There are more and more reasons to skip meetings and collaborate online instead. Time, gas and traffic are good enough reasons on their own to stay put and meet online. I think the reason people still insist on meeting face-to-face for every little thing is because they don’t know what alternatives are available.

I don’t mean to say you should never meet with other people in person. Face-to-face meetings always have value, but they’re not always the best use of the time. Choose your meetings carefully and for the rest, try hooking up online.

Here are a few online mindmapping tools and collaboration systems I happen to enjoy.

Bubbl.us is a web-based mindmaping tool. They’ve had a 2.0 version in public beta for as long as I can remember. Both the current and beta versions are easy to use for mindmapping and sharing. In case you’re not familiar with mindmapping, here’s a video from techbites on mindmapping with bubbl.us.

Huddle.net has iPhone and Blackberry apps in addition to the web console. I’ve used this to track tasks on a project, share files and manage a project calendar. This service also supports web conferencing with screen sharing, discussion boards and a virtual whiteboard.

Google Docs is one of my favorite tools. You can create text docs, spreadsheets and presentation files which can be viewed and shared online. Give another person change access to the file and they can edit it as well. My Toastmasters group uses Google Docs for the club roster and I’ve used it to submit articles to magazines.

Freebinar is a recent discovery for me. If you’ve done a webinar, or watched one, you probably know they’re pretty handy and of course, they help you reach an audience that can be anywhere in the world. There are some other good tools out there that charge a nominal monthly fee, but I don’t do enough webinars to justify a monthly ding on my card. So far, I can’t tell why I wouldn’t use Freebinar anyway.

That’s a short list, but it works for me.

Do you have any favorite online collaboration tools? Share your discoveries in a comment below.

Technorati Tags: brainstorming, mindmapping, Online Collaboration, project management

In the realm of personal branding there are two camps: One believes that you create a personal brand through the way you dress, cut your hair, pad your resume and all that nonsense which ends up giving the concept of personal branding a bad name. The other sees personal branding as a process of revelation. Issues which you may consider to be “style” become the natural outlet for one’s core identity.

If you’ve seen me speak in public in the past couple of years, there’s a good chance you’ve heard me tell some variation of the following story. I use it to illustrate the point of using life as a means of revelation.

In the early 1900s reconstruction efforts in an area of Thailand required the demolition of an old abandoned temple. In the temple was a large stucco statue of the Buddha, painted gold. Destroying the statue wasn’t an option so the incredibly heavy statue was moved to a warehouse where it stayed for another 20 years.

In 1955 it was decided to move the statue into a newly constructed building. During the move, the crane’s cable broke and the statue fell in the mud. While examining the statue for damage, it was noticed that some of the stucco had cracked and fallen off.

The statue was actually made of solid gold.

All of the stucco was removed revealing the largest gold statue known to man. It stands almost 10 feet tall, weighing over 5 tons and can be visited in Bangkok today.

Here’s the point: the gold painted stucco gave off a false appearance (presumably to conceal the statue from the Burmese about 200 years ago), but it did not change the essential nature of what it was.

All the hurts you’ve experienced in life is the schmutz that covers you just like the stucco on the statue.

• An elder says something mean and hurtful
• You get beat up at school
• Someone cheats on you

Schmutz. Schmutz.Schmutz.

You think the schmutz is helping the problem. You pack it on. It seems to reduce the hurt. You tell stories about the schmutz to anyone who pretends to listen. You say to yourself “because of this schmutz, no one will ever hurt me like that again.”

Eventually you’re totally covered with schmutz and you think that’s who you are. Maybe at this point you’re dissatisfied with what’s happening in your life so you paint the schmutz gold so others can now see how well you’re doing, how strong and independent you are and how you’ve got it going on.

None of it changes who you are but it does seem to do a great job at hiding the essential nature of who you really are. It prevents you from doing the good, and making the impact, for which you were put on this Earth.

Public school systems, human resource departments and governments love to apply GoldenBuddhaSchmutz on people too. Well-meaning friends give you advice that’s rarely authentically directed at you but is some random pontification to help fill the silence.

GoldenBuddhaSchmutz is sneaky stuff and it’s pretty sticky.

The thing is, you’re under no obligation to wear any of that.

While chipping it off and leaving it behind may not always be as easy as it sounds, the only other option is not to chip it off and leave it behind.

Which choice is really all that good for you?

Technorati Tags: personal branding

Everyone starts somewhere. Invariably, that somewhere is “the beginning.” The beginning may look different on the surface from one person to the next but absolutely no one is born playing violin, writing novels, doing taxes, hunting down all the Jedi in the universe, pounding on opponents in heavy weight fights or winning bouts on The Iron Chef.

