Like so many other people out there, I subscribe to probably 100 more RSS feeds than I need to. However, I just love the idea that everything I may or may not be interested in is at least is one place. It stands for “Real Simple Syndication” for  a reason right? Unfortunately, sometimes organizing can lead more towards organized chaos versus simplicity. Therefore earlier this year I decided to make a commitment to not only organize my RSS feeds, but to do so through apps that made reading them not only enjoyable, but simple!

So I started with my MacBook. I admit I mostly use my RSS reader on my Mac to find relevant articles on specific topics for either our company or for clients. With that being said, I think NetNewsWire is quite literally, the bomb. You can download it to your computer and it synchronizes with your reader (in my case, I synch it with Google Reader).

The selling feature to me is the Smart List functionality. It’s a similar set-up to iTunes, in which you can create Smart Lists with keywords and phrases that automatically gather in these folders to show all the content in your feeds that contain these keywords. It’s perfect for finding those articles mentioning B2B news or highlighting competition mentions. And don’t worry PC users, you can use FeedDemon similarly with tags versus smart lists for finding those keywords.

The other feature I like about NetNewsWire is that it synchs with Instapaper. So if I’m reading something interesting, and I want to save it to tweet about later, write a blog post about, or actually finish reading the article, it’s a click of a button and POOF! It’s saved in my Instapaper feed. And yes, I do have many-a folder in my Instapaper account with titles such as “Facebook Posts”, “Tweets”, “Newsletter Links”, etc. for both Astek and clients. That way I don’t have to worry about a back-log of links in my Instapaper account. But that’s a whole other blog post.

Now, to my iPad. Personally, I am a newspaper kind of girl. I have a degree in Journalism, and there’s something about reading a real newspaper…you know, one with ink. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a digital subscription to the New York Times (I do). It does mean that I scoured the App Store for an RSS reader that made reading my RSS feeds an actually pleasant experience. Lo and behold, Early Edition. Now, no matter how many RSS feeds I have, they will always look pretty on my reader. Just add a cup of coffee and it’s almost as Sunday-morning-esque as a real newspaper.

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, How To, Technology

Have you ever painted a room to find that the color looks dated just a few months later? Or have you ever tried to put together a spring look, something fresh and bursting with color and just a twist of sophistication, but when you put all your pieces and accessories together you looked like a kid’s carnival ride instead?

I LOVE color, but I’m not always awesome at pulling together a pallet that evokes the response I’m looking for. I’ve been so daunted by the need to pick color before, that I’ve abandoned projects (and outfits) over it. This is why I am SO excited to find Colourlovers.com (Note: that’s colour with the British “o-u-r“ spelling).

In this online community, people with a real passion and talent for color put together hundreds of pallets and patterns for you to browse through and give them fun names like ”Valiant“ or ”Viking Invasion“ or ”Lovers Cry at Movies“. They even have a Business section that is specifically colors that are trending in the corporate world.

They also take images of objects from trending websites and pull color pallets right from the images.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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I definitely would encourage you to check it out! It’s very inspirational!

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Katie Hawkey Categories: How To, Marketing, Web

Social media was created by individuals for individuals. Let’s make that clear up front. As far as businesses are concerned, they have done some fantastic things with social media to connect with their client base via customer service, engagement, charity, or just seeming “cool”. The businesses who have done this well are looked upon as models to other businesses to the point of some saying, “We need to do what they did and we’ll be successful!” I hate to burst your bubble, but that’s not necessarily true.

If you are a business and say, “We need to be social.” I ask you this: “Why?” Granted, social media is fun. I would tweet all day if I wanted to! But so many businesses start with feeling they need to get on specific platforms – mainly Facebook and Twitter. However, as a business, you may not be appropriate for social media. In the financial sector, most companies only allow their personnel to be on LinkedIn. You may run a manufacturing facility – not sure if Facebook is really the best platform for you.

So before you get all platform-crazy and want to be on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo, Quora, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google+…. take a step back and answer the question, why do you want to be on social media? What is the business goal here? Most of the time, it’s to gain more clients and increase business. Or it’s to engage with existing clients and maintain them. Or it’s to just know everything that’s being said about you and your competitors to gauge where the market is going so you can model marketing plans around the consumer voice. Whatever it is, figure it out. Then we can talk about platforms.

Now, the next huge debacle – do you have the resources to manage these presences? If you want to create a presence on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, you better make sure you have a plan on who is going to be creating that content and when. And whoever is responsible, make sure that person or group of people is knowledgeable on appropriate community management skills.

Does the person running your social media communication know that there should be a generic company Facebook profile (i.e. mine is Rachel at Astek) to manage your company Facebook page so his/her personal profile is kept personal? Does he/she know that the you should always have more people following you on Twitter than you following – and that you actually need to engage on Twitter at least 12-15 times a day (and those are in conversations, not just status updates)? And finally, whoever is managing your social media presence, does he/she call him/herself an expert? If so, find someone else!

