Cross Promotions

Cross promotions are things you see the big players do leveraging their web sites, TV and other media sites to get visibility to what they need to.

In today's world SMBs can also get this kind of cross promotion by taking advantage of the many free tools out there such as Facebook, Twitter and Blogs ("FTB").

How does this all work? Create a blog to talk about your product and / or services, twit about the blog posts on Twitter while adding shorter updates around the blog entries and finally add links to the blog posts to the Facebook page you setup for your company.

In terms of blogging there are many ways to create a blog, Google's Blogger site is the one I use as it gives you the tools to focus on creating your content.

In terms of Twitter, setup a separate account from the one you use for personal use.

In terms of Facebook, you can create a page for your company either under your personal Facebook account or just create a new Facebook profile for the person in your company that is going to post the updates.

Once you have all of these accounts setup, use a tool such as TweetDeck to monitor, update and manage your updates.

Some ideas for content:

• Have a coupon on your website? Twit about it and include a link to the coupon driving traffic to your business and to your website.
• Have a new product or service, don't just add it to your website, write a blog post and post a link to the blog post to Facebook and Twitter.
• Are you passionate about what you do and / or sell, then talk about your passion, not just the product or service, on twitter, write up a blog post, post it Facebook.
  

Keep in mind blog readers, Twitter users and Facebook fans are all a bit different in how they search for and want to consume their information so don't be afraid to do a bit of customization for each of these channels so you can gain an audience.

I know some of you are thinking this sounds like a lot of work, but once everything is setup, you just create some content and then use the tools to share / post these entries across all of the components of your FTB cross promotion strategy.

Writing about blogs on a blog

I haven't been writing this blog for very long and haven't had my Kindle very long so what better time to publish this young blog on my young Kindle.

I am sure everyone (at least those of you who read this blog) are thinking I am very premature (or something not so politically correct) in doing this, and from an audience building perspective that would be correct.

However part of the purpose of this blog is try out new technology and then write about how it goes. Given the budget for this blog doing something that might actually make money vs. cost money is always a good thing.

Now I know there will not be much money coming in from this effort, but that is not the point. Helping others looking to do this type of publishing is what I am after so I am willing to work through this process and collect what I can.

At this point I have setup my account on the Kindle Publishing Site to allow the money to start flowing in from all of folks that not only want to read my blog but also are willing to pay the price that Amazon will set for it (which I am sure will be the minimum $.99).

I did not spend a lot of time with the graphical options Amazon allows as part of the publishing process, but I will come back to that when I need to bump my sales up to hit my next goal.

For the next 48-72 hours I will be in "Pending Approval" status, which unfortunately means you will not be able to jump onto your Kindle right after reading this and start downloading my blog until I get approval, but patience is important in these things (or so I am told) and I will be reporting back as soon as my blog is available for everyone to start downloading.

While I am interested in working through this, I am also interested in how I and others will deal with blogs that most likely are available free on the web, available as RSS feeds for your favorite RSS reader or web site (like iGoogle), dripping out to you via Twitter and maybe even posted to a Facebook page (still working on that one).

While $.99 is not a lot of money (and I would see only a small portion of that amount), it is still more than free and so it will be fun to watch my Kindle revenues take off and see how many people will be willing to pay for the fun and convenience of reading this blog on a Kindle.

Since this blog post is about blogging, one good thing about talking about my Kindle publishing experience over multiple posts is it gives me something to write about for another day, which is important as I have now committed to Amazon that my blog will be updated daily :)

Small Time Texting Looking for Big Results

I saw an article today about Visa testing out texting whenever your card is used. They are looking to cut down on fraudulent card usage, which is a fine objective, but I am not sure most people want to be texted every time they use their card. The novelty will wear out fairly quickly unless they add in some sort of filter mechanism.

Now where texting could make sense is in the SMB market. When I travel I often use a car service to take me back and forth to the airport. Every time I land at my home airport we go through the same song and dance where I call the car service, have to get transferred to the dispatcher, tell them who I am and what door I want to be picked up and they tell me what car number will pick me up. They also tell me how long it will take for the car to get to my door, but I have learned to generally double the time they tell me in their optimism, but that we can talk more about another time.

