of the conversation.”

Conversations happen everywhere. Blogs, forums, and social networks represent a small slice of that conversation. Time and time again I hear companies want to “control the message.” But that is so much more challenging now that there are millions of people carrying around video cameras that can instantly post to YouTube.

Rather than focusing on controlling the conversation, move towards shaping the conversation. That only happens when you are participating. Participation isn’t something that you start in a crisis or when things are wonderful. Participation starts in between events when the only reason you want to talk is because you want to talk. Otherwise it feels hollow.

Just wanted to congratulate my friends Jeff Backal of Team Builders Plus (#45) and Anthony Mongeluzo of Pro Computer Service (#70) for being among the fastest-growing privately held companies in the Philadelphia area.