The term “expert” in social media land is almost the equivalent of a four-letter word. Those of us who make our careers off of social media and innovative technologies know that whatever we do know, there is twice as much stuff that we don’t know. Pride is not a good feature in a community manager. Make sure this person is innovative, creative, and always reading and trying to learn on what’s going out there in that scary land many call a “cloud”. For example, Google+ brand pages are just around the corner. Do you have a plan in place for when that happens – whether that plan includes engaging in that platform or focusing on something else?

Now we enter into that precarious zone of agency management. Many businesses stat that they want to be active on social media but don’t have the time. So they want someone to do it for them. And no, don’t hire an intern to manage your social media. Going back the qualifications of a community manger, you need to make sure that a certain skill set is present in this individual – plus you need to make sure he/she knows your brand, is trustworthy in protecting and representing it, and if he/she leaves, you’re not left going, “Now what?”

Therefore, if you do hire an agency or someone externally to help you launch a social media presence, fantastic! Have at it! But I would strongly suggest that messaging and content creation come from someone internally, and just have the agency train you on appropriate messaging and to set expectation on what level of engagement is realist for the company to maintain. Because if the agency can send out 15 tweets a day, that’s great, but if your internal bandwidth is only 5 per day, then you have a problem. It is perfectly reasonable to hire an agency to take over social discussions on a one-off basis such as for an event, conference, Twitter chat, etc. But full-time ownership should be created internally unless that agency is almost grandfathered into your business or if they give you a clear exit strategy so you know how to keep up with the presence they created for you after they’ve left to go to the next client.

Social media is not a buzzword, and it is and will continue to grow into being vital for business successes. You should not ignore it, but just like any other business decision, make sure you have a plan on how to use it and why you are using it in the first place. Have questions? Do you have good examples/case studies? Please share as we easily could’ve missed it on our Twitter feed!

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: Entrepreneurship, How To, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

Emma, the EPS Astek sends all our emails out through, had a truly excellent round up of mobile-friendly-email design and programming guidelines.  Really great nuts and bolts stuff for all of us.  For the designers, things like recommended pixel sizes for links, fonts, email layout and landing pages widths and more.  For the programmers, actual code snippets for forcing certain behaviors to keep emails and landing pages sized for readability and interaction.

http://myemma.com/blog/2011/07/27/anna-yeamans-6-mobile-design-tips/

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Katie Hawkey Categories: How To, Marketing, Web

Are you on Google+ yet? What people are calling “Google’s take on Facebook” is already at 10 million users in the first few weeks of its full release. After digging into it myself, I have to say I’m really liking it. Personally, I am not the biggest fan of Facebook. That doesn’t mean I’m not on it, but I primarily use it as feed for people to see all the articles I write and stuff I post, etc. As for status updates and conversation – I leave that to Twitter.

Let’s start with the basics. You can create a Google+ account by going to plus.google.com. There you set up your profile which basically takes the place of your existing Google profile if you already have one. I set mine up similarly to my LinkedIn Profile actually, considering that not only can you find people to connect with through your address book, but also by searching for keywords. So for my ‘headline’ I entered in the keywords that apply to my industry and my interests in general.

As soon as I added all my web profile links and synched my contacts, it was time to start playing with Circles. Yes, Circles. Instead of putting your friends in a series of lists, Google+ has you put your contacts into different circles. They have the basic defaults of Friends, Family, etc., but you can also create your own. For example, I created a Social Media / Digital circle. I also created circles for different Twitter groups I’m involved in, a circle for my blog, a circle on fashion, etc. etc. Then when you are on the home page of Google+, you will see a stream of updates from people in your circles (very similar to your Facebook Wall). What’s really cool though is that you can select which circles you want to view, and when you update your own status, not only can you tag an individual but you can also only share it with that one person (again, ONLY that one person) or with just a select circle or two. And if you add someone to a circle who’s not on Google+, they will get an email from your account so they can still see the information you want to share with them!

The privacy settings are very well-tuned on Google+ versus both Twitter and Facebook. However for those of us who have 1,000+ pictures on their Facebook profiles, never fear, there’s a plug-in for that! If you use the Chrome browser, you can download the plug-in, Move2Picasa, and move all of your Facebook photos or just a few selected ones into your Picasa and/or Google+ account! Mine transferred with the click of a button!

There’s also a sort of ‘newsy’ portion of Google+ that I equate to either the LinkedIn news and headlines and also some Twitter lists you can make or even categories in your Flipboard iPad app. Instead, Google+ calls them Sparks. Sparks provides you with topics of interest that you can follow and glean from based on whatever topic you decide to follow.

