If you haven’t been using Google Trends to help with your business, you’re missing out. It does more than just tell you what the latest hot searches are. Under the Explore menu, you’re able to analyze search terms of your choice, found out when they were popular, where they came from, and what search phrases they appear in.
This can be incredibly useful in conjunction with other analytics that tell you how google searches drive traffic to your site: you can find out if certain events drive searches, how better to optimize your content to pick up on broader search trends, and the like. But Google’s analysis of its own search trends doesn’t stop there.
Just a few days ago, Google released a new way to track search trends. Called Top Charts, it appears to be a simple tool: it tells you the search trends for given topics from actors to whiskey. It’s a pretty simple idea that has pretty powerful implications. Like their knowledge graph that shows up on the side of many of their searches, Google has been working not just to provide us with webpages that have the words we want, but also with the actual knowledge we’re searching for. Read More
Yesterday, we talked about how well the SyFy movie Sharknado used social media to deliver ratings. A powerful social media strategy involves more than just keeping your twitter feed updated regularly. Content, of course, plays an important role, but just as important is making sure that your message reaches the right audience. Having a broad message designed to reach a large group of people should always be a part of your strategy, but we all know that people are more likely to listen to people they trust. So it makes sense to target people who command a lot of influence with their peers.
Marketing theory calls these people, unsurprisingly, “influencers”—people with a lot of clout over other folks’ decisions. If you can tailor your messaging specifically for them, it’s more likely that they’ll pick it up and transmit it through their own networks. And with all the social networks springing up on the internet, it can be easier than ever to figure out who matters most to a community. The flip side of this is that there are so many communities and so many networks, it can all seem overwhelming.
So we’re here to help. Identifying influencers is as much art as science. But there’s a method to the madness to help you find the folks that matter the most.
Step One: Make sure you understand your target audience Read More
Just a few days ago, TechCrunch reported that Samsung has filed trademarks indicating that it may be entering the burgeoning smart watch market. With this news, it joins the ranks of other companies rumored to be developing smart watches: Apple, Google, and Microsoft all allegedly have watches in the making.
Interestingly, this emerging wearable computing market has been driven by small players—perhaps most famously by Pebble, a smart watch that was crowd funded through Kickstarter. But with these bigger companies moving in, it’s worth reviewing the smart watches on offer and asking whether this newest tech trend has something to offer you.
The tagline about smart watches is “hands-free computing.” The general idea is that the watches will wirelessly connect to your smart phone and move some of its functionality out of your pocket and on to your wrist. If you ever get furious about having to take the phone out of your pocket to make a call, check your messages, or read a text (or, for that matter check the time), then these might be products for you.
If that seems silly, keep in mind how everyone thought that the iPod (and mp3 players in general) were useless and that they’d never take off. Almost every reviewer has recognized the advantages in terms of convenience and connectivity of having a device that’s more accessible on your wrist. Read More
We spend a lot of time talking about ways we can best manage our time. And when there’s a lot on our plates, the dream is just to get someone to take care of business for us. Fortunately, we looked at ways to do just that: there are a lot of small-scale outsourcing options available, connecting people that have surplus time with people that have a deficit.
This has always been one of the promises of the web: connecting people that wouldn’t otherwise be connected. And while the time crunch issue has been addressed, some major players have identified an opportunity to make a different kind of valuable link: connecting experts with those that need expertise. Both Google and eBay are rolling out services that promise to link up people that know something with people that want to know something.
These services share something in common with Elance, which we talked about before, but each aims to carve out a specific, special niche when it comes to connecting specialists with those who need their help.
eBay opened the salvo with SecretGuru. Currently in beta and available only in the UK, SecretGuru is an attempt to bring a curatorial eye to selling expertise. Unlike Elance, which allows almost anyone to ply their services, SecretGuru is highly selective about which experts it offers. It wants to create “memorable experiences,” from specialized cooking classes to learning to make shoes to personal style advice. Read More
About a year ago, the consulting firm McKinsey and Company conducted a study that concluded about 28% of the average workers’ time is spent on email. Thinking about my own email experience, I know a lot of those emails are basically useless. Or, at least, things that don’t have to be dealt with immediately.
SaneBox is an inbox management program that wants to help you deal with your chronic email bloat. Compatible with Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, and most other web-based email programs and email clients you might use, SaneBox gives you a toolbox to let you manage your email rather than having your email manage you.
There are a lot of products that help you manage your email, but SaneBox has given some deep thought to the problem, and their efforts show. Based in part on the principles of the popular productivity principles of Getting Things Done, SaneBox is more than a simple email filtering tool like Gmail’s priority inbox.
Though it does filtering quite well, too, which is the foundation of most email management tools. SaneBox defaults to two levels of importance, but is able to manage up to five. And while their importance algorithms work well on their own, SaneBox allows you to connect to you various social media accounts to better learn what’s important to you and what isn’t. Best of all, it summarizes your unimportant emails for you so you can decide quickly what needs your attention and what you can ignore.
