TED Continues to Amaze All

But now I have to think more!

"There's a flip side to everything," the saying goes, and in 2 minutes, Derek Sivers shows this is true in a few ways you might not expect.

Why you should listen to him:
Derek Sivers (link to his blog) is best known as the founder of CD Baby. A professional musician since 1987, he started CD Baby by accident in 1998 when he was selling his own CD on his website, and friends asked if he could sell theirs, too.

CD Baby was the largest seller of independent music on the web, with over $100M in sales for over 150,000 musician clients.

In 2008, Sivers sold CD Baby to focus on his new ventures to benefit musicians, including his new company, MuckWork, where teams of efficient assistants help musicians do their "uncreative dirty work."

"Derek Sivers is changing the way music is bought and sold. A musicians' savior. One of the last music-business folk heroes."

Esquire Magazine

A Message for All the Thinkers Out There

This makes me want to try some more...

Who can’t use a little dose of inspiration in the middle of the week? Christian Borstlap recently finished these deliciously simple animated illustrations for Dutch children’s charity, Kinderpostzegels.

Paul Postma did a great job of bringing Christian’s colourful illustrations to life, complimenting them with a playfully restrained animation style to really let their personalities shine.

Auto-Post Tools for Social Medias

Can you change the concept a bit?

Thanks to Jennifer Stalford for his original blog post.

1. HootSuite 2.0 allows management of multiple Twitter accounts with tracking capabilities, scheduling features and feeds blogs to Twitter. It now also interacts with LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook pages, and Pingfm.
2. Ping.fm - ”Post From Anywhere – To Anywhere”. This can auto-post to 49 different social medias. The biggies included are LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Delicious, and WordPress. Users can also use this on their SmartPhone.
3. Posterous is “the dead simple place to post everything”. This is done directly through your email account. In addition to having it auto-post to 10 social medias, users can attach url links, files, photos, video, blogs, and MP3’s. The largest social medias it works with are Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and WordPress.
4. Twitter Feed - This works with Twitter, has analytics that are viewed on a personal dashboard, rss capabilities, works with blogs, and improvements have been made to the login process.
5. Friendfeed states that it’s ”the easiest way to share online”. Users can post something on their phone, Facebook or email and it disperses it to their friends.
6. Facebook allows users to auto-post to Twitter but only works with Facebook pages so it is ideal for businesses.
7. EzineArticles has a feature that auto-posts a message on Twitter that indicates a user’s article has been published.
8. WordPress to Twitter rates very well by users, shortens links and is compatible on WordPress blog versions up to 2.8.4.
9. Twitter Notify is a blog plugin created by Windows Live Writer Microsoft for Live Writer. It posts to Twitter and shortens the link to a blog post.
10. xPollinate is another free blog plugin for Live Writer. This can auto-post a portion or an entire blog post to multiple social medias including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and more through Ping.fm.
11. Socialooph is a free social media management site for managing your Twitter account.
12. Postling is “social media management for businesses”. It allows multiple people to manage multiple accounts. You can create accounts for your team or your clients and control their access, including which brands they can interact with.

La Mime After My Own Heart

...., .... .., .. ... ..... ...!

This has got to be the best Mime on the planet. La Mime has figured it out how to be a funny mime. He also keeps in the tradition of being a bit creepy with his since of hummer too. This one particularly poignant because of the new laws in BC regarding cell phones and driving.

Be warned you could be watching this guy for hours.

Great Tweeting Tips for 2010

Tweeting all the way to the Bank

Be more innovative with Twitter this year. Here are 10 useful tips.
Thanks to Andra Picincu for her great blog post.

1. Expand Networks
Using Twitter, you can join topic groups related to your business and career and gain valuable information from scanning others’ tweets. Your company will gain new customers and potential partners. Do a search for keywords related to your product on Twitter Search and then follow the users.

2. Build Credibility
If you hold free workshops, seminars or web meetings; let people know that it’s starting soon, how to participate and join in by tweeting about it.

3. Highlight Your Tweets
Twitter allows you to share the latest news and events related to your business in 140 characters. Set up a Twitter feed for the specific purpose of notifying customers when new products come in.

4. Look For Leads On Twitter
Twitter can be used to direct traffic to your websites. You can share information that is useful for prospective clients or employers to enhance your reputation.

5. Communicate With Employees
Twitter is a great collaboration tool, which can be successfully used to save time and money.

6. Deals & Promotions
Offer incentives to those who follow you on Twitter. You can give them free coupons, discounts, package deals and samples.

7. Customer Complaints and Service
By accepting customer complaints in the open, other consumers can see what kind of company you really are.

8. Interact With Your Competition
You can read the tweets of your competitors daily and stay in touch with them. Although this rarely happens in the real world, Twitter has changed it all.

9. Organize A Local Tweetup
Twitter can help you organize meetups. All you have to do is to send a message announcing the time and place of the meeting. It’s an informal and effective way of planning a meeting.

10. Brand Loyalty
With Twitter, you can always stay in touch with your followers. All these people are potential customers, so you must help them get used to your products and services. Participate actively to conversations and tweet constantly.