When to switch off technology

Have no time to invest in what your business or organization needs the most? This post is part of a productivity series aimed at helping you optimize your time management.

Skype chats, email notifications, Twitter and Facebook apps, etc. are all extremely useful tools, but they can significantly reduce your productivity if used at the wrong time or for the wrong tasks. Continue reading “When to switch off technology”

Remote Work Advantages

Have no money to invest in what your business or organization needs the most? This post is part of a productivity series aimed at helping you optimize your budget management.

It’s true that there are still some jobs that can’t be done remotely using the web or telecommunication systems; however, many jobs can and are being done in that way thanks to these useful technologies available to most companies.

Accounting, project management, marketing, PR, programming, design, web and mobile development, etc., are just some of the jobs that – depending on the nature of a project – can be done remotely. Continue reading “Remote Work Advantages”

Productivity and Growth Always Come First?

Image Credit: Gapingvoid

We are recklessly working with complete disregard for our mental, physical and social health.

This “always connected” digital age is only part of the problem that is almost turning us into slaves of the system we are living in. In my opinion, there is something fundamental that we shouldn’t forget at a much deeper and human level.
Continue reading “Productivity and Growth Always Come First?”

What is time to you?

Have no time to invest in what your business or organization needs the most? This post is part of a productivity series aimed at helping you optimize your time management.

Ask yourself this question: What is time to you?

When I ask this question to my clients, I always get a different and interesting answer. For some, time is just minutes, hours and days, while for others it’s something you sell or an “investment” for the future. Continue reading “What is time to you?”

How to avoid “No Strings Attached Budgets”

Have no money to invest in what your business or organization needs the most? This post is part of a productivity series aimed at helping you optimize your budget management.

If you want to save on a budget, you should have a very detailed budget first.

This may seem obvious, but surprisingly many companies don’t have a complete budget written down. Oftentimes, they just have certain budgets, but many of their expenses are typically left floating free without being thoughtfully tied to an actual plan. These sums of money are what I define as “No Strings Attached Budgets”. Continue reading “How to avoid “No Strings Attached Budgets””

How to Upload Files and Folders to Google Docs

Upload folders to Google Docs

Here’s how you can upload, not just files, but an entire folder from your computer to the cloud using Google Docs.

I can’t tell you how happy I am about this new feature! I’ve been waiting ages for this. It’s handy to upload data to the cloud but when you deal with a huge number of files you need a way to transfer offline archives to the cloud without then spending extra time in reordering everything once everything is online. This new Google Docs feature solves the problem.

Google Docs is an essential tool that I use on a daily basis with my team and clients. If you are not familiar with Google Docs I encourage you to have a look at it, I’m sure it will come in handy.

Andrea

Communications Report for December 6th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

Communications Report for December 6th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

[Communications Report] for September 17th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