But what makes SaneBox really interesting is what it can bring to your inbox besides basic filtering. One of my favorite features is the summary of email activity, which includes the summary of your latest unimportant emails, but more powerfully, provides a lot of statistics on your email behavior, which lets you think critically about how much time you’re spending and the load of messages you’re dealing with. A richer understanding of how much time I can expect to spend on email helps to plan my workload—and lets me consider whether I really need to read everything I think I need to read.
There are a whole host of other great features: one-click unsubscribing from email lists you don’t want to be on anymore, automated nagging features that will email you to let you know if an important email hasn’t been replied to, cloud-based attachment storage, and others. It also works with the email on your mobile devices, so you don’t have to worry about scrolling through a ton of useless messages on your phone.
SaneBox will cost you $5 per month (and you can try it for free for 14 days), but given that the company estimates that it saves the average user two hours per week, it just might be worth it to you.
A couple days ago, I wrote about the release of Microsoft Office for the iPhone and Android. This got me thinking about the state of the original killer apps: the productivity software that really drove the original personal computer revolution.
It’s interesting that the mobile revolution hasn’t really produced the same kind of software that made the pc ubiquitous in homes and businesses. The founders of Quip hope to change that. Founded by Bret Taylor, the former Facebook CTO and one of the driving forces behind Google Maps, and Kevin Gibbs, who headed the technical team for the Google App Engine, with $15 million in startup funding, the Quip team has the brains and muscle to make a real difference in our mobile productivity.
The inaugural blog post for quip makes a really good point: after showing a picture of MacWrite, one of the first graphical word processors that was released in 1984, they note: With the exception of some additional color and a stack of toolbars at the top of the screen, it doesn’t look different from the software that probably came bundled with your current laptop. We still use the same metaphors and the same workflow that we used when shoulder pads and leg warmers were cool.
Quip tried to rethink word processing from the ground up for the mobile experience, emphasizing four design goals: collaboration, mobility, interactivity, and simplicity. We’ll walk through these to understand what Quip has to offer.
Central to Quip is the idea that you’ll want to share your documents and work on them collaboratively. Quip allows a single document to be edited simultaneously on any device by multiple users, which is a pretty good feature in itself. Most revolutionarily, tho’, is that the document is combined with an editing and commenting thread, so you can keep up-to-date on the conversation and the edits that have been made.
Image from Quip
Quip also provides shared folders that automatically update users when something inside them has changed.
Quip strives to make word processing truly optimized for mobile: besides working well offline, Quip looks great no matter the device you’re working on. And it’s not just a pretty face: the formatting of documents changes depending on the device. If you’re reading on an iPad, for instance, pictures and text might be integrated in a different way that takes advantage of the larger screen. The same document on the iPhone might separate the text and photos to make reading easier. Quip promises that whatever the device, you won’t need to pinch and resize to have a usable document.
Quip supports printing, but they also realize we usually just look at documents on the screen these days. To take advantage of this, they offer some interactive features that seem truly handy. You’re able to “@-mention” people and other documents, for instance, to link directly to them. You’re also able to transform text simply. To borrow Quip’s example, you can change a bulleted list into a checklist that multiple users can update at once.
Finally, Quip is pretty easy to use. That said, some users might find this simplicity a disadvantage. Some of the standard ways we’re used to dealing with word processors just don’t apply to Quip. There’s something of a learning curve. There also aren’t the same robust formatting options we’re used to. This is the trade-off for what the Quip folks say is “a minimal, elegant design that helps you focus on writing — not ribbons.”
Unfortunately, Quip doesn’t offer any compatibility with Microsoft Word—just Quip’s native format and PDFs. So if you’re interested in making the transition, you have to jump in head first.
Quip is available now for desktop and iOS devices, and there’s an Android app in the works, too. The basic service is free for up to 5 users, and the professional edition (currently in beta) costs only $12 a month.
It’s 2013, and by now most of us know that a powerful social media presence is essential to building your brand on the internet. To make that responsibility a little easier, a number of social media management applications have emerged to coordinate your presence through time and across social media platforms.
One of the applications that seems to be picking up a lot of steam is Buffer, an application that started life managing twitter feeds but has expanded its focus to include Facebook, LinkedIn, and many other platforms and features.
The basic idea behind social media management software is that you’re able to make updates to your various social media accounts in a single convenient location. And best of all, you’re able to schedule your updates so you’re able to prepare your posts and tweets beforehand. Most applications also offer various analytics to determine your social media impact and help you to refine your strategies for maximum reach.
In this respect, Buffer behaves a lot like its competitors, which include HootSuite, perhaps the most popular of these applications, and others such as TweetDeck, and SocialFlow.
