My older brother. After flying to the nearest village, he had two choices for climbing to the Pucketts' mountain home: foot or pack animal. He chose the horse, of course.
How many children do you know whose field trips include flying in a Cessna 180? This was one of the many rich experiences that missionary pilot Larry Puckett brought to our family when we were fellow missionaries in Mexico. Larry’s wife, Doris, recently published an account of the Puckett’s adventures in the mountains of Mexico: “In The Hollow of His Hand.”
www.puckettbook.com
To help Doris market her new book, I put together a simple Web site: www.puckettbook.com. It includes all the pictures from the book (only bigger, sharper, and in color). It also provides an easy link to Amazon.com, where the book can be purchased. Take a look at some of the excerpts from the book (click here). I think you’ll get a feel for why I wanted to help my old friends tell their fascinating story. While you’re at it, go to Amazon and buy a copy for yourself!
Incidentally, I built this Web site with relative ease using the blogging platform, WordPress. I took one of the many free “themes” and adapted its templates and styles to appropriately present Doris’ book. Since it is built on a blogging platform, Doris is able to log in to the site and make additions and corrections with nothing more than a Web browser.
The client’s new Web site was due to launch the next morning…but it just wasn’t working right. It was already 2 am and I was too tired to think straight….
A few months before I had written a recommendation on this blog for using Crossloop (click here to see that entry, and the introductory video). I have used this screen sharing program many times to help friends and family with computer problems. In the intervening months, a new service had grown up around Crossloop. A large network of individuals now offer tech support for hire using Crossloop. So, at 2 am, I went to the Crossloop site and found an individual who could help me with the Web site program that was giving me fits. He charged $40 per hour. That was more than most of the helpers, but I chose him because he had an excellent track record. I don’t even know where he lives. He’s either a night owl, or he lives in another time zone! At 2 am, he began sharing my screen remotely, trying to fix my problem.
For close to an hour, I watched as the assistant controlled my computer. He went through many of the diagnostics and steps that I had already attempted. That was comforting, but seemed futile. Finally, he asked me to restart my computer. He had just made a change that cleared up the problem! I gladly paid my $40 and shut down for the night. When my client opened her Internet browser the next morning, there was her shiny new Web site, just as I had promised!
If you are having computer problems, but are still able to connect to the Internet, you may want to give the helpers at Crossloop a try. It could sure beat hauling your computer down to the shop for some techie of unknown skills to tinker with it for several days!
When my boss in Dallas, Texas decided to take advantage of an alternative cancer treatment in Guatemala, I got to go down with him on his first visit. My two jobs were to translate and to set up his remote office. While the Guatemalans may still be laughing at my Spanish, I think they’d be impressed with the remote office — I sure was. We had a great team back home helping to plan and implement the setup and helpful hosts in Guatemala.
Essential Ingredient: High-Speed Internet
The apartment/office in Guatemala receives Internet service from the wireless router in the apartment owners’ home. Before going down, we had them bump their service up from 512kbps to 1Mbps. Tests revealed that it was indeed operating at 880kbps–not blazingly fast, but adequate for our purposes.
The Equipment
Most of the equipment for the office can be seen in this photo:
Setting up a remote office
A Dell laptop (several years old) with Windows XP Pro.
Kinks and Solutions
Our first kink was getting the equipment into the country. At the Guatemala airport, the customs agents informed us that we’d have to pay import taxes on the scanner and printer. Since we did not have the sales receipts for this new equipment, an agent looked them up on the Internet and assigned a purchase price to them. I kept wishing he’d look them up at my favorite supplier: Newegg!
We had the laptop’s Outlook Express configured with IMAP, so that my boss’s email in Guatemala would mirror the email on his office computer back home. That worked well. But we assumed I’d be able to use the apartment owners’ SMTP settings for outgoing email. On arriving in Guatemala, I discovered that they were using an Exchange Server. When we checked with their ISP (Turbonett), we learned that they had not provided an SMTP server in Guatemala for the past four months! I guessed that most customers must be using a Webmail solution, like Gmail. Therein lay our solution. I set up a Gmail account for my boss and set his Thunderbird email account to use Gmail’s SMTP server for its outgoing email.