A much better process would be for me to text them when I land (or after I get my luggage) and tell them what door . They would know from my number who I was and if I had a reservation. They could then text me back with the car number picking me and if there were going to be any delays. The whole transaction done in a few key strokes.

By implementing texting a SMB (Hinsdale Transportation take note) can differentiate itself as being easier to do business with and probably allow the company dispatcher to handle a few more customers and the customers might even be a little bit happier despite the travails of business travel these days.

There are many other ways a SMB can take advantage of texting or other methods of technology if they just think a bit out of the box. Each application of technology may not yield big results, but they all add up to a competitive advantage and who doesn't need that in today's business climate.

Got any ideas or thoughts on how a SMB can leverage technology in new ways, add your comments to this discussion.

Kindle me this Batman

I am new owner of a second generation Kindle from Amazon. For those of you not familiar with the Kindle, it is an e-book reader complete with wireless links to the Kindle Store at Amazon for easy purchasing of books, magazines, newspapers and blogs. While certainly not "cheap" at the recently reduced price of $299, it pretty much follows the "razor / razor blade" theory of marketing. That is Amazon makes its money selling you content for the Kindle.

So I had it for a few days at home to play with it and try out some trial magazine subscriptions. Personally I am not a book person but a big reader of magazines, newspapers and blogs so I thought it would be handy to load it up with stuff I like and take it on the road with me as I travel a lot. Once you decide what you want to subscribe to, it wirelessly downloads new items as they become available and they become ready for you to read.

So with all that going for it, I took my first trip with it today having loaded it with Time Magazine and Business Week. My initial reaction is that it delivers a nice user experience in that it is small, light weight and easy to read on an airplane in various lighting conditions. It is a bit strange as you page easily through the articles that you really don't know where you are within the magazine, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. It also keeps track of where you left off, so when you return to reading a particular magazine (or book, etc) it takes you back to the same page so no more bookmarks that fall out or dog-earring pages. While there are many other features, the other one I want to mention now is the ability to pop up a definition of a word in a page you are reading. Didn't use it often, but it was nice and easy to use when needed.

While not a big reader of books, I did think I would want to buy a few books and read them as I had time. Of course the first book I wanted to download, a new book on John Purdue (the namesake and original benefactor of Purdue University); while available on Amazon can't be downloaded to the Kindle because the publisher has not agreed to terms with Amazon.

Of course Amazon does provide you with a link to tell the publisher that you want this to change. Feel free to click on the link a few times so the publisher gets the message and I can download the book along with the other Purdue alumni that might want to read it :)

One of the other features of the Kindle is the ability to read your own documents on the Kindle. Of course this process would work better if the Kindle could actually take standard formatted documents in PDF or DOC, etc. format. But of course in the walled-garden that Amazon is building around the Kindle that just won't do. So instead you can send a PDF version via email to your Kindle (yes each Kindle has its own email address) and Amazon converts it to the native Kindle format and then pushes the converted file to your Kindle. It should be noted that the new Kindle DX does have native PDF support, but I have no plans to try it anytime soon.

At least that is how file processing is supposed to work. While sitting at the airport this morning I thought I would send the document I was going to present at a client today to my Kindle and then review it on the Kindle instead of taking the time to boot up my PC on a very short flight. In today's world the expectation is send an email receive something back ready for reading, but 16 hours later I am still waiting, so there are still some kinks to work out for the folks at Amazon. In reading a very good FAQ on Kindles and PDF, this long processing time appears to be an experience shared by others as well.

BTW: If the capability to send documents to the Kindle actually works it will give the corporate security folks one more headache to deal-with, but we can discuss that in another post.

On top of all this, Barnes and Noble announces that it is getting into the e-book business, of course they have been in and out of this business before so I am certainly a skeptic on this idea being successful.

So what does all this mean, well the Kindle did allow me to read my magazines without having to deal with more paper and a price point that might actually save you some money over buying them at the airport. But given the still relatively small number of books available, the competitive battles brewing with Barnes and Noble, Google and others as well as the issues with PDF files, I would say it is still a bit of a riddle, but one I will continue to try and solve and report back on my progress.

A Single Point of Convergence

In my professional life I spend a lot of time trying to eliminate single points of failure in the systems and solutions my team and I build. We make sure all of our hardware can scale up as well as out, we make sure we have appropriate load balancing across all of this scaled out hardware and that our communication paths are redundant and diverse as well as many other efforts to make sure our systems and solutions don't fail.

