Time to put this blog to rest
Finding the time and inspiration to post regularly to one blog is difficult, trying to do that for four blogs much more so.
I am re-arranging my blogging activities, because I cannot keep up with finding content and time to write posts for all four. I also needed to create a new website for my Focused Prosperity business.
Here is what I have done:
This blog will remain online but I will not be posting any new content to it. I will gradually move some of the posts over to my new Social Media blog which is part of my business website Focused Prosperity.com . I will also be posting new content related to Social Media for small to medium size businesses on the new blog. When the domain registration comes up for renewal I will decide whether to keep it, resurrect it in another form or let it lapse.
My original blog Peter Wright’s Blog will continue with 4 or 5 posts a week on marketing, more general social media tips and ideas, life, health and the odd tilt at politically correct windmills.
The blog I started early last year for my fellow Baby Boomers will also continue to feature weekly posts on health, ways to generate income from home and a bit of humour.
Thank you for your support over the last 6 months, please visit my other 3 blogs, subscribe to which ever you enjoy and I will endeavour to create interesting and useful posts for all my readers.
The thin end of the wedge for a free Internet
To increase awareness of the implications for bloggers, internet users and social media addicts, I have posted this free graphic from fearlessfosdick of deviant art
For more information visit my other blog and read this post: Sopa : A sledgehammer to crush a flea. And also this post on Smurk Creative.
So that’s it for today, if you want to continue to enjoy the internet as it is then add your voice to the millions who are deeply concerned.
Need help getting started in Social Media (while it is still available) for your small business? Call me at 1-866-250-4504 or email me at peter@focusedprosperity.com
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The Power of Social Media Friends
The power of Social Media.
Facebook delivered 317 new visitors to my other blog over the weekend from one link on a friends page. The top-level, highly successful blogs get more visitors than that every day, but I know that 300 new visitors are enough to get most bloggers excited. Those new visitors did not require any expenditure on advertising. No Google AdWords, no Facebook ads.
Mike is a good friend from way back in my previous life in Africa when we both worked for the same large company, over 20 years ago. We had lost touch for years, then made contact again on Facebook last year.
As usual, my Networked Blogs setting posted a link to my Peter Wright’s Blog on my personal Facebook wall and one of my business pages. My old friend Mike noticed it and shared it on his wall. He has over 2500 Face Book friends. Over Saturday and Sunday, 317 of those friends visited my blog, several left comments and 7 subscribed to my newsletter. From the comments, I made contact with other people from many parts of the world, who, like me, had been forced to leave our country.
Because of the circumstances resulting from their involuntary relocation, some of those new visitors may not be potential customers or clients, but many could be. I have also made new Facebook friends and some of their friends could be customers some time in the future. Such is the viral nature of Social Media.
Just because we might think we only have a small group of Facebook friends, we should not assume that our messages will not reach a wider audience. As my example shows, just one well-connected friend sharing an update can get a huge number of new visitors.
What are you doing to expand your network of Social Media friends? Is it part of your Social Media strategy? How would you feel about 300 new visitors from one friend sharing your update?
If you need help getting started or ideas to make your social media updates for your small business go viral, call me at 1-866-250-4504 or email me at peter@focusedprosperity.com
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Kleenex Facebook promotion converts sniffling users to raving fans.
Here’s hoping you had a relaxing and merry time over the Christmas holidays and that you are now refreshed and re-energised, all ready to make 2012 your best year ever. I enjoyed a quieter two weeks and even managed a few totally “unplugged” days, no social media or internet at all.
I wrote about “archiving” the year just ended and using that exercise to help set goals for the new year on my other blog in a post on January 4, I also wrote about an important element for achieving goals that many people forget on a post yesterday. If you have a vague feeling that you did not achieve much last year, read the post and take half an hour to do the exercise, you will be pleasantly surprised at how much you did get done. There is another big benefit from doing the exercise, it’s all in that post.