And probably one of my favorite functions of Google+ is their Hangout platform. By starting a Hangout, you can actually video chat with up to ten people at a time, and see each person as sort of thumbnails on your computer stream. Talk about taking Skype to a whole new level!

On the mobile side (this is one instance I’m so happy I have a Droid vs. an iPhone besides the Google Maps turn by turn directions), the Google+ app features a GroupMe type quality with its Huddles function, which is essentially group texting to members of your circle. Definitely ideal when coordinating with a group of individuals.

There are many other features to Google+ including some shortcuts, typing tricks and even plug-ins to create your own Google+ vanity URL! For lots more tips and tricks, check out this handy topic guide via Mashable.

How are you using Google+? Thoughts? Ideas? Let’s compare  notes!

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: How To, Social Media

If you’re like me, you can’t have enough digital desktop space. However, if you’re like me, you switched to a laptop many years ago, and had to take a step back from desktop computers that could easily run as many monitors as you could fit on your desk. Macs have always had an advantage here, running dual monitors since the late 80’s. This was one of the reasons they gained popularity for desktop publishing.

While most laptops natively support one external monitor in addition to the built-in screen, I’ve found myself at times wanting two big displays since I usually don’t have my laptop open on my desk. I find it cumbersome and recently downgraded to a 13“ MacBook Pro since I typically use the laptop as a laptop on planes and in coffee shops where it’s cramped. I may even go AirBook next.

Low and behold, about a year ago the geniuses at DisplayLink invented a microchip (let’s call it a magic box) that allows you to run a monitor off nothing more than a USB connection. How does it work? It compresses the video signal to fit into the 480 Mb/s data stream that USB can handle. Back in the day you had to have a separate video card for every monitor or pair of monitors, which used far more power and generate more heat. No more.

So now they’ve licensed the chip and there are all varieties of magic boxes out there. I highly recommend this USB display adapter from Diamond Multimedia, which works on Mac and PC and also has a built in 3-port USB hub since you’d be losing a USB port otherwise:

Installation is a snap. Install one DisplayLink driver, which you can find here for free, then plug it in and go! The box has a DVI monitor port, so you may need an adapter for VGA, etc.

The only drawback is that the refresh speed is a little sluggish. You’ll notice this when you drag windows around or play a video. It can support HD resolution on up to six additional screens (one monitor per box), which is great, but I would not recommend it for watching movies or gaming. That’s what your main monitor is for!

At Astek, we’re completely laptop-based, which is great for a flexible work environment. And now the only significant limitation has been removed. I tested it out first on one workstation, and then bought them for the whole office. It’s $60 for the box, so around $300 total investment including a monitor for a significant increase in productivity. Here’s my current setup:

What would you do with two monitors?

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Gadget, How To, Technology

We’re big fans of the Specialized Information Publishing Association (SIPA), an organization focused on the ever-changing needs of niche publishers, typically in the B2B space. As members and speakers, we’ve enjoyed getting to know the diverse groups involved, and I often learn as much as I teach at their seminars, since publishers are in the middle of a bone fide revolution.

Tom Lynch and I attended the national conference in Washington D.C. this month, and added “exhibitor” to our list of credentials. Astek’s growth has always been fueled by word of mouth from our happy customers (thanks!), but we felt it was important for us to add another layer of support for SIPA, as well as to get some extra exposure for Astek by having a booth that stood out and quickly became known as “Astek Lounge.”

I’m thrilled with how well our booth turned out, thanks largely to Vin at Vin Design, who is an expert in experiential design.

First things first. Tom and I headed over to IKEA to pick up some essentials. We were creating something very different from the blue table we were provided — a space that would invite people to come in and stay awhile. And it worked!

While we were giving away real apples (on the right), we decided to have a contest and give away another Apple in the form of a new iPad 2. People entered by scanning our QR code (on the left) to register for our ePiphany newsletter. This gave us an opportunity personally to help several SIPA members get their QR code readers installed and working on their smart phones, which proved most painful on Blackberries.

Check out Astek iPad winner Brad Forrister, of M. Lee Smith Publishers/Business & Legal Resources, basking in his new toy (green cover of course):

We had fun experimenting with colorizing QR codes, and used them on the table tents strewn throughout the lounge to make it easy to learn more about Webany CMS, ePiphany, and the people at Astek:

I gave a talk on mobile publishing to a standing room-only crowd. Every couple of years publishers are thrown for a new loop in technology: SEO, CMS, social media, and now mobile. We’re helping many publishers figure out how to go mobile, which is the fastest growing content consumption market.

SIPA is a very progressively-minded organization, and hired Astek to run Twitter for the whole conference. Rachel was putting in 12-hour days back in Chicago, but it was a raging success. Several members participated, both those at the show and ones who could not make it. We had two Twitter walls (one shown below with Kati and Anne), and hashtags for the conference and each seminar to facilitate macro and micro topical real-time conversations.