  • Seven ways social nets like Facebook and LinkedIn are ‘truly evil’ – Something to keep in mind…
  • How to Unleash Your Human Potential | Fast Company – Allow your workers to experiment, and make their goal to please the customer–not the boss.
  • The Science of Retweets on Twitter – One of the most actively discussed aspects of Twitter is the art and science of retweets. Retweets, in my opinion, are one of the most sincere forms of recognition and validation, empowering users to pay it forward through the recognition of noteworthy content
  • American Express launches interactive campaign with Mark Ronson – The interactive campaign will be hosted at www.channel4.com/mylivestory, and will encourage consumers to celebrate their most memorable live music moments by submitting photos or videos of their favourite gig online.
  • Crowdmap – Collect news, aggregate and visualize on a map. Crowdmap is designed and built by the people behind Ushahidi, a platform that was originally built to crowdsource crisis information. As the platform has evolved, so have its uses. Crowdmap allows you to set up your own deployment of Ushahidi without having to install it on your own web server.
  • Developer Release – This is now a community project and development is open to anyone with the technical expertise who shares the vision of a social network that puts users in control.
  • Don’t Think of It As Piracy, Think of It As Marketing – Most video-game developers — along with most musicians, writers, movie producers and virtually every other kind of content creator — see digital piracy as an enemy to be fought with every weapon at their disposal. Not Markus Persson. While the Swedish developer of the indie game Minecraft says he isn’t happy about people copying his game illegally, he sees it as a necessary part of doing business in a digital world
  • Facebook Creates Multiple Account Dashboard for Advertisers – As Facebook becomes more of a force in the online advertising space, it has to also step up to the plate with analytics and reporting.
  • “The Social Network” Interactive Trailer Is All Up in Your Facebook – Anticipation is rising for the October 1 debut of The Social Network, the film that explores the history of Facebook and how it was founded. With just two weeks left before its debut in theaters, the film is launching its interactive trailer, chock-full of Facebook-y goodness.
  • Google’s troubles recruiting and retaining | Econsultancy – Recruiting and retaining ‘the best and brightest’ is the goal of most companies, and that explains why, for most companies, doing so is a tough job.
  • The Colors of the Web’s Superbrands [INFOGRAPHIC] – What colors do the web’s most powerful brands use to distinguish themselves from others? The folks from COLOURlovers decided to find out…
  • Levi’s launches online fitting service for women – Brand Republic News – The new digital offering is based on the figures of 60,000 women worldwide, and is meant to be a step towards ending the frustrations in the “search for a perfect fit”, according to Levi’s.
  • Top 3 Reasons Traditional Marketing Will Fail – Traditional marketing methods and overall approach will undoubtedly fail in today’s communications climate.
  • Twittelp.com | Help in the blink of a tweet. – Twittelp is a mobile application that provides to its users a quick way to ask help on the twittersphere. Every of your follower will be able to see that you need them, moreover you can define up to 5 follower (suggest your best friends or familiar) that will be mentioned inside the help request. (Thanks to Giuliano Iacobelli)
  • BBC News – What your social network profile picture really says – Nina started a Facebook page for her experiment, gathering over 3,500 members, who shared their reasons for choosing their profile pictures…
  • The Desert of Community Building | Geoff Livingston’s Blog – It’s important not to deceive one’s self about the significant effort and time one will invest to build a community, and then continue to invest in order to sustain it. The Fifth Estate requires continued interactions…The time and human resource commitments are real and significant. Have the patience to see it through, from start to finish, and the deserts that lie between moments of great interaction. Knowing this from the start helps.
  • 5 Compelling Reasons to Readjust Your Information Diet, and How to Do It – “One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with.” Marshall McLuhan
  • The Implications of Consumers Spending More Time with Facebook Than Google | Forrester Blogs – The difference between the two companies is that Facebook has a unified offering that people find compelling, while Google has a collection of sites that people find very useful–Google search, Gmail, YouTube, Google News and the other Google destinations are largely separate consumer experiences. This is a problem, and the solution may be Google Me, the rumored and expected social offering from Google.
  • Q2 2010 State of Social Meda Sponsorships – Good stats.
  • Seven Important Social Media Trends For The Next Year – Social media changes from month to month. Trends come and go quicker than the seasons change. Having said that…it should be an exiting year ahead in social media and these should be seven of the main trends…
  • YouTube Starts Testing New Live Streaming Platform – YouTube has announced it will start a two-day trial of their new streaming platform, which enables broadcasters to stream live video directly into YouTube channels.
  • How Newspapers Should Embrace Social Media – Some of the opportunities for socialised news or newspapers.
  • 30 Awesome B2B Social Media Resources – Marketers are currently in a state of transition. As social media and online marketing are integrated with traditional marketing channels, marketing teams need to learn more about the nuts and bolts of B2B social media. This list is designed to help marketers fill in the gap as well as provide resources for those in all phases of the B2B social media adoption process.
  • TubeMogul: People Watch Facebook Videos Longer, And Click On More Ads – On average, people who click on a video from Facebook are more engaged. They tend to watch longer than viewers who arrive from other sources— 1:45 minutes per view versus !:32 for Google (Twitter users are almost the same with 1:44 minutes per view). Roughly 40 percent of Facebook video ads, give or take, are watched all the way through across different video ad types. On the Web in general, video ad completion rates hover around 25 percent.

[Communications Report] for June 28th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

  • 5 Tools to Track Twitter Trends – On any given day there are over 600 tweets per second on Twitter for a total of over 50 million tweets per day. With an overload of tweets daily it can be difficult to grasp what is really trending at any given moment. Use the tools below to quickly find current Twitter trends and trending conversations.
  • Social Media Measurement Should Focus on Outcomes, Not Output – It’s not about simply looking for opportunities to drop messaging into ordinary conversation, but about finding shared interests, shared benefits and shared rewards for others in the communities where your brand interacts.
  • 8 Steps to Creating a Brand Persona – In social networks, the brand and how it’s perceived, is open to public interpretation and potential misconception now more than ever. Without a deliberate separation between the brand voice and personality and that of the person representing it, we are instantly at odds with our goals, purpose, and potential stature.
  • Top 10 Clever Google Voice Tricks – The phone management app is great, but even cooler hacks exist just under the hood.
  • How I Use Gmail Multiple-Inboxes Lab Feature to Manage E-mail Overload – Useful productivity tips.
  • 15 more awesome social media infographics – Infographics that demonstrate a mixture of both hard data and strategy practices. Hopefully, they’ll also provide some inspiration or can be useful in helping you with presentations or pitches. As before, links to the actual graphics are in the headline titles.
  • 6 ways to find value in Twitter’s noise – A great example that shows how we can get insights from analyzing Twitter data.
  • Social Media is the 3rd Era of the Web [graph] – A search that compares the world wide search volume on Google for new media, web 2.0, and social media. What the graph shows is that we’re at an inflection point in the language we use to describe the macro trends of innovation on the web…it’s the indicator that we’re in the 3rd Era of the Web and it’s The Era of Social Media.
  • How The World Spends Its Time Online [infographic] – Millions of people across the world are constantly connected by the internet. Here’s a look at what everybody’s doing when they’re in front of their computer screen.
  • Is Social a Source for B2B Leads? – Terrific insights about B2B site visitors referred from social media.
  • Diesel Cam – Interactive installation at Diesel Stores in Spain, being the first store that allows users to share the moment of buying and trying garments on their Facebook profiles from the store. Consumers are able to make pictures, publish them and boast their new acquisitions with their Facebook friends.
  • The Fun Theory – A great Volkswagen initiative. #engagement
  • Teens and Their Mobile Phones / Flowtown – Have you ever wondered what teens were really using their mobile phones for? A recent study released by Pew Internet Research has shed light on average mobile
  • Public Media Joins Forces for One Big Platform – The country’s five silos of public radio and television are spilling into each other with a joint program that will allow them – and eventually the public itself — to build apps, stations, websites and other media services combining audio, text and video content from every public radio and television outlet in the country.