In the interests of starting the years posts off on a light note, I found this article on ADZAG about a clever use of Social Media by Kleenex. For the full story and a short video, click on the link.
In a nutshell, Kleenex monitored Facebook status updates looking for people who were complaining of feeling sick. 50 Facebook users were selected and sent a Kleenex care package, by courier no less, time being of the essence.
Giving out 50 care packages generated 650 000 impressions and a 100% share rate. That’s good exposure for a small investment.
Extend that thinking and many small businesses could do something similar, hundreds of possibilities spring to mind, but I doubt if we will see banks and car manufacturers giving away many products.
What are your marketing goals for 2012? Will social media be part of your strategy or will it be a casualty of the daily whirlwind of running a small business?
If you need help getting started or ideas for social media for your small business, call me at 1-866-250-4504 or email me at peter@focusedprosperity.com
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Is your Social Media strategy ready for 2012?
Did the caption on this image make you smile? Are small business owners ever “ready” for the New Year?
One area many are not or have not even started is social media.
Social media is not going away, our customers, competitors and employees are spending increasing amounts of time on it, using an ever-expanding range of platforms and an array of devices that were inconceivable just a few years ago.
Here is a link to an interesting infographic from Search Engine Journal on how social media is affecting the way our brains work, our thinking patterns, attention spans and ability to focus on tasks. It is both interesting and frightening.
Each year at this time, experts in various fields make their predictions for the new year. Predicting future developments is a murky area for most fields and more so for any rapidly changing new phenomena like social media as a business tool. So lets just assume that the current trend continues, all the more reason for all small businesses to at least look at social media and see how it can be incorporated into marketing strategy.
For those few businesses which thrive on anonymity (and there are some) at least have a plan to use social media defensively should the business come under attack. It is difficult to plan an effective strategy when Facebook and twitter are already being flooded with calls to boycott your products or services.
Two areas of technology where I believe we will see advances in 2012 are large screen projection capabilities of some sort for smart phones and tablets. Will this be with holograms or the ability to project images onto a wall, a sheet of paper or a desktop? Will this signal the obsolescence of lap tops? No idea, but to me it seems a logical next step without which further improvements to smart phone capabilities might be limited.
How about improvements to voice recognition so that devices no longer need keypads? Or computers controlled by thought?
2012 could be an interesting year in many ways.
If you need help getting started or monitoring social media for your small business, call me at 1-866-250-4504 or email me at peter@focusedprosperity.com
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Happy New Year and best wishes for 2012.
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Chiquita Bananas’ Oil Boycott – Social Media Blunder or Non-Event?
Wishing you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Has Chiquita Bananas triggered a social media blunder with their much publicised intention to boycott fuel produced from Canadian oil sands?
As of today, the best supported Facebook page “Boycott Chiquita – Support Ethical oil” had 2078 “Likes” Not a huge percentage of the Canadian population and undoubtedly including some non-Canadians. Compare this to the 103 982 “Likes” on the official Chiquita Bananas page and it certainly does not look like a big impact yet. Interestingly, there is not a single negative comment about their boycott on the official page. Apparently they have a system to delete negative comments as soon as they appear.
Not a lot of activity on twitter either in the last few days. The Calgary Sun ran a poll and 71% of respondents indicated they would be boycotting Chiquita Bananas. Not a scientific survey so that result may not be representative.
Unfortunately, there is so much misguided disinformation about oil sands oil being spread by mischievous people and organisations using it as a rallying point, that Chiquita’s blunder will probably not prove disastrous. Certainly a foolish and risky marketing strategy given their own disgraceful record of supporting terrorist groups and other human rights issues. As much as I would like to think that their Canadian sales will suffer a huge drop, I suspect too few people will be prepared to be seen as backing our own oil production.
Odd that so many otherwise sensible and concerned people and many celebrities, would sooner support oil producers that treat women like property, or are decidedly unfriendly to the West and whose oil is transported by sea with much higher risks of massive pollution. Hypocrisy?