So while being a 3rd don black belt is super-cool, that same person started with a white belt, no belt or their pants down around his or her ankles (literally and/or metaphorically speaking). The same can be said about you for everything you’re good at today.

And what’s wrong with that?

There’s energy in newness.

I know people on Elance who created an account and then bid on jobs saying “I’m so new, I’m going to bed over backwards to give you a better experience than anyone else bidding on this job.”

I once worked at a communications hardware company that sold millions of 56K modems months before they finished inventing everything necessary to ship the product.

I’ve personally stood in front of company CEO’s saying “this has never been done before and that’s why we should do it,” and they said yes.

And find me someone who worked on the NASA Moon launch team with experience sending rockets to the moon.

Inexperience doesn’t mean incompetence. We just elected a President with no real executive experience. Of course, now that he’s there it’s his job to step up and do what he needs to do and learn what he needs to learn, and deliver.

Watch the movie Julie and Julie (I know, there’s a book too). I presume Julie Powel at least knew how to boil water and pop stuff in the microwave, but was probably not ready to bone a duck when she started her blog. That wasn’t enough of a reason for her not to start, but I see people much further down the road look at blogging, consulting, writing, building a shed and all sorts of other things with an amazing level of fear…due entirely to their lack of experience.

No matter what it is that you’d like to do. If you think you’re missing something before you can get started, ask yourself how that lack is actually an asset. Reframe how to see lack and turn it into something you have that’s a gift.

Technorati Tags: Assets, Branding, Marketing

This ad ran in Time Magazine (June 30, 1947). That’s right, the headline reads DDT is Good for Me. 

When I make jokes about this, I’ve actually had someone respond with “well yes, but the benefits of DDT in Africa can’t be argued with.”

Really?

I understand that Malaria is a horrible affliction, but if you’re going to keep score, then put everything up on the board. According to research published in the Journal Science, The Lancet and other peer-reviewed publications, those same people who are being “saved” by DDT are going to also have to deal with the following:

• Disruption in semen quality, menstruation, gestational length, and duration of lactation
• Premature births
• Reduced birth rate
• Diabetes
• Neurological disorders
• Asthma
• Cancers
  • Liver
  • Pancreas
  • Breast
  • Blood
  • Testis
  • Lymphatic System

This doesn’t even begin to cover the effects on the rest of the ecosystem. You can look that up for yourself.

With Malaria resulting in over 800,000 annual deaths, it’s obviously a major issue and it needs serious attention. However, just because DDT is easy and cheap to manufacture in massive quantities does not automatically make it the right solution.

Once DDT is in the ecosystem, it runs its way through all forms of life. Studies indicate that its impact is felt by anything made of living cells.

That’s, like, everything, right?

Which leads us back to the DDT is Good for Me ad. Perhaps you’re looking at the copy of the ad and thinking how silly it is. Aren’t you lucky that no one is spraying DDT in your backyard? Think again. With the way this stuff moves through the ecosystem, any yard is your backyard.

If an ad ran like this today, would you simply accept what it said? Would you just assume that some government agency, with its highly-compensated staff, is running its own studies to make sure every line of such a series of claims is true?

Who really is looking out for you?

Technorati Tags: advertising, DDT, Time, Truth

Once upon a time, companies registered domains for everything. One frozen food company registered a .com domain for every single product they sold. The idea back then seemed simple enough (relative to a limited understanding of the Internet): There were no useful search engines, so why not make it possible to type “[productname].com” into the web browser (typically that  ugly POS known as Netscape) to pull it up?

Other companies used this approach to create a domain name for each advertising campaign.

The search engines came along and after a maturation process Google rammed their concept of “ site authority” down our throats. Having many domains weakens your online authority and that meant putting everything back on one domain’s site. Then you had to find a creative way of arranging all the information so search bots and (as an afterthought) people could find it.

I’m just glad there aren’t more wiki’s as a result.

Aside from search engine optimization woes, it’s just plain harder to get people to come to your site anymore. In case you didn’t get the memo, social media has the Internet by the nards and it’s not likely to let go any time soon.

So what’s a company like Coca-Cola to do?

If the people at Coke have any brains, they would abandon the old model of needing to own every web property with which they intended to market and get in the middle of the crowds of people who want what they have and like to talk about it too.

Apparently, the right people at Coca-Cola are in possession of said brains because that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Now maybe they didn’t come up with the idea to create their Facebook fan page first but at 4,134,849 fans and counting, they haven’t screwed it up either. Last time I checked, this fan page had just made news by crossing the 1 million fan mark. I don’t think that was too long ago so adding on another 3 million fans is pretty sweet.

What do people do on this page?

