Prepping for a trip to Sydney, I have been alerted by Twitter buddy Tony Hollingsworth to UBER – a Private Driver alternative to taxis.
Now soft-launched in Sydney, the service is rolling out around the world. Install the app, use it to order a car and your credit card on file will be charged automatically.
Check out the buzz on Twitter – it appears to be well worth the extra cost. Hope the service rolls out to Melbourne soon!
I’ll be using the service to arrive in style at The Grounds of Alexandria to meet Tony and some other tweeps on Monday afternoon so I’ll update this post then!
It’s been brewing for many years – @TrevorYoung, the PR Warrior and I have now collaborated on a DIY training program for small business owners.
Both Trevor and I work with businesses of all shapes and sizes from large Australian retailers, professional speakers, entertainers and celebrities. We are often approached by smaller businesses for assistance and feel disappointed we can’t offer personal assistance!
So – we’ve pulled together all the best bits of everything we’ve learnt so far about getting social media marketing right and we’ve distilled it down into eleven training modules, delivered fortnightly by email.
The Reach Kit includes a few months free access to our exclusive membership site with further news, tips, regular webinars (live video broadcasts) and member services.
Proud as punch to let you know about it. www.TheReachKit.com
You can join the Facebook community and also interact on Twitter.
People often come up to me after I’ve spoken about social media at conferences/events and ask about Pinterest. They have the idea it’s just a throw-away time-waster being used by no-one.
The reality is, Pinterest is driving more traffic back to websites than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined and an annual BlogHer study has just revealed females trust Pinterest more than Facebook.
Here’s a very clever example of a brand using it well. Can you be inspired by this – no matter how large your business?
If you don’t include this bit:
http://
in the weblinks you’re using in your Twitter biography, YouTube video descriptions and various other spots, you won’t get the automatic clickable link appearing. This means your visitor would have to select your web address, copy then paste it into a browser window. Or try to type it themselves. You don’t want to give them all those barriers to visiting your site do you?
With YouTube especially – including your web address, facebook page, twitter page and any other relevant online properties will give you better ‘google juice’ meaning you’re more likely to come up in the search results for your topic area.
I do love it when a big brand makes a point of putting some personality out in the public domain. These videos are a couple of years old now, so I bet the team has changed – it would be a great idea if they did a new version, but it’s a good idea worth sharing anyway!
As much as we love to bash Telstra, you can’t fault their impressive move into social media customer support – have you seen Telstra 24/7 on Facebook where you can even install an app to check your usage, recharge, etc or Twitter or even Pinterest?
If you’ve received a DM (direct message) in your Inbox along the lines of
‘someone is saying bad things about you’ with a link
DON’T CLICK. DELETE.
If you click the link, it takes you to a PRETEND twitter login page. It is known as a phishing scam (‘fishing for your personal details’). If you then enter your Twitter credentials here, your own account will begin sending that message out to your followers. Then people really WILL be saying bad things about you but it will be your own followers: clients, colleagues, friends.
If you have already been compromised, IMMEDIATELY change your Twitter password via www.twitter.com. While you are there, go to Settings and Apps and ‘revoke access’ to any apps you do not recognise or even those you are semi-sure about. You can always allow access later to those apps you find you need.
Next, compose a general tweet letting people know your account has been compromised and no-one should click any links in direct messages from you. Put a message on your Facebook wall too.
Now, go into your Inbox and delete any the direct messages which have been sent out by your account with the wording ‘bad things about you’ and that link.
Oh this is a godsend for Page Admins on Facebook.
Quietly over the last week or so, Facebook has rolled out a feature called ‘Voice’. If you have a Brand Page, you’ll see the Voice option in the top right corner of the screen.
Click it to drop down a TERRIFIC option which lets you switch identities – you can post/comment/like as your own personal profile OR your Brand Page profile and easily switch between the two.
This used to be such a drag, I’d just forget about it. Sometimes I’d want to make a comment as Yvonne on one of the posts by the pages I admin but I’d have to go into the Admin Page Settings and switch the setting off, back to the page, make the comment, back to Admin settings, switch it back on, save. blah blah blah!
Loving this new change – thanks FB, we can be friends for a bit.
I’ve long been a fan of Google Docs (now Google DRIVE) for collaborating on files.
Use your google account to sign in at http://drive.google.com, hit ‘Create’ and away you go. You can choose to share your file by adding email addresses OR you can share it for ‘anyone who has the link’. Copy the unique URL and paste it into an email for all of your collaborators.
It’s always been one of those magical demos – watch how amazed even the most modern person is when they see a bunch of people all working on the very same document at the same time.
In the past, I’ve used shared Google spreadsheets for brainstorming – I’ll put a random word at the top of a page and have my brainstormers use that word to spark ideas to solve whatever problem we’re working on.
Now, I’ve dialled it up a notch. I’m working on a project with a top secret collaborator and we’ve set ourselves a super tight deadline. We can’t rely on face-to-face meetings to get this job done, we’re going to have to work on it whenever we’ve got the time. Together or otherwise. And we need to collaborate on many many files.
Using Google Drive, I’ve created a ‘Collection’ which is like a folder. Hit the Create button and you’ll see it at the bottom of the drop down.
Once you’ve got your Collection named, hit the arrow to the right of the collection name and you can create docs, spreadsheets and more inside that Collection. Best of all – just SHARE THE COLLECTION and all the files inside will be shared.
I am a Timeline fan, but I’ve never been happy with the ‘recent posts by others’ box in the top right corner of the Page. The best way to demonstrate engagement is to SHOW the posts by others integrated into the Timeline just as they were before the switch.
Here’s the trick to make it happen for posts by others you’d like to put back into your Timeline:
- in the ‘recent posts by others’ box, locate the post you want to integrate to the Timeline.
- click the x in the top right corner for that post.
- choose ‘allowed on page’
- refresh your browser window and you’ll now see that post in chronological order integrated into your Timeline.
You have to do it manually for each post you want to integrate, which actually works well because you can pick and choose the best posts.