The next kink was in our use of Vonage. Our original plan was to connect the Vonage base unit directly to the host family’s router. The Vonage package came with three wireless phone handsets which could be placed down in the office. Unfortunately, the signal from the base unit in the hosts’ home out to the office was weak. My boss often had to step out of the office and stand in the yard for clear phone reception. Now, the yard is beautiful, but this was pretty inconvenient, especially since it was the rainy season! Here’s how we solved this little problem: The laptop was receiving a strong wireless signal, thanks to the Radiolabs Wave RVII wireless receiver. This was impressive. Because of the layout of the apartment, the wireless signal was traveling 120 feet and passing through three to five steel-reinforced concrete block walls. I asked our IT specialist if there was some way for the Vonage base unit to be connected to the laptop instead of to the router. YES! He connected to the laptop remotely with Crossloop and configured the laptop to share its Internet connection via the unused Ethernet port. Unfortunately the Vonage base unit could only connect properly with a crossover cable, which I could not locate in Guatemala City. So the Dallas office had to “overnight” the cable down to me in Guatemala. Once that crossover cable was installed, the Vonage phone worked perfectly in the remote office.
No Fax? No Problem
One piece of equipment was a real standout: the Fujitsu SnapScan S300. My boss sends and receives faxes all day long. We had considered taking a compact fax machine, but settled on this little device instead. It has worked so well that it will soon take its place in my boss’s main office here in Dallas. He places an original in the feed slot, presses enter, and just a few seconds later there is a clean scan converted to a PDF and attached to an email ready to be sent. Like I said above, this little unit stole the show. You can view one of the official videos at the Fujitsu site, or see this video from Notebooks.com:
That’s the outgoing part of the fax replacement. How about incoming faxes? For this, we set up a routine in the Dallas office’s phone system (IP Office) where faxes sent to a special phone number are automatically converted to PDFs and emailed to my boss. Very clean solution…. This alternative to faxing is also potentially “green” if/when the PDFs can be read off the computer screen and not printed.
When a customer’s new BMW crashed into his flooring showroom, Ira Kirkley did the smart thing: he titled the security camera footage “Customers Can’t Wait to Buy” and sent it off to local television stations. The news departments couldn’t resist, and soon “Big Bob’s Flooring – #1 Flooring Retailer in DFW” was getting free publicity.
But Ira didn’t stop there. He posted the video on his Facebook account for all his friends to view. That’s where I saw it. And you know what? Seeing that 3-second video reminded me that my friend–whom I trust–is the Director of Operations for a flooring store. Guess where I’ll be shopping next time I need flooring? And guess which store I’ll recommend to others?
This is a simple–if uncommon–illustration of how social networking can aid in advertising. People who know you and trust you can be your best advertisers. You just have to remind them that you’re out there ready to serve them!
I recently talked with Rob Brown of RDB Consulting, Inc. about social networking tools. We talked about Facebook, Plaxo, and LinkedIn. Rob offered to write the following guest article explaining why he is investing time and effort in his LinkedIn account:
I’ve just started using LinkedIn as a prospecting tool for my small business. While it’s too early yet to make a definitive statement, I have to say that I’m very impressed by its power and scope. Let me go out farther on a limb and say that I think this application could be a game-changer in terms of how people network and search for new clients or jobs.
While like everyone else I’ve been deluged with all of the hype about Web 2.0 and social networking, the light did not come on for me until I started using LinkedIn. LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) bills itself as the social networking tool for professionals. After years of steadily growing its users and maturing as an application, it has reached its “tipping point” in the last year or so. By that I mean that the number of business users registered has reached the level that it has become a powerful business networking tool. It now has eclipsed its rivals and become ubiquitous in the business community. It is now rare to meet a business associate who does not have a LinkedIn profile.
What LinkedIn Is
Ok, so just what is LinkedIn? Here is a good definition from Wikipedia: “LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003 mainly used for professional networking. As of February 2009, it had more than 35 million registered users, spanning 170 industries.”
Wow! That is a lot of users and a lot of different industries.
LinkedIn is similar to other social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace in that it is a huge site that allows registered users to maintain a list of contacts and to build their network of contacts. The key difference is that your LinkedIn contacts, called connections, are business associates that you know and trust.
How LinkedIn Works
Expanding your network of business connections is the key concept of LinkedIn. Everyone on your network is not only connected to you but to others, who in turn are connected to others, and so on. As you can imagine, the number of people you can potentially connect to grows exponentially at each level (levels are called degrees in LinkedIn).
For example, if I pull the network statistics for my own account, this is what I come up with. My account has 142 direct first-degree connections (people I know personally). When you add up all the network connections that each of these 142 people have, I have the potential to reach 51,100 second-degree connections. (Second degree connections are made up of people who know at least one of my first-degree connections.) If I go one step further and add in the third-degree members (people who know at least one of my second-degree network members) I could potentially have access to more than 4 million members!