They talk about Coke, Coke Cookbooks, shirts, the museum, flavors, sweeteners, when the Stevia Coke is going to be available and when I CAN BUY IT HERE IN DC (hint hint) and all sorts of stuff I really doubt a marketing team would have ever come up with on their own.

In other words, Coca-Cola is connecting to people where they are (social media) and joining them in conversation.

I can’t wait to see how this shift impacts Coke in 2010. Some of the frontier is still unknown but if they can pull off authenticity and being “real” online, then anyone can.

How about you? Are you walking away from any of your marketing practices from the previous year and stepping into more social media/networking?

Technorati Tags: Branding, Business, Coca-Cola, Coke, Marketing, Social Media

For the last couple of weeks of December I listened to my collection of recordings from notorious grump and marketing master Jedi Dan Kennedy. During one discussion he mentioned how he never has “feedback forms” available for the audience. Why?

Because

a.) he doesn’t really care about their input. If people are buying, he’s doing things right.

b.) the audience isn’t qualified to give him relevant input. The comments usually say more about the person making the comments than the recipient.

This makes sense to me because “unqualified input” seems to come from everywhere. When I’m doing a copywriting project for a client, the English Major who insists that single sentence paragraphs “aren’t allowed” may be qualified to critique my next book but certainly knows nothing about writing ad copy.

While I love Toastmasters, the obligatory “uhm counter” role carried out by the grammarian is a minor surface issue. Watch the top paid talk show hosts and listen to how many times they say uhm. Now, do you want to tell me that you can’t be a successful speaker if you say uhm when you talk?

Now, if you dig deeper and build a person’s confidence as a speaker (which is what Toastmasters is great for), the uhm’s will magically reduce in frequency on their own and the remaining uhm’s don’t sound like they’re coming from a Nervous Nelly anymore.

That doesn’t mean I don’t listen to feedback. For example, I listen to what clients say they’re looking for. That tells me something about them and there’s often more in their feedback than what appears on the surface.

“Perception is reality” is only reality for the person with the perception. Speak in front of 100 people and ask for feedback, you will receive the results of 100 different perceptions.

So which reality is reality?

All of it and none of it.

Sonia Simone at Copyblogger posted about this topic as well.

How about you? Have you ever been derailed by feedback?

Technorati Tags: Branding, Dan Kennedy, Marketing

When it comes to marketing on the Internet, your brand is your identity. It lets potential clients know exactly who you are and what you and/or your business are all about, and can go a long way toward separating you from the rest of the crowded Internet pack. Your brand is what it is based on who you are, how you do business, and how you provide value. That is why personal brand positioning is so important if you are serious about making your presence known online. Without it your website will quickly get lost in the shuffle. Here are a few steps that can help position yourself for success on the Web.

First of all, to achieve successful personal brand positioning, you need to take a close look at who you really are by taking the time to explore things like your core values and your passions. This will help you find your special niche, which leads to the writing of your brand description. Next, take the time to define your dreams and put them into action. Develop what it is that you are really trying to accomplish with your brand. Without an end result to strive for, you will simply flounder along without direction. Then, it’s time to take action. Define your target market and pursue them with passion.

The next step in personal brand positioning is to figure out what may be stopping you. Maybe it is a fear of failure, or even a fear of success. Whatever it is, you need to identify it and find a way to overcome it, or you will simply crash and burn. Another step in brand success is to recruit a squad of brand “cheerleaders.” It is tough to make it in any business venture on your own, so you need a corps of folks around you who will keep your spirits up during the inevitable tough times. Next, you need to learn how to package your brand. Since appearance is everything when it comes to marketing, your package needs to communicate who you are with just a quick glance.

Another important step is to develop your own unique style. This will serve to differentiate yourself from your competitors, and give your brand a distinct online presence. Finally, it is time to roll your sleeves up and get to work. With patience, perseverance and a strong personal brand, Internet market success is within your grasp.

Author: Jean Klett
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Excise Tax

If Google is the Godzilla of the search market and Bing is Mechazilla, Yahoo! is Mothra: Kind of sad and dorky looking but people still know who he (it) is.

Of course, it wasn’t always that way. I remember when people talked about Google as being a “pipe dream” if founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin thought they had any chance of making a dent in Yahoo!’s market dominance.

Some dent.

As mentioned in this CNN Money report, Google and Bing are kicking Yahoo! to the curb. Google’s dominance in the search world is uncontested. Today, they own the game but the former lordship of Yahoo (and Netscape, and MySpace, and Friendster, etc.) should serve as a reminder that when it comes to playing King of the Hill on the Internet, the higher ground doesn’t really mean much.

Here comes Bing. Even though Bing is 3rd in search market share, it’s rapid growth is made only more worthy of note when you consider the money machine behind it. Microsoft can afford to play with Bing until they figure out the magic formula for search (if they haven’t already).