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but the lesson is that social media blunders only become serious when a critical mass of support is generated. The issue determines whether there is enough momentum to develop that critical mass. Killing seals, enforcing the law by evicting occupiers are issues that get that momentum, defending oil sands production against hypocritical criticism is not.
Another “politically correct” campaign that is stirring up some strong feelings is the attempt by many businesses and brands that should know better to ban “Christmas” from Christmas. I wrote about it on my other blog here: Which Marketing Experts Banned Christmas This Year and the next post as well. My own small symbolic resistance to this un-patriotic attempt to turn us all into a herd of neutered sheep is to immediately un-subscribe to any newsletter that sends me a “Happy Holiday” greeting and withdraw my support from local businesses that have banned the word “Christmas” from their stores or places of business. Losing my purchases is not going to have much effect on them, but it makes me feel better!
All the more reason to be very careful before taking a controversial stand in social media, it can work both for and against you.
Do you know what issues in your business might develop critical mass in social media? Let me help you find them, call me at 1-866-250-4504 or email me at peter@focusedprosperity.com
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Do farmers use social media?
Farmers using social media and the web?
Farmers are traditionally seen as conservative and slow to adopt new technology. As with any category of business, that may be true of some but certainly not all members of the group. Some farmers have turned small family operations into huge agribusinesses. Farmers in many parts of the world were among the first major users of two-way radio systems for communication, telemetry for remote control of irrigation systems and GPS systems for precise application of fertilisers and more efficient use of large 
tractors and combines.
If farmers were slower to adopt the cell phone in all its stages of evolution, it was more to do with coverage limitations than user reluctance. Farmers are also great innovators, the only way we could get telephone service back in Zimbabwe in the early 2000′s when all the copper land line wires had been stolen was to connect a cell phone to a 30′ outside antenna similar to a TV aerial. It was quite a circus having someone on the roof to turn the antenna while another watched the “bars” on the phone for the best spot. Very frustrating when, despite substantial bracing and supports, the wind moved the pole. We also connected our computer to the cell phone to send emails. The connection was too slow and too expensive to ever consider visiting a website.
Now there is a more efficient and cheaper satellite service for internet access which is more reliable than the cell phone service for the few remaining farmers in that beleaguered country.
It was not surprising then to read of a new “dating site for local food businesses” called Sustaination that is in beta right now in the UK. The purpose of the site is to make it easier for both consumers and food businesses (retail and hospitality) to buy local food products and for farmers to find local customers for their produce. There are similar exchange type sites in existence, but this one seems to follow the “Social Media” model more closely.
There are many other sites catering to farmers, just as there are those that cover practically every industry, it can take considerable research to find the sites that our customers are using. But it is important that we do the research.
Three statistics from Sustaination’s site :
- The UK food market is worth 151 billion pounds a year.
- Local food sales are expected to reach 6.2 billion by 2013.
- 20% of consumers are prepared to pay a premium for local food.
With numbers like these, is it any wonder that the site is generating a lot of interest from farmers and buyers?
What about your industry? Have you got groups of customers that you assume are not active in social media or web-savvy? It might be worth taking a look at what they are doing and find out how to reach them before your competitors do.
Do you know where your customers go in social media? Let me help you find them, call me at 1-866-250-4504 or email me at peter@focusedprosperity.com
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Prevent Plugin Problems by Better Blog Backup
On Friday morning I had a sharp reminder of the importance of creating regular backups, so sharp that I nearly lost my breakfast.
I opened up my Password vault, clicked on the link to my other blog and got a 503 error code “server down for maintenance or over capacity” Now every blogger likes to think that his or her writing attracts enough visitors to crash a server but I thought it was unlikely in this case.
Long story short, it was a plugin creating apparent traffic to the site in excess of my hosting package limit. I had to disable plugins until I got the site working again then re-activate them. It was the first time I had experienced that problem or needed to take that action to fix the problem so it took me 6 hours. Now that I have done it once, I know that I could do it a lot quicker next time, but it was still a lot of time wasted.
