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Twitter Writing Tips

Writing on Twitter is by necessity an exercise in brevity, and it may surprise you to find out that B2B marketing can actually be quite effective even when you can use a maximum of only 120 characters.

Here is an important tip: just stick to the facts. Long titles may be SEO friendly, but more than likely they will just get lost on Twitter, where they simply do not work. Titles need to be short, to the point and appealing.

On Twitter it is not a bad thing to be familiar; messages with a famous quote, a hit song or a piece of pop culture often resonate.

Tweets that carry with them some kind of positive connotation will give your message extra impact.

This does not mean, however, that you can just copy text outright, so exercise some discretion.

Being timely is also important on Twitter. You are writing for a real-time audience, and any message needs to be in tandem with the current interests of your followers. Remember, he who hesitates on Twitter is truly lost.

Plan Your Workday’s Start For Maximum Efficiency

Your first few minutes at work can set the tone for the entire day, so don’t waste them. Here are some tips for launching a productive day from the very start:

• Arrive on time. Nothing throws you off your game like having to catch up with everyone else. Get the rest you need, and give yourself plenty of time to show up when you need to be there.

• Settle in smoothly. Don’t take too much time for this. Spend just a few minutes reviewing your to-do list (updated the night before!) and checking in with your boss and employees. Plan your day, but be ready for interruptions as they arise.

• Check messages—briefly. Don’t bother answering every email and phone message you’ve received since yesterday. Review them quickly, deal with any that require immediate attention, and then move on.
• Think. Your brain is fresh in the morning, so use it to make plans. Review your long-term goals as well as your most urgent tasks for the day, and spend a little time analyzing your priorities so you can put your energy where it will do the most good.

• Choose your most important task first. This may be the task you least want to do, but putting it off will only distract you and drain your energy. Look over your to-do list and pick the job that will have the biggest impact, and take it on while you’ve got maximum energy and the fewest interruptions.

• Plan a break. Don’t push yourself to stay at peak energy all day. Schedule a quick break at some point in the morning so you can double-check your priorities, revise your plans, and get a little rest to prepare for the rest of the day. Enjoy a “brain snack” such as trail mix, peanut butter and toast, or hummus and vegetables.

Easy Tips To Secure Windows 8 Devices

With cybercrime on the rise, even the brand-new Windows 8 can leave a person vulnerable – which means it is important to know how to protect your devices from the moment you get them.

The good news is that this is not difficult if you follow a few simple tips.

You should commit to security from the very beginning; password-protect your new device immediately, connect to a Wi-Fi network you know is secure and register your device.

A number of companies such as NortonLive PC Quick Start will enable you to get your brand-new device up and running, easily and safely.

It is also important to be careful when choosing apps. All apps are allowed a certain level of access to private information, but some may use this in a malicious manner.

Make sure you read the user agreement to prevent giving the manufacturer rights you aren’t comfortable with, such as letting it into your social network and accessing a friend list. All your apps, email, bank accounts and social networks should be protected with complex passwords that you do not share with anyone.

Avoid Vexing Your Boss With These Workplace Fouls

You don’t have to be a toady to get ahead at work, but staying on your boss’s good side is a positive strategy. Smart employees do their best to steer clear of these management pet peeves:

• Tardiness/excessive absenteeism. Managers can’t make plans if they don’t know when—or if—you’re going to show up for work. Do your best to be on time and stay healthy.

• Procrastination. Don’t waste time. Managers depend on you to get timely results, not make excuses for lateness. If you run into a problem, tell your manager right away so he or she can plan accordingly.

• Drama. This can include gossip, turf battles, and constant sniping between employees. Stay focused on getting your job done in a professional manner no matter what personal issues might intrude.

• Dishonesty. If a manager can’t trust you to tell the truth, your whole working relationship is likely to crash and burn. Tell your boss what’s going on, even if it’s bad news. A good manager will appreciate your truthfulness.

• Insubordination. Few managers will tolerate an employee who openly challenges him or her for very long. Learn the difference between raising issues and making trouble. Even when you disagree with your manager, do it with tact.

• Negativity. An employee who’s constantly complaining, or always pointing out the down side of every decision, isn’t helping his or her boss. You don’t have to put on a Pollyanna act, but do your best to be positive about what’s happening in your workplace to show your boss that you’re a team player and that you can get along well with coworkers.

Business To Business Sales: Listening Is Key

One of the best pieces of advice when it comes to the world of B2B is for salespeople to actually listen to their customers.

