Erik T. Ford

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Another solid one by HubSpot. Very excited for Tuesday's event: Internet & Technology Summit 2009

This article is by Lauren Brown, a HubSpot marketing intern for the last six months. She’s now leaving to study in Australia. 

About a year ago I had the opportunity to go to Paris for a semester. I had decided to do a study abroad program, and as I’ve been taking French classes for eight years, France was the logical choice.

But right before the forms were due, I decided not to go. I realized that I had not really chosen Paris; I had just seen it as my only option. I took some time to explore other programs, and in four days I will be leaving for Sydney, Australia, an option I hadn’t even considered a year ago.

This week’s top five stories of the week from InboundMarketing.com all prove that you shouldn’t always take the next logical step. Never do anything by default. Assess what’s around you, explore your options and go to Sydney (metaphorically speaking, of course).

1. A Case Study: Using Contests to Build Links

Author: Debra Mastaler of Search Engine Land

In this case study, Mastaler discusses the challenges of working with a client whose industry is highly competitive. The internet was already overflowing with good content about the industry, so she knew her campaign had to be creative; she could not just publish another white paper or article.

Instead, she decided on hosting a no-string-attached contest for which participants were not required, only recommended, to link back to the client’s site. Through a series of sales-pitch-free emails to a top industry association the client had joined, Mastaler helped the client to build trust with potential partners and host a successful contest, resulting in over 50 inbound links to the client’s site.

Lesson: See what’s been done, and do something else

2. If you blog, make it easy for people to comment

Author: David Meerman Scott of WebInkNow

We create blogs to share information and conversation. But as Scott points out in his article, sometimes we are unknowingly squashing the conversation before it has even begun by either not allowing or limiting commenting on our blogs.

Scott suggests opening up your blog to anyone who wants to comment, not just others who use the same blogging platform. If you’re worried about spammers, you can always manually approve comments or install spam-blocking tools like a captcha. One commenter on this post also reminds us that it never hurts to end a post by asking readers to share their thoughts.

Lesson: Let the conversation happen

3. How to Manage Twitter

Author: Chris Brogan

People often wonder how Chris Brogan, as busy as he is, has the time and energy to respond to the dozens of people that tweet him daily. In this blog post, he gives us a little insight on his favorite tools and tips for organization, and how he uses Twitter to maximize its benefits.

What’s important to remember, and Brogan points this out near the end of the post, is that this is his way of using the site. He needs to manage the onslaught of Tweets he receives, connect at events, keep in touch with friends and followers and learn more about cities he’s travelling in, but you may not. Keep this in mind when using Twitter and all social media.

Lesson: Learn from others but do what works best for you

4. SES SJ: SEO Through Blogs And Feeds

Author: Top Rank Blog

Blogging combined with the use of RSS feeds can be a very powerful marketing tool. In a panel at Search Engine Strategies 2009: San Jose, industry leaders discussed how blogging can help search engine optimization efforts, and if you’re not already blogging, why you should be.

As you all probably know, link building is extremely valuable. However, the panelists also share some advice about making your company stand out from the crowd, distributing content and finding the time to blog if you are a small business.

Lesson: Blogging is far from dead

5. Generating New Business Online With Local Search

Author: Stephen Logan of Ezine@rticles

An often overlooked and potentially worthwhile aspect of SEO is local search. Particularly for small businesses, local search can be a beneficial addition to a marketing campaign. In this article, Logan gives some suggestions on ways to move your company to the top of the rankings in local search.

A good start for companies looking to improve their local searching rankings is to make sure the company is listed in all relevant online directories, as these directories create links back to the company’s site. Companies should also identify important keywords, and use the chosen words naturally throughout the text of the website. Tweaking headings and metadata to reflect keywords can also give you an SEO edge.

Lesson: Look to Local Search

Photo Credit: wilf2

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The work doesn’t change, but the environment can. Google realized this early in the game, even prior to the economic doldrums. Yet as times get tougher, jobs lost, budgets crunched, where has all of the fun gone? This is a great brief article via HarvardBusiness encouraging a different stage for operations. I love the historical analysis as well.