I did notice that when I reactivated the Google Plus Widget and checked the box to display posts from Google Plus in the sidebar, it displayed the Google Plus badge correctly but then an error message instead of the post/s. It also prevented all the other widgets below it displaying in the side bar. So I suspect that caused the problem. As soon as I unchecked the box to display posts, everything went back to normal.
While I was fixing this what was going through my mind was that I had last backed up on the hosting server about 2 months ago, but had not transferred a back up to my own or another storage facility. The thought of losing over 2 years of content was making my knees shake.
Fortunately, it all ended well, the blog is back to normal, I have backed up and transferred copies of the database and back up files to my own computer hard drive and an external hard drive just to be sure. One of the reasons many of us neglect this vitally important part of blogging is that it is a nuisance. There are various on-line services available that can automatically back up files and store them securely at a safe, remote facility. I am going to investigate some of them and will report my findings in a later post.
Have you backed up your blogs or websites? Do you do it regularly?
If you need help getting started or monitoring social media for your small business, call me at 1-866-250-4504 or email me at peter@focusedprosperity.com
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Scammers gear up for Christmas
A quick reminder that the online scammers are gearing up for the holidays. I wrote about some scams doing the rounds on my other blog in this post.
My Gmail account was also hacked from India this week, fortunately Google picked it up before any mischief had been done (as far as I can tell) and advised me to change my password. Another reminder for us to be alert and change passwords regularly. I use Last Pass to keep track of passwords, but instead of letting Last Pass generate a secure and very complicated password, I had set my own for Gmail which I thought was secure enough. Now I let Last Pass generate them. It is a free service and very useful for keeping track of the huge number of pass words we seem to need for all our social media and internet activity.
There is evidence that online fraud will increase over the holiday period. A worrying factor for 2012, is the increasing use of social media by criminals for identity theft and to get access to users other online accounts.
All the more reason for business owners to monitor social media regularly, not only to listen to our customers and see what they are saying about us, but to be on the alert for any attempts by hackers or scammers to compromise our own websites or social media accounts.
If you need help getting started or monitoring social media for your small business, call me at 1-866-250-4504 or email me at peter@focusedprosperity.com
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Save time, be more effective in social media with an XeeMe profile.
As I dived deeper into the social media pool over the last couple of years, two things irritated me.
Firstly, keeping track of passwords and user names, I solved this by using LastPass, a secure password vault, I have been using it for many months now and it is a huge time and frustration solver. It ‘s free, it has versions for Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox, it is very easy to set up and use.
Secondly, how to share all my social media links. It is simple to put a twitter link in an email signature for example, but it gets a bit unwieldy when trying to make links to another 20 or so platforms visible. As a blogger, I also want to display links to my blogs wherever possible.
There have been a few sharing sites, but until now, I have not found any that were simple to use, had a big following and were well supported.
That has been fixed with the launch of XeeMe.
XeeMe will display ALL your social media links on one page, I cut the screen shot off to save space in this post, but if visitors go to my profile or just click on the button below, all my social media links are displayed.
Setting up a XeeMe profile is simple and quick, it only takes a few minutes to add the major sites like twitter, Facebook, YouTube and a website or blog. The other sites can be added later.
The dashboard is simple and easy to use :
Not only is XeeMe a very effective tool to make all your social media links available in one place, but it also tracks social media activity and status. There are a number of analytical tools with results presented in easy to follow graphs.
So now instead of wondering which links to put in email signatures or on other sites, I can just put something like” My entire social presence” and a link to my XeeMe profile. Visitors and readers can follow me on which ever sites they prefer.
Makes life simple for all of us.
Give it a try, it’s free and a huge time saver.
If you need help trying to get started in social media for your small business, call me at 1-866-250-4504 or email me at peter@focusedprosperity.com
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