So given all of this why do technologist such as myself continue to look for the perfect tool to carry around that converges all of the functions we need into one single point of failure, sorry meant one single device? Well because they are so nice to have, failure wouldn't happen to me, would it?

I had a Blackberry 8830 device that kept me in touch via email, voice, text. Gave me access to the web and had a myriad of applications such as VPN, Twitter and Yammer. It also had some nice utilities such as an alarm clock that I used when I travel (which is a lot).

Why bother messing with wake-up calls and hotel room alarm clocks, I had my own device that I knew all of the tricks to and it had worked for me for years ... till one night.

It was a late night when I finally got to bed after dutifully setting my "trusty" Blackberry for an early morning wake-up and drifted off to sleep.

I woke the next morning when sunlight started streaming through the hotel curtains, not the sort of thing I was expecting given my need for another early morning start of the day. Reaching for my Blackberry, I was greeted with the dreaded message ... push here to reset.

While the obvious thing to do was to actually push the button to reset, I know if was fruitless (but did it anyway). Once that message shows up on a Blackberry it has just become an expensive piece of useless plastic.

I scrambled to make my morning meetings and managed to just barely make it. I then had to make it through the day (a travel day at that) with no phone, no connectivity, no VPN. I still had my PC with me so all was not lost (this is a lesson post not a horror story), but getting through the day was tough. Worse yet, I had only one business day between the end of this trip and my next business trip so I had to act quickly to get reconnected. I even had to use a pay phone, yes they still exist :) to call my ride when I landed at home.

The good news is I survived, my excellent IT department loaned me a temporary Blackberry and had it delivered to my house on Saturday and I was good to go for my Monday business trip.

With time to think, I scanned all of my options to replace my Blackberry 8830 and chose the Blackberry Bold. This is a great device with all of the features and functions that my 8830 had plus lots more including a decent camera and the ability to run my favorite music app Pandora. With all of these new features I no longer needed my little Sony camera or for that matter my iPod (except for the silly issue with connectivity on an airplane).

Out of the failure of my old Blackberry had come more convergence and this was good! Of course learning important lessons is also good so now when I dutifully set my Blackberry's alarm, I also use the hotel's wake up service because making sure I wake up on-time on the road is just as important as all the convergence in the world.

The Year Round Christmas Letter

The Christmas letter is one of those things that people make fun of, but yet secretly enjoy reading when received. While I still receive 1 or 2 each year, in today's highly connected world they seem very old-fashioned.

In today's world keeping up with family and friends is so much easier, but yet figuring out the right way to do this and keeping up with all of the ways folks are communicating can be downright difficult.

My family has settled on using Yammer to create a "private" area to communicate with each other using a simple user interface that is available on multiple platforms including web, desktop, SMS and multiple smartphones including the Blackberry. Yammer is similar to Twitter in that is a giant flow of updates from all participants, but is much more private because it is restricted to users on the same mail domain. It is also much easier to use because it is not limited to the 140 character limit of Twitter.

The tricky part with using Yammer in this way is to get email addresses on the same domain. In the corporate and SMB world having a single mail domain is the norm, but with family and or friends this is normally not the case. The way I have handled this is to create forwarding mail accounts on one of my mail domains. I simply create an account on my domain that forwards to the users own normal mail account. In this setup they receive the Yammer invite and verification in their own mailbox and only have to remember the Yammer ID I have created for them to sign-on to Yammer.

This allows you to create a nice walled-in environment to share who is doing what, when and how. We have three generations of family members using Yammer to communicate on the daily comings and goings of our worlds.

I would also suggest you install the YammerFox add-in to notify users when updates are made to their Yammer site.

I have also looked at Facebook's group function and found its functionality to be well behind Yammer's for purposes of sharing family info, but when extending your communication circle beyond the family to your friends Facebook seems to be the best way to make this work. In general as the communication circle moves from family to friends the details of sharing is low enough to work with Facebook's more open privacy model.

My family now communicates so much via Yammer that my weekly call to my parents centers around the week's Yammer updates vs. spending time learning what has happened since we last talked.

As my family works on extending this communication model to our friends via Facebook, the need for the year end Christmas letter will just fade into history.