At present, this is not always the case. But clients and customers really want you to listen to them and gain a real understanding of their needs, situation and requirements, and it is your job to do that by listening actively to what they have to say.

Many B2B salespeople have a particular behavioral style or may even have been trained to focus on presentation and talking.

Unfortunately, sometimes this style actually prevents them from listening to what their customers are really trying to tell them.

Listening as a sales skill is taken for granted far too often. Some people may even believe they have a natural gift for it – a perspective that can mean they put very little effort or time into learning how to listen properly.

While it is important to listen to the customer first, when it comes time for your pitch, engaging the customer with your storytelling skills is one of the most crucial tools in a salesperson’s skill set.

Being able to capture the imagination of your customers and to engross them in your tale can very quickly give you an enormous competitive edge over your rivals.

It’s Time To Get Your Business Ready For 2013!

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

Thankfully, black Friday and cyber Monday are over. As we settle in for the rest of the holiday rush and start looking toward 2013, it can be easy to get overwhelmed and miss out on some important, year-end activities.

Here are a few reminders to help you stay on top of your IT needs and systems in the new year.

Set Goals
Now is the time to get your team together and set achievable goals for 2013. Discuss issues and successes that happened in the last year and how you are going to use this information to make things run smoother in the coming year.

It makes sense to have your IT consultant participate in these meetings – we have insight into what’s coming up in the networking, cloud and server spaces, as well as practical expertise on getting the most from your IT investment.

Promote open communication so your team members can voice their ideas, concerns, suggestions, and feedback. This way, everyone will be part of the goal-setting process and know their responsibilities for the year ahead.

Update your website
Is your site ready for the New Year? This means that you need to update the copyright dates to 2013 on the appropriate content, install current updates to your software applications, check terms and privacy conditions, and more.

These are little things that are easy to forget, but they can mean a huge difference in the message you send to customers and advertisers. Plus, they can help protect your legal rights too.

Communicate
As the business owner, it’s important to keep your entire organization aware of upcoming plans and changes.

Inform all staff members what is going on with technology, your plans for the upcoming year and what they can do to help.

Keeping everyone in the loop avoids unnecessary issues from escalating into major problems. Share information to improve processes and increase working relationships throughout the entire organization.

Are you ready for 2013?
It’s a busy time of year for everyone, but don’t let that get in the way of your IT and business planning for 2013.

Set achievable goals with your team, and review all of the key issues from the past year. Make updates to your Website so that you protect your information legally and present current messaging to your customers.

And be sure to communicate your plans with everyone in your organization. This way, you’ll save time and money, as well as avoid confusion. Starting the year with a firm plan will put your business on the road to success in 2013.

What Your Company Can Do To Cook Up New Ideas

Most companies recognize that innovation and creativity are vital to their survival, but they don’t know how to plan projects that will bring the quantum leaps they’re looking for.

Design specialist Heather M. A. Fraser, in her book Design Works (Rotman-UTP Publishing), describes three essentials every business needs to generate productive innovation:

Empathy
To create products or improve services, you need to understand what your customers (or even your employees) want.

They won’t always tell you; sometimes they don’t know themselves. That means you’ve got to develop your knowledge from the inside out.

Learn everything you can about their business needs, their personal goals, their failures, and their successes, regardless of whether any of those data seem to apply to your areas of expertise at first.

What you collect can lead your organization’s imagination in unexpected directions. Before the introduction of the iPod, for example, few people realized they wanted “a thousand songs in their pocket.”

Visualization
Take what you’ve learned and add it to what your organization can do.

Brainstorm as many ideas as you can, in practical terms but without limiting yourself to what’s easy or what you’ve done before. Combine ideas and concepts that don’t obviously go together, and look for ways to maximize your strengths—always with an eye on what your customers really want.

Strategy
This is where innovation can bog down unless you’re careful to select ideas that fit with your overall business objectives and strategy. Some companies pursue too many promising ideas at once, never perfecting any of them. Others design a great new product that doesn’t apply to their market and that they don’t know how to sell.

Be creative, but be rigorous in your analysis of what the market needs and what you’re capable of delivering. Then get to work.

Healthy Aging Tips From WebMD

A recent poll of centenarians, grouped with people who are over 65, conducted by WebMD found that there were a number of tips that they believed were very important to aging in a healthy manner and maintaining a youthful outlook on life.

One of those tips is to maintain strong relationships with family and friends, and another is to keep learning new things throughout your life and ensure that your mind stays active in the process.

Centenarians also believe that it is important to maintain a sense of humor and laugh a lot as well as to look forward to each and every new day with a sense of optimism and purpose.