With the economy in a coma, a pervasive unease has settled on businesses. Executives worry about the state of the company; employees fret about losing their jobs. What’s a leader to do?

Lighten up!

Work, especially when the stakes are so high, is serious enough that a manager shouldn’t add to the tension by over-managing or going around with a sour puss. It is up to the leader to inspire hope and confidence and one way to do it is by spreading some good cheer. Here are a few things to try.

Relax your mood. There is nothing a manager can do about the tanking economy, but he can do something about how he reacts to it. Grim-faced expressions do not make people want to work harder, but a frequent smile and a friendly nod can do something about the way they feel about their work.

Create laughs. World War I British troops living in trenches amused themselves by staging lighthearted theatrical productions. It was a taste of home and a reminder that as bad as things can get, we all need to laugh, if only to remind ourselves that we’re human. So find ways to lighten the mood. Spring for lunch, order cake for the break room, pass out movie tickets or DVD rental coupons, or post cartoons on the billboard. Doing these things reminds people that all work and no play makes for dull living.

Keep your door open. Let people know that you are available to chat. Most often people will come by to discuss work, but there will be times when conversation about life in general is more appropriate. This is not slack time; it’s human time. Be available when people just want to talk about things, even about the fate of the company. Be honest and open. You cannot guarantee lifetime employment, but you can promise straight talk.

There is precedence for levity. Abraham Lincoln kept his cabinet and his generals loose by telling stories that would amuse but were also instructive. Case in point. When associates sought to poison the reputation of U.S. Grant by calling him a drunkard, Lincoln famously quipped, “Send whatever Grant is drinking to the rest of my generals.” Grant was winning; the other Union generals were not.

Franklin Roosevelt held regular happy hours in the White House, even during the darkest days of the Depression and the Second World War. It was a time to kick back, gossip, and share some laughs.

No one would call Lincoln or Roosevelt inattentive to their situations; both men knew how to find a moment of distance from reality as a means of refreshing themselves and their aides.

Few would argue for excessive levity — that’s foolhardiness. A manager needs to keep the team focused on the priorities at hand, but she can do it while being professional about the work and appropriately lighthearted with the people who do it, including herself.

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Excellent article by Winston identifying catalysts for the future and great trends/ opportunities that follow suit. I know I particularly have been focusing on the business analytics tools that can help exploit opportunities in the value chain. What about you?

Everything’s getting faster these days—you’ve heard it before. Two mega-trends in particular are merging: rapidly accelerating technological change and rapidly evolving environmental issues and pressures. Lucky for us, the first change is going to save our butts from the second. Fast-evolving, smart IT will play a critical role in helping us navigate and profit from environmental challenges. The two trends together are combining to make for enduring change in how business is done, a movement to a permanently higher plane of green and tech-driven activity.

A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Ten-Year Century,” makes the well-known case that the pace of transformation in society is accelerating. More has changed, the authors say, in this decade than in the previous century. To be specific,

Changes that used to take generations—economic cycles, cultural shifts, mass migrations, changes in the structures of families and institutions—now unfurl in a span of years… Game-changing consumer products and services (iPod, smart phones, YouTube, Twitter, blogs) that historically might have appeared once every five or more years roll out within months.

The “Laws” of Technology that the authors highlight—Moore’s and Metcalfe’s—perfectly describe how quickly both computational power and networking capacity are growing (double the computing power on every chip every 18 months, for example). It’s a “law” in the world of technology that things are steadily getting faster.

But this op-ed and other “tech is changing the world so fast” stories—and I’m a sucker for them—miss the another big shift that’s moving just as fast: the degradation of the natural world and the resulting pressure to green society and business.

The forces driving the greening of business—from natural world pressures to business customers asking tough questions about your environmental impacts—are evolving incredibly quickly. First, we’re witnessing changes in the physical world that scientists and geologists normally expect to take decades, if not millennia.