And money is something Yahoo! is no longer swimming in. This past week they “shutdown” to save money. While this WSJ post mentions that Adobe also shuts down at the end of the year, Adobe isn’t having cash problems.

Yahoo! apparently has some money for unique marketing ideas though. They paid the extra bag fees for passengers at SFO and SJO on Dec 23rd. Did everyone get Yahoo! luggage tags in exchange for having their bag fee paid?

But with Yahoo! ending their search engine arms race, what’s left?

I’m sure these guys aren’t going to give up without a fight, but what does the Yahoo! brand even mean anymore? Creating a brand out of thin air is one thing, but having the elements of your brand fall off and try to connect that brand to “new things” is sort of like opening a can of Coke to find a lemon-lime soda inside…or New Coke!

Ewwwwwwww

What do you think? Is Yahoo! still Yahoo! without search? What do they represent to you today? How is that different from a few years ago?

Technorati Tags: bing, Business, Google, Marketing, SEO, Social Media, Yahoo

Back in 1901, the first Nobel Prize was awarded. Alfred Nobel set the prize into motion using his fortune largely earned from his invention of dynamite.

Amazingly enough dynamite was actually a safety improvement over highly volatile nitroglycerine which was under heavy use at the time. Dynamite could be used for the many earthworks efforts of the time, not only in mining but also in clearing away stubborn mountains that stood in the way of a railroad’s intended route.

On the other hand, the convenient nature of dynamite also expanded its use in killing large groups of people in a single effort and was viewed by many as one of the first (arguably) true weapons of mass destruction.

Before his death, a paper accidentally carried his obituary which basically remembered him as a modern harbinger of death due to his horrific creation.

Le marchand de la mort est mort ("The merchant of death is dead")

it went on to say, "Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.”

Not wanting this to be his legacy, the Nobel Prize was essentially his effort to "rebrand" himself and on 27 November 1895, Nobel signed his last will and testament, setting aside the bulk of his estate to establish the Nobel Prizes.

Did it work?

Before reading this, were you aware of Nobel’s original notoriety?

Technorati Tags: Alfred Nobel, Branding, Dynamite, Nobel Prize

What do you think is the difference between your professional brand and your personal brand? Well, think about who you are at home and when you’re away from the office. How do you spend your free time? And how do you like to interact with your family and friends? That is your personal brand.

Some people really do not want their professional and personal brands to intersect ever and that is a choice. Now, most of the people who work with you – either with you or for you, they want to know a little bit about you. It reassures them to know something about your off-duty side. In fact, a colorful off-duty story about you in the right way can help build your word-of-mouth marketing and make you memorable.

For example, have you ever known somebody who Monday through Friday was an executive in a pinstripe suit and a perfect red power tie or whatever the power tie color of the year is? And then on the weekend is the ultimate Harley rider? There’s nothing wrong with that. So, if this person wants to be Mr. Executive on the week and a Hog rider on the weekends, that’s great. That’s a clear professional brand and a clear personal brand.

We just want this person to be careful, neither his family nor his company wish to see him on the news in a barroom brawl. And we certainly hope that he doesn’t join the Hell’s Angels. But if he did a ride for charity or went to his kid’s career day in his business suit and riding on his motorcycle. Come on, how cool would that be?

On the flip side, here’s a story of an IT project manager who had an unfortunate collision between their professional and their personal brand. And it goes something like this. This project manager worked for a company who issued laptops to their employees. And they were fairly lenient with the use of the laptops. They allowed resources who were not on call to take the laptops home even if they weren’t traveling. And the company even allowed resources to use the laptops to access their personal emails and to visit some web sites.

Of course, the assumption was that people would do this outside of working hours. Then one day as a meeting was about to begin and most of the attendees were in the room, this project manager who was to facilitate the meeting blurted out an unfortunate confession. “I just came from human resources,” he told the entire room. “I’ve almost lost my job. The desktop support team was working on my laptop and they found porn. I knew I should not have let my son borrow that laptop.”

Whoa, too much information, clearly not managing his brand. And what do you think people walked away thinking about him? Because half of the people probably thought it was his son and just that well, you know, he should have better controls on his kid, but I’ll bet you that some of those people walked away thinking, “Yes, sure buddy, you got caught, didn’t you?”

See, what’s a great way for a politician to lose their job? To get caught doing something in private that they have sworn to be against when they’re in public. People are going to Google you. They’re going to find your web site. They’re going to find your blog. They’re going to find your MySpace page. It’s great to know about your hiking club. It’s not so great to see drunken pictures of you dirty dancing or up-close photos of your private tattoos. So, the general rule is if you don’t want people to know about it, don’t put it online or even better don’t do it at all.

Author: Margaret Meloni
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Import duty tariff