Of course, these gigantic numbers represent only potential contacts, but they give an indication of how you can use LinkedIn to greatly expand the scope of your client prospecting efforts.
Powerful Search Engine
LinkedIn also has a very powerful search engine. You can search by name, company, industry, job title, and geographical location. For example, you could search for all the LinkedIn members with the job title of purchasing agent working for IT companies in Dallas, Texas. Once the list is returned, you can quickly scan the list to see which companies the members work for, and whether you have any first-, second-, or third-degree connections with any of these members. Even if you find a contact with whom you would like to be introduced but for whom you do not have any connection, you can do a second search on the company and find out if you are connected to any other employees in that company, who could then possibly introduce you to the person you are seeking.
This process is infinitely more efficient than calling each of your contacts individually and asking them if they know of someone in a particular company or industry to whom they could introduce you. It’s power networking taken to another level!
No More Cold Calling
If you are like me, you hate cold calling with every fiber of your being. LinkedIn eliminates almost all cold calling because in order to contact someone, you must first be introduced by a mutually trusted connection, so that when you do call the person, it is a warm call—the person already knows who you are and the intention of your call. Of course, not everyone will accept your request for an introduction, so your efforts will occasionally result in rejection, but since you are being introduced by a mutual associate, this should occur much less frequently. Anyway, how you would you prefer to be turned down? Over the phone by a stranger telling you in no uncertain terms never to call him or her again, or via a polite email from the LinkedIn system?
LinkedIn’s Ethos
A final note about introductions and connections—the underlying ethos of LinkedIn is that your set of connections should only be comprised of people you know and trust. This way, when you seek an introduction to a new connection, that new connection should know and trust the person introducing you, and can probably assume that you are a trustworthy person yourself. If you start accepting invitations from persons you do not know well, your own and others’ networks will be compromised and the effectiveness of LinkedIn will degrade. In these difficult economic times it is tempting to try and build your network as rapidly as possible, but in order to preserve the integrity of LinkedIn, try to be politely circumspect regarding whom you include in your network. That way, when someone asks you to introduce them to another in your network, you are certain that you are introducing two trustworthy business professionals.
Getting Started
Don’t feel bad if at first you feel a little intimidated getting started with LinkedIn. Start by building your personal profile (tip: including a head shot photo helps people quickly recall who you are when viewing your profile). Feel free to visit my LinkedIn profile for ideas: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rdbconsulting. Feedback is also welcome.
When I started using LinkedIn, I did not find the LinkedIn documentation or online tutorials very helpful. After struggling for a bit, I finally went to Amazon.com and ordered “LinkedIn for Dummies” by Joe Elad, which I have found to be very useful in explaining the “whys” in addition to the “hows.” My friends tell me that another good book is “I’m on LinkedIn–Now What???” by Jason Alba, also available from Amazon.com or other booksellers.
After you’ve set up your profile, start importing your contacts. LinkedIn has several plug-in tools for this. I used the one for my Outlook list of contacts. It quickly identified which were LinkedIn members and added them to my list of connections. LinkedIn has similar plug-ins for other popular electronic address books. If you do not have your contacts stored electronically, you can use LinkedIn’s search feature to search for each of your contacts and determine if she or he is a LinkedIn member. If so, send him or her a request in LinkedIn to become connected. You can quickly build your network this way.
Once you’re up and running in LinkedIn, you’ll soon be on your way to increasing your marketing scope and penetration. Best of all, you can reduce or even eliminate the amount of time you spend cold-calling. No more cold calls. Life is good.
About Rob Brown
Rob founded RDB Consulting, Inc. in 2001 to focus on information design for technology startups. Several years as a journalist honed his reporting and writing skills and led to a successful career in training and communications for high-tech and engineering companies. Prior to founding RDB Consulting, Inc., Robert was an Accenture Consultant in their Change Management practice. He has also held positions with Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART), the US Department of Energy Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory, and Texas Instruments.
Since placing high in Google searches is very important to some of my clients, I have been researching an increasingly popular tactic: using YouTube videos. So far, I am encouraged by how easy it is to post videos. Registering at YouTube just takes a couple of minutes, and their interface for uploading is straightforward.
My only hitch in posting the video embedded below had to do with maintaining aspect ratio. I produced the video using Windows Movie Maker with sound track manipulation in Audacity. It was done in 4:3 aspect ratio. That’s the ratio of older TVs. Following some bad instructions at an otherwise helpful site, I ended up with a YouTube video that was stretched horizontally. I had to delete it and follow YouTube’s own instructions more carefully. When all else fails, follow directions!
