I keep reading that T-Mobile has begun pushing out the new Android update “Cupcake” for my G1 phone.
I don’t have it yet or know anyone who does, but I can’t wait.
The ‘Burgh is also due for a T-mobile 3G network. Last I heard is that it’s due in May.
Can social networking hurt your business? You bet it can! I have written many times before about how quickly bad publicity can spread these days.
One of the main reasons that I hear from small business owners about why they don’t want to spend the time to get into social networking is that they are worried that someone will say something bad about them.
I have some news for all of those people, no one needs your blog or forum to tell the world about what they think of your business. I recently read a good post by Frank Marafiote called How Social Networking Can Kill a Business. His main point is “Don’t let the mud hang there on the wall with no counter-response. Otherwise, readers will assume it is true.”
My main point about this is how can you respond to something that you don’t even know is there? You need to be involved in social media at least to the point where you know what is being said about you.
One of the reasons I bought the Android Phone was that I knew that with an open source operating system, anything that I wanted that it was missing would soon be available along with more. Great stuff open source.
The Android version 1.5 is now available and I could get it myself, but I’ll just wait for T-Mobile to push it up to my phone in May. So far it looks like everything that I was hoping for.
Earlier this week Google started “profiles” as a way for people to provide their personal information to Google that will be displayed on search results pages for their names. Google had this to say about the new feature “a way to give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name.”
I don’t know about you, but I think that I’m more comfortable with people finding and reading what I write about me rather than what others do, even though it may be good. So I’m trying this out. At the very least I’m getting some links to my site and profiles on Twitter and LinkedIn which may help business.
Google may be trying to do something else here, like starting it’s own social network instead of buying Twitter, but at least I feel like I’m more in control even if I’m probably not. Try it out yourself, then Google yourself and see how it works.
Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Ted can find episodes of any TV show you like to watch. Just add your favorite shows to ted and he will search for the newest episodes and downloads them for you. Ted uses bittorrent and RSS technology to get you the newest episodes as fast as possible!
Ted works on Windows, Linux and Mac systems that have Java Runtime Environment 5.0 installed. You need a bittorrent client, like Vuze, µTorrent or Bitcomet to actually download the episodes.
I was reading over an article on Monster called Ten Tips for Staying Happy at Work and even though it’s about keeping happy when you work for others, I realized that most of it applied to people who worked for themselves as well.
One of the reasons that I love working for myself is the feeling I get of being able to control my own time. If I want to stop in the middle of a beautiful day and go outside and work in the garden I can usually manipulate my work, go outside and putter and then come back to it later. You have to be self disciplined enough to actually go back to work, but it’s a great fringe benefit.
I’m going to pass along the link because I there is quite a bit of good information there. My mother used to tell me that if you are not happy at work the rest of your life probably will be unhappy as well no matter how much money that you make.
I recently got in touch with a high school classmate of mine. Barb Girson is an International Direct Selling expert, trainer and coach who recently set sail with her own business called mysalestactics.com. We had a few emails back and forth and an interesting conversation about where we have been and what works in promoting out businesses.
I mentioned to her that Craigslist has been one of the best tools that I use to find new customers. Barb asked me about how I get it to work for me and also asked me an interesting question, “Would you consider this a networking strategy?”
My first thought that no it was not, but after pondering the question for a while I have decided that it is. I’ve met new people through the use of it and have used my networking rule of trying to offer something of value (free information) without expecting anything in return, so I guess it could be called networking.
Her next request was for me to describe the process that I used for this. I decided to write this post about it because I believe what Scott Ginsberg says “Writing is the key to all wealth“.
There are two methods that I use to promote my business on Craigslist:
First, I have written a series of advertisements that I rotate through several cities in my region in the “computer services” section. It is important to follow Craiglist’s rules by not posting too often and only posting these ads in the appropriate section.
I have seen many ads for different services posted in the “web design jobs” or “computer gigs” sections. Since these sections are for people looking to buy web services these ads usually get flagged and removed pretty quickly, but more importantly they are not read by the people who are actually in the market for their services. I know that personally I would never hire someone who didn’t understand or care that this was not the correct section to post their ads.
Second, the “web design jobs” and “computer gigs” sections are the ones that I need to be reading to find people advertising jobs that I can do. To read those I use RSS. Every Craigslist page has it’s own RSS feed and I can subscribe to those just like any blog and get these ads almost as soon as they appear in my feedreader. For that I use Thunderbird another great free Open Source tool. Not only do I get my email, Thunderbird brings all of my RSS feeds into it as well and I can read them just like my regular email.
Even though there is quite a bit of Spam on Craigslist using Thunderbird I can still monitor many Craigslist cities, have all the post sent to one folder and go through 30 or 40 posts in a couple of minutes. I currently subscribe to two feeds in well over 30 Craigslist cities and still only spend about ten to fifteen minutes a day working on it. I probably actually answer five to six ads a day and I have a general outline that I use for this. I try to personalize each reply to the individual city and request, but here’s the basic outline:
Hello,
My name is Jim Lillicotch and I am replying to your Craigslist ad.
I live in Pittsburgh PA and have customers in (local city) and many other areas that are very satisfied.
For information about my business, I invite you to tour my blog:
Feel free to comment on any posts that strike your interest and contact me with any questions
Thank you for your consideration.
Jim Lillicotch
Lillicotch.com
I have found that people posting these jobs on Craigslist tend to be bombarded with responses to their ads, but if I get a reply I try to find out exactly what their job entails and offer to be as helpful as I can. I have foud several customers this way and also a few good friends.
Looks link the new update for my Android G1 phone is almost ready. There are going to be lots of improvements that I’ll use, plus it promises to make almost everything on the phone run faster.
The best things for me so far are copy and paste from the web and stereo bluetooth for charging and listening at the same time. It will also support widgets so that means many more cool new apps are coming.
I read the other day that a small company in Taiwan is suing Apple over the multi-touch technology. I’m hoping that will lead to having multi-touch and auto rotate on unrooted Android phones, like mine.
A funny thing happened when Google temporarily removed the tethering apps from the market a couple of weeks ago, Twitter was ablaze with ways around it, which helped me locate this solution http://androidguys.com/?p=4542.
T-Mobile tried to keep people from tethering their phones and the result was that now many more people know about this and are now able to do it.
The issue that matters to me the most is battery life and I guess that’s just a problem that I’m going to have to live with until I get a new phone, but at this point I’m pretty sure it will be another Android phone.
One of the greatest strengths of America is that people, companies and even cities can reinvent themselves. Even now in this time of economic recession new opportunities are still everywhere.
It’s clearly visible here in Pittsburgh, my hometown. Here’s a great video called Rust to Renewal – Pittsburgh’s Green Economy that shows how far that we’ve come. There’s not even one mention of the Steelers.
Favorite Site Designs -
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Tri-Win Mailing Services.
This site is a mailing service. Any doubt about that from the first glance?
Everything that they do is right there in front of you. Navigation is easy to find and use. I would prefer some sort of hover effect so that visitors know that they are links, I do like that the main navigation is in plain text, though.
