Tagged Under: Business life

It's not uncommon for computer pioneers to make their money, cash in, and then head off to some tropical paradise or shift gears and focus more on the quality of his life or the quality of the lives of those around him.

The most powerful trend these days in communicating information is the "infographic". As the name implies, it's communicating information using images. Anyone who has ever witnessed a political race knows how powerful a pie chart or bar chart can be ("Number babies my opponent eats per month"). Good infographics take it to the next level, presenting complex information in ways that are easy to digest and scales/relationships can be quickly grasped.

Tuesday (March 20, 2012) BlueCarmoo wrapped up three days of exhibiting our business productivity suite at the Business 2012 show in London, UK. Despite having to battle some initial inclement weather conditions INSIDE the venue, Team BlueCamroo's three day participation at the exhibition was a great success. We met both current clients and several new ones. The Business 2012 show proved to be a turning point for BlueCamroo.

Be careful about who you outsource your online reputation management to. Make sure the company has responsible track record. It's not some foaming-at-the-mouth kook operating from a laptop in a Starbucks.

In BlueCamroo, Leads are what I like to call "the big slush pile". The Leads section is where you enter your first contacts. Got a business card at a trade show? Saw someone on Twitter? Someone filled out a Send Me Information form on your web site? Got an inquiry to your info@mycompany.com email? These are all leads. And they can all be captured easily and in the later two cases automatically by BlueCamroo.

A few days later the same news orgs that rather uncritically reported the news did an about face and admitted they were hoaxed. Someone setup a bogus site in hopes of starting an urban legend and weaning people off of what the site developer thought was a troublesome browser to design for. Seems a little over kill. If you truly believe IE users just sit around and drool, I guess you could just put some javascript on your site that detects a person's browser and redirects them to the Epic Meal Time channel or Rick Roll them.

BlueCamroo's Social Network Scout provides a number of ways to monitor your online reputation. Searches under Social Network Scout Buzz and Support channels can keep you on top of bad PR wafting its way through Twitter and Facebook. Unfortunately, even Social Network Scout can't (yet) provide the kid gloves needed to handle these types of situations. What do you do?

ShootCutGo.Com was kind enough to provide us this video.

Team BlueCamroo was in Manchester, UK May 4 and May 5 for the Business North West show. The annual Business North West show puts trade show exhibitors in contact with thousands of extremely high quality small- and medium-sized business owners and key buyers at those companies.

Are you in the Manchester, UK area? Will you be in the Manchester, UK area May 4-5? Well, so is Team BlueCamroo! We'll be exhibiting at the Business North West show. We'll be in booth 118.

Until recently the paradigm has been computing resources are scarce (hence costly): CPU time, storage space, Internet bandwidth. The reality is these old bottlenecks are now cheap and in abundance. Consider Yahoo's free email service gives users unlimited storage space. Hotmail and Gmail similarly offer very large amounts of free storage. What is truly scarce (and costly) is human labor. What is more costly: having senior staff spend time cleaning out their Outlook inboxes to reclaim hard drive space or simply spending $100 once every few years to add a terabyte of additional storage? Software as a Service (SaaS) offers companies, particularly small- and medium-sized enterprises, the ability to leverage the modern abundance of computer resources to lower labor costs.

Email marketing. What was once considered the worst offense on the Internet back in the 1990s has emerged as a basic tool for business to client communication. What changed?

Going viral. It's the holy grail for anyone putting content on the web. Viral marketing has been around since the days when the Internet was primarily just an email system. People would email "make money fast" Ponzi schemes. I doubt anyone made money. I don't see many of these in email anymore. It's probably not because people have figured out pyramid schemes are doomed to fail. It's more likely email spam filters are really good at catching these things.

What obscure domains of knowledge does your company master? Ask yourself how can you package it for a lay person? You don't have to do a full blown YouTube channel but you could easily do a blog, setup a Facebook fan page, or even tweet. And don't underestimate the lay person's fascination with obscure areas of knowledge. Haven't you ever wondered what a day at Microsoft or a GM truck plant is like?

Team BlueCamroo is back from the Business Startup trade show in London, UK. The Business Startup (Nov 30-Dec 1, 2010) trade show is a massive two day event that helps fledgling entrepreneurs connect with exhibitors that can help people get their business off the ground and keep them in the air during the first few critical years. Exhibitors ranged from Bic (as in the pen manufacturer) to Albright Patents (a Patent and Trade Mark law firm). And of course, BlueCamroo had a great corner booth.

There's the old aphorism that a person can live 40 days without food, 3 days without water, but not even a second without hope. In the business world opportunities are a business's "hope". A business lives or dies by the generation of opportunities and carrying them through into signed contracts. One of the benefits of CRM is the ability to see, at any given moment, what's in your opportunity pipeline, where various opportunities are at, and make sales projections. BlueCamroo can help you quickly visualize your sales pipeline using primarily the Reports feature. But before you start to make effective use out of reports, you need to make sure you're setting up your Opportunities correctly.

Think of social media like web addresses back in the mid-1990s. Even companies like McDonald's couldn't really understand why they wanted to register a web address. At a minimum, lock up your company or personal name before someone else does. Just as you began to find new ways to incorporate the Internet itself into business, you will slowly begin to find ways to incorporate your social media sites into your business.

There’s a great piece of business advice in 37Signals’ “Getting Real”. It advises having an enemy...

As BP struggles to contain the oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, and businesses and communities across a swathe of coastline brace themselves for the economic and environmental impacts of oil washing ashore, President Obama told NBC last week that he wants "to know whose ass to kick".

When you think about it, not much has changed in the way that project management, collaboration and task management software works.