Buffer really distinguishes itself when it comes to ease of use. The scheduler is often singled out for approval: you’re able to set up default posting times so you don’t have to specify for each new post, which is the case for most other social media management software. This is especially useful as you can schedule your posts to correspond to peak usage time for each different networks, set it, and forget it.
Besides scheduling posts, generating and sharing content online is also a snap. Buffer provides you with browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari to make sharing content from the web a snap. Just find something you like, click on the Buffer button in your browser, and you’re all set to either share immediately or to put it in your buffer and share at your previously scheduled times. Read More
On the heels of its June release of Office for iPhone, yesterday Microsoft made its venerable Office product line available for Android phones. It’s been a sticking point for mobile professionals that the most common word processing, spreadsheet, and slideshow programs were inaccessible on the most common mobile devices. But now we’re able to have Word, Excel, and Powerpoint with us on the go.
Sort of. Despite the ubiquity of smart phones the last few years, Microsoft didn’t make its most popular applications available for a good (to Microsoft) reason: until now, Office products were only available on Windows phones, and Microsoft had hoped that the popularity of those applications would drive users to phones that used their operating system.
And even though Microsoft has finally offered Office on different platforms, they’re still banking on the popularity of Office to pull users further into the Microsoft experience. For one, these aren’t exactly stand-alone applications. Unlike their Windows Phone or Windows 8 counterparts, they require a Microsoft 365 subscription.
And while you can email attachments, syncing and cloud storage is only available through Microsoft’s SkyDrive or SharePoint. Finally, these apps are only supported for the iPhone and Android Phones– there’s no comparable support for iPads and Android Tablets.
Of course, the news isn’t all bad. While you can’t create new documents with the iPhone or Android Office (also unlike their Windows Phone or Windows 8 counterparts), you can edit existing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files online through the Microsoft services and offline. The editing capabilities for Excel seem especially robust. Check out some of these features from the Microsoft Office for iPhone help:
Find text within a workbook
Apply filter
See the sum, average etc of a range with AutoSum
Sort selected data
Add, delete, and display comments
Format cells
Clear cells
Undo/Redo
Share files via email
On top of it all, the interface is easy and intuitive, and the documents, spreadsheets, and slidshows look good to boot. This isn’t just to make it easy on your eyes: in a crunch, a pocket projector and your smart phone are all you need to give a professional looking presentation.
So while it isn’t quite time to toss out your laptop and start running your business through your phone, you can at least make changes to your work while you’re on the go.
Thanks to Google, every entrepreneur’s favorite second office—the coffee shop—is about to get a major pick-me-up. Google announced yesterday that it’s partnering with Starbucks to bring free WiFi connections to all 7,000 company-operated Starbucks stores.
There are over 13,000 Starbucks stores in the US, some of which are franchised, so it’s possible your favorite Starbucks will be passed over. But if you see “Google Starbucks” as an available network, you’re good to go.
This is more than just free internet. Google promises that wireless connection speeds will be up to 10 times faster than the wireless connections previously offered by the coffee shop. And for those cities that have Google Fiber (so far just Kansas City, but coming soon to Austin, Texas, and Provo, Utah, and a few other cities), they plan of having speeds up to 100 times faster. So whether you’re uploading video or just listening to music while you work, your wireless experience will be zippier and more seamless.
This isn’t Google’s first experience with free WiFi: they’ve been offering the service in their home city of Mountain View, California, for a while now. They also offered free wireless at certain Starbucks after Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast.
The incentive for Google is clear: with free, fast internet, more eyeballs can linger on Google’s advertisements, whether through search, YouTube, or elsewhere. The move makes sense for Starbucks, too, increasing the draw for customers to pop in and grab a coffee (or a few, if they plan on staying awhile).
Being in business often means traveling for business. And if you’re traveling a lot, you’ll want to make sure you’re signed up to get rewards for it! There are tons of tips and tricks out there for accumulating and spending points, but here are a few basics to remember, and one great website to check out.
1. Pick the Right Program
While it can’t hurt to enroll for the frequent flyer program from any airline you use, it makes more sense to pick an airline and “concentrate” on it. That means knowing what airline you’re most likely to use, either because they have a strong presence at your home airport, or fly often to your most common destination city. If you’re traveling often, you’ll know which airline offers the best deals and routes for you.
If you haven’t been using Google Trends to help with your business, you’re missing out. It does more than just tell you what the latest hot searches are. Under the Explore menu, you’re able to analyze search terms of your choice, found out when they were popular, where they came from, and what search phrases they appear in.
Being in business often means traveling for business. And if you’re traveling a lot, you’ll want to make sure you’re signed up to get rewards for it! There are tons of tips and tricks out there for accumulating and spending points, but here are a few basics to remember, and one great website to check out.