Exercising, keeping moving and staying active were also viewed as vital, as were making healthy nutritional choices in terms of food consumption, keeping up with the latest news and current events, and maintaining a sense of independence.

Choosing A New Printer For Your Office

By Tech Experts Staff
When it comes to the type of printer you use for your everyday printing needs the choice seems pretty simple doesn’t it? That may not be the case at all…

With hundreds of different printers, brands, etc. the task of finding the right kind of printer that will suit your company’s needs can be more difficult than expected.

So what should be taken into consideration when looking to buy a new printer?

Some important points to consider: Size, cost, cost to maintain, type of ink, functionality needed, and finally speed.

While most everyone can agree with the statement “you get what you pay for” that tends to hold true with printers as well.

The problem with using this sentiment as your sole deciding factor when it comes to the type of printer you need is that you can end up with a printer that is WAY too big for your company and your needs.

Many different manufacturers make copy machines that are very large. For most small businesses, a large copier is overkill.

A nice Multi-Function printer will work just fine, and save you quite a bit.

So the second thing to consider is cost. Buying a printer that doesn’t cost much generally means it’s made of inferior parts and will wear out sooner than one that would have cost a bit more money.

Cost largely determines the feature set available on a printer. Take for instance Ink Jet printers versus Laser Jet printers. Ink Jet printers are much cheaper but tend to wear out long before a Laser printer would.

While considering the cost of the printer itself it would be good to consider the cost of the cartridge as well as other maintenance items.

Some higher end printers have the ability to have maintenance kits installed; the benefit to this is that these printers tend to be able to outperform cheaper printers.

Being able to replace easily worn parts keeps a printer running well for a number of years.

What type of cartridge is best or most cost effective?

This really comes down to what the printer will be used for.

For general home users using an Ink Jet printer may be fine, and cartridges for these types of printers are much cheaper as well.

If the printer is for a business or someone that does a lot of printing, then a printer that takes toner cartridges would be a better choice.Printer functionality is a huge point to consider.

What is needed by the device? Does it just need to be able to print black and white images or are color images necessary as well? Does the printer need to be able to receive faxes? Make copies?

All are valid, important questions when considering the type of printer needed.

The final point to consider is speed. If a company needs a large amount of documents printed at one time by many different users it would be a good idea to consider a printer with a high PPM (pages per minute) rate.

Still confused what would suit your needs? Give us a call and we can get you a quote on a printer that works well for your business.

Writing Compelling Online And Offline Marketing Content

Working in the world of B2B communications there are a lot of rules and regulations to follow, and it is often all very serious indeed, but that doesn’t mean that all your communications have to be boring.

There are a few guidelines to remember that can give potential customers important information without putting them to sleep in the process.

The first tip is to keep the message as brief as possible and just get to the point. A short, powerful idea that has been cleverly packaged will always be better than an inordinate amount of waffle.

The more efficient you can make the message, the more likely it is to be read and to have the effect you want it to have. It is also important to make your content valuable and one of a kind.

While your topic of choice may have already been the subject of countless articles, you need to provide a different angle that will make yours stand out from the crowd and draw in consumers.

Avoid Four-Letter Words
There are some four-letter words that have no place when it comes to the world of B2B – and we’re not talking about profanity.

These are simple everyday words that the really clever stopped making use of a long time ago. Some of the most offensive?

The likes of “can’t” and “busy” as used in sentences such as “We can’t do that” or “I’ll call you back when I’m not as busy.”
Customers come to your business because they believe that you will be able to give them what they are asking for.

Even if you genuinely cannot give them that, you should always try to send them to someone who can, as they will remember your helpful behavior.

Likewise, under no circumstances should you tell a customer you’re too busy to deal with them.

No client wants to feel that they are unimportant and unappreciated, and if you do that, chances are your client will find someone else who won’t make them feel that way.

How Much Content Is Enough?
One question faced by many B2B companies is when they have created enough content to be able to answer all the questions that a prospect might conceivably have at each and every stage of the buying cycle.

The question therefore is, how can a company go about determining that? It begins with understanding who their ideal buyers really are and the kinds of concerns and issues they will have.

Creating buyer personas can actually assist with this, as they are used quite commonly in order to create an ideal customer archetype based upon what you already know in regard to your current prospects and customer base.

You need to be able to get inside your buyers’ heads and have a solid understanding of what it is that makes them tick. To do this, talk to your customers and to the personnel at your company who regularly engage with them. It will be a lot easier to craft your message.