A Christmas gift from a trillionaire would probably be nice. It might cost more than you or I will make in a lifetime. But it could not be any nicer than the gift my father recently received from two young friends.
When my mother passed away three years ago, Dad lost his chief source of beauty and charm. He had known Billie Jean McKenzie (Mom’s maiden name) since they were in the same Junior High Spanish class. Billie Jean pointed at the young John Hepp and told a classmate, “I’m going to marry that boy!” And so she did. The daughter of a seamstress and a gardener, Billie Jean filled Dad’s home with beautiful things that she grew or made with her own hands.
Since Mom’s death, I have been impressed with the way God has comforted Dad, filling much of the void in his life with beautiful, charming friends. Two of those are Hannah (11) and her sister Gracie (8). Recently, their mother told Dad that they were learning how to sew. Dad gave them some boxes of cloth that Mom had collected. Surely these remnants would come in handy as the girls practiced stitching….
Back home, as Hannah and Gracie dug through the various samples of cloth, they made a discovery. Some of the samples had already been stitched together as squares for a quilt. Recognizing what they had, the two girls, their Mom, and their sewing instructor worked hard to finish what Billie Jean had begun. When it was finally ready, the young friends invited Dad over to their house for hot chocolate … and to present him with a cozy Christmas quilt.
How many trillionaires–or even millionaires–do you know who could have come up with such a wonderful Christmas gift? I only know of One.
Have you ever had computer problems that resulted in your having to re-install the operating system and all the programs that you need? If you’re like me, that process can take a full day or more. And it isn’t fun! Here is what I do on my Windows XP machines to avoid this nightmare:
Step One: I back up all my data on a daily basis and store my backups in a remote location.
Step Two: I periodically use DriveImage XML to create an “image” (clone or copy) of the drive that contains the operating system and programs.
I’ll describe Step One in another post. There are various ways to do that part of backup, including the way I’ll describe (SyncToy backups from my DATA drive to external USB drives) and some on-line backup solutions (like Carbonite). Step Two consists of
Recent Example:
Backed up C: Drive of my father’s computer. Operating System, Programs, and Data are all on this drive, about 23 Gigabytes.
Total time: 54 minutes, including 2 minutes to download DriveImage XML, install it and start unattended backup running.
Size of backup: 23 Gigabytes in 33 CD-sized chunks.
downloading and installing the free software DriveImage XML Get it at www.runtime.org As of this writing, download “DriveImage XML (Private Edition) V2.02″ (this is like Norton Ghost, only free and maybe better!)
Installing the software on your C: drive
Using DriveImage XML to back up your C: drive (the operating system and programs) to another drive (internal or external). The backup can be stored on an external drive or CDs, which should be kept in a separate location. I prefer to store backups on an external USB drive, because I can place them inside an encrypted volume (more about that some other time).
The recovery stage is where the magic happens. Say your C: drive goes bad… You can restore the “image” to a replacement hard drive and be back up in operation in a matter of minutes. There are a few things you’ll have to learn about at that stage, but–trust me–they are minor, and you’ll be glad you have that image to work with!
Here is a video from the people who created DriveImage XML:
Geiger Associates Inc. recently updated their Web site to reflect new corporate communications services. Owner Don Geiger is a wordsmith whose writing doesn’t really need accompanying images. Nevertheless, to dress up his Web site a little, we chose some stock images that related to his areas of service. One of the images did not work as well as we had wished, so we tried something else…
I photographed one of the antique typewriters (dust and all!) in a friend’s collection. Go to Don’s new site and see how this worked out. Let me know what you think!
Have you ever tried getting–or giving–computer help over the phone? Frustrating, isn’t it! You spend half your time describing where things are on your screen or trying to visualize the other person’s screen. Lately I have been encouraging my friends and clients to download a simple little program that solves this problem by actually allowing you and your helper–or the person you’re helping–to share the view of a computer screen right over the Internet. It takes a fast Internet connection and is easiest if you can talk over the phone at the same time (I use a headset for this purpose). The product is Crossloop. Read about it and download it from www.crossloop.com. You may gain some confidence by watching the video I have embedded here. When you want to give it a try, contact me, and–if I have time–I’ll help you try it out.
The client’s new Web site was due to launch the next morning…but it just wasn’t working right. It was already 2 am and I was too tired to think straight….