Scientists are very surprised by the increasing pace of change in environmental deterioration, particularly in our climate. As science writer Sharon Begley points out in Newsweek, statements from experts such as, “that really shocked us,” “we had no idea how bad it was,” and “reality is well ahead of the climate models” keep coming up repeatedly. The scientific consensus on environmental issues has also moved quickly, from careful support for the thesis of human-induced climate change to vast, overwhelming, somewhat nervous agreement in less than 10 years. How sure will our scientific leaders be in 10 more?

Second—and this is the good news—the business world too is changing its ways at a remarkable pace, especially when you consider the size of the companies in motion. Leaders are drastically reducing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, innovating even in seemingly static parts of the business like fleet and distribution. We hear every day how much Wal-Mart is changing itself (taking an already lean company and improving fleet efficiency by 30% in three years) and forcing change on others (making somewhat-radical new demands on suppliers that will change how they do business).

We can be forgiven for finding the technological, environmental, and business changes awe-inspiring, daunting, and “deer-in-headlights”-freeze-inducing. During a time of fast change, it’s also tempting to go into ostrich mode, just chalk it all up to a temporary frenzy, and hope that if you shut your eyes tight it will all go away. But is today’s pressure on business and society to go green a “bubble,” just another rise in environmental interest like the ones we saw come and go in the early 90s and early 70s? You can guess where I come down on this.

Part of my reasoning is that the business opportunities in solving environmental challenges are so large, why would interest wane? We can already see that the technological changes of today will serve us well in the search for solutions to our biggest environmental challenges today and tomorrow. Imagine the scale of industry transformation and the profit-potential in just three areas:

• New energy-efficiency and generation technologies to save money and to power our lives
• Satellite imaging, “remote sensing,” nanotechnologies, and data collection methods to track environmental impacts from forests to factories
• Business analytics tools and software to identify risks and opportunities up and down the value chain.

And so, as with the certainty of the “Ten-Year Century” futurists about the increasing pace of technological change, I believe that the acceleration of the greening of business is real and its impact will be permanent, not transitory. The growing revolution in how business is done will likely dwarf the original industrial revolution in its impact on how we live. We’re moving quickly to a new way of designing, making, shipping, selling, using, and disposing of all goods and services. And given the pace of change, it’s a spectacularly bad idea to wait out the recession to take action (a case I make in my new book, Green Recovery).

Given the power of high-tech fixes to deal with the somewhat terrifying pace of environmental change, I say let’s not just cope with technological change or even embrace it, but let’s do everything we can to accelerate it. It may be our only hope.

Erik Business Innovation, Reader Shared, revolutionary technology innovation, opportunity, technology

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This is a great, handy post to squeeze a bit more productivity out of your environment!

Originally intended to display your bookmarks or browsing history, the Firefox sidebar can actually be put to many more uses. Airplane pilots and World of Warcraft players alike understand how valuable it can be to get more information at a glance, and a small amount of tweaking can get your browser’s sidebar working to do just that.

This guide gives you five ideas for making good use of your Firefox sidebar, but there are many more options out there. What do you use your sidebar to display? Let us know in the comments.

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1. Add Facebook Chat or Google Talk

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Want your Facebook or gTalk sessions visible across your browsing session? These are both simple to set up. For Facebook, all you have to do is create a new bookmark pointing to facebook.com/presence/popout.php. The important key is to check the box marked “Load this bookmark in the sidebar,” as shown below:

Then, anytime you launch the bookmark it will load in your sidebar and be available no matter which open browser tab currently has your attention. With some small changes this tip actually works in Opera as well.

For Google Talk, there’s simply an extension to install called gTalk Sidebar. This extension also provides a handy way to send off quick emails from the sidebar too.

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2. Add a Video Player

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If you’re a web video fan, this one’s for you. The YouPlayer add-on adds both a video player and a Winamp-style playlist to the sidebar. Adding items to the playlist is as simple as dragging and dropping from the list of supported sites, including YouTube, Metacafe, MySpace and Google Video. Local video is supported as well, so you can queue up vids from your desktop just as easily.