I tweeted the awards ceremony in real-time and Rachel picked up the broadcast to retweet through @sipaonline. It was a blast and really demonstrated the power of Twitter to the attendees. We’re racing with it, offering this service to all kinds of conference organizers. Twitter has come a long way since I first wrote about it in 2008, and the conference aspect has become the clearest way for me to explain its true potential to people.

We had a tiny bit of downtime in the booth, which Tom used to show me how to juggle apples:

At the end, we donated the IKEA furniture to the local Boys & Girls Club of America, who were as thrilled to get it as we were not to ship it home. Now that’s a win-win.

See you in Miami!

This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other ePiphany Articles

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Fun, How To, Marketing, Technology

It’s happened twice now: I’ve sent someone a zip file, and they say they have problems using or viewing the contents.  One time it was a test build of an iPhone app, and another it was some HTML files.  After some questions and some headscratching, still stuck, I start a screensharing session with the person, and in each case they double click the zip file and attempt to directly access a file within it.

The problem here is that Windows presents a preview of a zip file’s contents as if it were like any other folder.  But that’s not the case.  If you have files inside the zip that depend on each other, they are never going to work correctly until you properly unzip them.  This is done by right clicking the zip file, and then clicking Extract All.

So I hope this message reaches Windows users who may not realize this quirk about zip files.  I also hope it reaches those who send zip files to Windows users, so that they can ask first whether they were actually unzipped first when problems come up.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: How To, Technology

After recently attending SXSW Interactive in Austin, TX, and the CoreNet Global Midwest Summit in Chicago, I was struck by the major distinctions between the trade show floors and technology usage.

Leave it to a corporate real estate association (CoreNet) to know how to make incredibly inviting spaces that made me want to sit down and stay awhile, and even get a bit of work done. Placing lunch tables behind the trade show floor created multiple motivations to move through the space and discover new companies.

Leave is to the ultimate geek conference (#SXSWi) to treat the trade show floor in the most traditional, and in my opinion unappealing, format — rows upon rows of standard booths, with only a couple of premium players creating spacial environments. But even these were typically focused around a stage of some sort rather than a space inviting people to stay awhile.

On the technology side, I’ve never seen such focused and practical usage of cutting-edge technologies like Twitter and Foursquare as I did at SXSW. In this environment, it seemed strange not to look at a piece of technology regularly, whether at lunch or in a session. At CoreNet, a more traditional environment, I was the odd man out to have my phone visible during a session.

Next time I’ll get pictures!

This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other ePiphany Articles

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, General, How To, Marketing, Technology

As business people we seem to swim in a culture that abruptly labels unmet expectations as failures rather than lessons learned. This could be labeled as black and white, carrot and stick — take your pick. To me it places an unnecessarily negative and narrowly reviewed label on lessons that could otherwise bear real fruit for future interactions.

In the wake of countless huge companies being rewarded for failures that rarely seem to produce lessons or better results, this could be seen as the wrong message to send. But I’m talking about the little guys — those of us who have the gumption and power to do it better next time.

We had a project a few months ago that delivered less-than-hoped-for results. It happens. We learned a ton and the client acknowledged that the information and research was well worth the price.

The owner said something valuable to me, which was that success is unmistakable. You can smell it, taste it, and see it from a great distance. No one argues with it. No one makes excuses for it. It speaks for itself and everyone celebrates.

I agree with that philosophy. I’m not saying we should all pat ourselves on the back for not meeting expectations, whether they are from clients, employees, family, or anyone in between. But certainly there are constructive ways to evaluate those failures as lessons, which elevates our responsibility and chances to do better next time.

Make a point of scheduling time to review what went wrong and what went right. At Astek we call them postmortems. They are project reviews, or whatever you want to call them. The point is that you assign a focused amount of team energy and time to the evaluation, reach some reasonable and measurable conclusions (which requires knowing what you were measuring when you started), and then move on!

This last part is essential to make sure it’s a lesson and not a cloud of failure that can quickly turn to poison in an otherwise constructive work environment. Learn and move forward. After all, if you learn your lessons wisely pretty soon you’ll smell that unmistakable smell of success.

I place a real dollar value on these lessons, because they have real quantifiable value that is often thrown out with the bathwater. As a society we have no trouble spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on formalized education, so why are the street lessons so different? Both types of leaning require perseverance and a dedication to the end result.

Thomas Edison really said it best: “I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations which wouldn’t work.”

A business partner once said it like this: “In life you have only accomplishments and excuses.” A lesson learned is an accomplishment in its own right, but a failure with no lesson is nothing but an excuse and waste.

Another business partner once told me: “If you don’t learn something every day, your life sucks.” That one really stuck with me to this day. No one expects you to know everything or be perfect. Just do the best you can.

So go learn some lessons and let me know what you find!

This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other ePiphany Articles

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, How To