Open source vs. proprietary management tools
Open source software is a concept that I believe in and support. I have written more about it here. In deciding between open source and proprietary management tools, an organization may have to decide whether it’s willing to forgo some niche features in exchange for a less costly tool that does 80% of what its […]
The Hofbrauhaus Pittsburgh won’t let in the Marines
Pretty extreme headline, right? Note: I changed it because I realized it was actually too extreme, I was being sarcastic and it didn’t come off that way. I’m sure it’s not that bad, but that sure is the image that the Hofbrauhaus Pittsburgh is portraying. It’s just another example of how businesses don’t understand social […]
WordPress Can Do Anything
More and more these days I find myself recommending WordPress for much more things than just blogging. I’ve found that WP can be used to do just about anything the the best content management systems (CMS) can do and to me it’s by far the most user friendly and easy to learn system that there […]
How To Use Craigslist To Find New CLients
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 […]
Simple can be Good
When I stand up to talk about my business at my networking meetings of of the first things I say is that many vendors will try to sell you the most complicated system that they can. This is true for websites, inventory management or almost any system that a business will buy. For websites there […]
What To Send In A Newsletter
I had a customer who wanted to start an email newsletter last year. I installed a mailing list management program and then spent quite a bit of time explaining how I thought sending it should be done. I wanted to pass that information along so I wrote a series of posts on how to start […]
Friday Just For Fun Site – StumbleVideo
Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work) I bought myself a new phone for Christmas. It’s a G1 with Google’s new operating system called Android. You probably already know that I’m an Open Source kind of guy. I think that even though the iPhone […]
Think Before You Email
I was speaking with a customer the other day about ways that he could use email marketing to promote his business. He was belt tightening like most businesses today and he finally realized the possible value and low cost of this kind of promotion. When I first built his site he asked for and I […]
Positive Ways To Handle Negative Comments
One of the things that I mention to my clients that want to start a blog and allow others to add content to their site is that besides blog spam you probably will get some commenters that don’t like you or what you say. I usually say that instead of just deleting the negative comments […]
Giving Away A Great Product To Make Money – Pentaho
Here’s a great example of giving away a great product to make money. Pentaho is an open source business intelligence application and if you are thinking about buying new software for your business you need to check this out. It’s free and they have some great demos available. According to Wikipedia business intelligence (BI) is […]