If you’re one of those people who, like me, is always stumbling on videos you want to watch but don’t have the time just then, YouPlayer can help you gather a queue up throughout the day to watch later on when you finally find the time. And if you do find the time, let us know where it was. And send us some.

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3. Add a Feed Reader

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If you use Google Reader and Firefox, there’s a simple trick that can bring gReader nicely into your browser sidebar. The mobile version of Reader works visually very well in the relatively small width of the Firefox sidebar, so simply create a new bookmark for google.com/reader/i/. As with the Facebook chat tip above, you’ll want to check the “Load this bookmark in the sidebar” box here, as well.

You can also tweak it to open to a specific tag, which is handy if you have a ton of feeds and want to open the interface to a specific, frequently used topic. To go even further, you can install the Stylish extension and drop in your own CSS to customize the look and feel.

If you don’t use Google Reader, or just want a lightweight sidebar to show a few feeds perhaps separately from your main reader of choice, you might want to check out Sage. It’s a popular and easy-to-use lightweight feed reading add-on that supports OPML import/export and integration with the Firefox bookmark system.

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4. Add Google Docs

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If you do a lot of work in the Google Docs cloud, you might want to try out this handy extension. gDocsBar features drag and drop support to upload files simply by dropping them onto your sidebar.

Allowing you to search and filter to locate your documents, gDocsBar also includes smart folders, templates and webclips for a very full-featured document management experience all from the convenience of your browser sidebar.

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5. Use It For Tabs

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If you find yourself having to make an appointment with your eye doctor for bifocals just so you can read the miniscule text on the 87 browser tab labels you have open, this sidebar tip may be for you. Tree Style Tab is an extension that does a couple of very useful things: moves your tab collection into a sidebar and arranges the tabs vertically instead of horizontally, and establishes a Windows Explorer-style hierarchy amongst the open pages to make it easier to show or hide entire collections of tabs.

Not only does it make the tab labels a lot easier to read and thus find the open tab you’re looking for, but it makes it possible to close a related collection of tabs in one fell swoop, or hide it to get it out of the way in a large collection of open pages.

And actually, this tip doesn’t technically make use of the “real” sidebar at all, so you can still double this trick up with any of the above suggestions, or another Firefox sidebar extension of your choosing.

As always, have another great Firefox sidebar tip to share with other readers? Get thee to our comment form!

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More Firefox resources from Mashable:

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- 20+ Great Twitter Tools for Firefox
- 20 Simple Productivity Tools for Bloggers
- 16 Great Music Add-Ons for Firefox
- HOW TO: Make Firefox Your Productivity Machine
- 40+ Add-Ons for Managing Firefox Tabs

Tags: facebook chat, Firefox, firefox tips, google talk, GTD, Lists, productivity, sidebar

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Very interesting. I came across a quote a few weeks ago stating, the faster they rise, the faster they fall-

If you’re a visual learner, I have great news: the technology equivalent of Hot or Not is available in graph form. Research firm Gartner Inc has published the 2009 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, with a handy graphic detailing the hype cycle and 79 technology trends and topics on the curve.

The “Hype Cycle” illustrates the growth, maturity and adoption of technologies—but most of all, it looks at how much hype and media coverage these topics get. It can also be used to determine whether to invest in types of tech, according to Gartner—technologies with high user benefit and low time to mainstream acceptance are ripe for investment and implementation, while technologies with minimal user benefit and a long time until mainstream acceptance should be approached with “extreme caution.”

Both AllThingsD and Reuters focused on the position of microblogging on the chart (in the form of everyone’s favorite microblogging service, Twitter).

Microblogging is nearing the end of the peak of inflated expectations. (I trust I don’t need to show you proof that they’ve definitely entered that peak—where media frenzy leads to artificially high expectations.) They’re nearing the trough of disillusionment—where the inflated expectations create a backlash, the technologies fall out of media favor, and hype diminishes.

What do you think? Is Twitter already past the peak of inflated expectations, or to we have a lot more glowing stories to hear from the most popular microblogging service? What technology do you see as most interesting in its position on this chart?

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