I’ll try to blog anything of interest I find in Europe – but I’ll be pretty quiet until the end of January.

Scheduling Meetings

If you’re trying to co-ordinate a meeting with a number of people who are not in the same room, you probably usually have emails going to & fro. Doodle allows you to show a number of possible meeting dates & times on a web page. People click on the times that suit them & you can see at a glance which time suits best. People can make comments & attach files. The best feature is that there’s a timezone drop down box where you simply choose your timezone & Doodle adjusts the meeting times to your zone. (This is particularly useful for me as I’m always co-ordinating meetings with people from different timezones!)

Below is what you see – this is a test I set up. You can see where you’d add your name & choices.

If you’d like to try it, click here to go to the Doodle page & then add your choices.

The poll feature allows you to set up quick online polls. Below is what it looks like – this is a test I set up:

Click here to go to the Doodle page if you’d like to try it.

You can set up your own Doodle account here – it’s free.

First – I read the blog post by Valerie Khoo: Why you need a squeeze page (and what it is!). I highly recommend you read it. In summary – a squeeze page is a web page – typically independent of your website – which is usually a single page, with few options to click elsewhere. Here’s an example of a squeeze page from Valerie.

Second – webs (a place to create your own website for FREE) came to my attention. So I set to work to put together a squeeze page. It’s not the best you’ll ever see, but here’s what you can do with a free website builder and a couple of hours. You’ll notice there’s an ad at the top of the page – this is the price you pay for a free website! However, webs will remove ads for just $14.95 per year – pretty good deal!

You can have a number of free sites and they show on your dashboard when you sign in. It’s pretty easy to use so why not try one for yourself.

The software product will be presented in its full functionality, without any limitations save for those mentioned in Terms and Conditions.

I’ve put a small box in the sidebar to the right (scroll down towards the bottom) that will list the giveaway every day. All you need to do is click through and follow the instructions on the Giveaway website to download your copy.

Climate change represents a profound challenge to the lives and livelihoods of everyone, but particularly those living in developing economies acutely dependent on natural and nature-based resources. If the international community fails to act, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5% of global GDP each year, now and forever. (Achim Steiner, Executive Director of United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Under-secretary General of the United Nations) Read more.

According to CARE:

Climate change cannot be addressed by continuing to conduct “business as usual.”  It requires new thinking, new standards and new tools, as well as new partnerships to translate them into decisive action.

CARE has some great resources on their website – one of them is the  Green office survey which you might like to complete. Here are a few questions from that survey that you could pause to think over on Blog Action Day:

How often do you:

• Reuse paper for taking notes
• Reuse single sided paper in a copier or printer
• Use email rather than sending printed material
• Design documents to reduce paper
• Read a document on screen rather than printing it

And of course using Web 2.0 tools is an ideal way to reduce your carbon footprint & help to limit the consequences of climate change. So try a new Web 2.0 tool today & see how it can help your business as well as the environment.

Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to post text messages of up to 140 characters in answer to the question “What are you doing?” These messages are known as tweets and can be read by people who ‘follow’ you. You can make your tweets private or allow anyone who clicks on your profile to read them.

This video explains Twitter – in plain English!

Some people do actually tweet about what they are doing, but the business savvy are using Twitter to share ideas, gain a profile and drive business their way. Here are a few tips on getting started and using Twitter to boost your business.

Getting Started

Start a free  account by going to Twitter and clicking on the ‘Sign up now’ button. Follow the prompts to fill in your details and you’ll be tweeting within minutes. Say hello to the world from your new Twitter account (not that anyone will probably read it just yet!)

Finding Followers

Now you need someone to read your words of wisdom. The best way to find followers is to start following other people. If you know someone who tweets, go to their profile page and click the ‘Follow’ button just under their name. They’ll receive a message that you’re following them and they can choose whether to accept your follow or not. Often people you follow will follow you back – but only if you’re tweeting something of interest.

If you don’t know anyone on Twitter, there are a few ways of finding interesting people. You can use the search function on your Home page for words of interest to you and your business. This will return anyone who has tweeted those words recently. However this can return an overwhelming number of results, so I recommend one of the following.

Twellow and Just Tweet It are directories of public Twitter accounts, with hundreds of categories and search features to help you find people. Type a word of interest into the search and they’ll give you a list with the most prolific tweeters at the top. Click through to their profile and see if they are worth following.

Once you’ve found a couple of people to follow, go to their profiles and see who they follow – you’ll probably want to add some of these people to your list. Within no time you’ll be building up your network.

What to Tweet

Unless you’re a celebrity, no-one will really be interested in what you’re doing at any point in time. Use your tweets to share resources and ideas to become a person others see as knowledgeable and generous. Do NOT start tweeting by immediately trying to sell or promote your own products or services – this will turn most people off and they won’t follow you. Try to get a balance of sharing other resources and ideas along with promoting your own stuff.

Check Twitter daily if you can and try to get a balance between tweeting too much and too little. Once a week is definitely too little and once a minute is too much! Happy tweeting.

10 Tips

Here are 10 tips for using Twitter effectively:

1. Fill out your profile and add a link to your website before you start tweeting and following other people.
2. Add a photo or logo before you go live – people want to know who you are.
3. Choose some keywords that describe your business and put them in your profile – this will get you a higher ranking in the search engines.
4. Don’t follow anyone until you’ve posted a few interesting tweets.
5. Check who is following you – if you don’t like the look of them (or their tweets) block them.
6. Try to respond to people who follow you with a ‘nice to be in your network’ type message.
7. Don’t just push your own products or services – be generous and share resources and ideas you find.
8. Share a little personal information in your tweets so people see your human side.
9. Comment on other’s tweets and retweet what other’s have posted (with acknowledgement).
10. You don’t have to read every tweet made by people you follow.

This article was recently published in Working Women.

It’s very easy – go to the Wordle ‘create’ page. You can copy some text into the text box, enter a URL, or use a delicious user name. The site does its magic and creates your Wordle in a matter of seconds. Once you’ve generated your Wordle you can change it manually by choosing fonts, colours etc or you can hit the ‘Randomize’ button & see what Wordle will do for you. And it’s all FREE.

I Wordled the tags from this blog and here are a few versions that I liked from ‘randomizing’.

As you can see, they’re all very different, so you could easily find a style to suit your purpose.

How could you use Wordle in business?

The immediate use that comes to mind is to use it to represent your products or services or perhaps the values of your business. What a novel way to display your business!

I’m sure you’re more creative than I am, so please let us know how you think Wordle could be used for business by telling us in the comments section.

If you’d like to see a range of Wordles made by others click here. To make your own – go to the Wordle site.

Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be the largest-ever social change event on the web. One day. One issue. Thousands of voices.

The focus this year is Climate Change. Climate change affects us all and it threatens more than the environment. It threatens to cause famine, flooding, war, and millions of refugees. Given the urgency of the issue of climate change and the upcoming international climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December, the blogosphere has the unique opportunity to mobilise millions of people around expressing support for finding a sustainable solution to the climate crisis.

Read more about Blog Action Day.

There are various ways to find stats on your blog – depending on what platform you use. WordPress (my favourite FREE blogging software) provides a number of stats, but I like Feedjit – which is a free app I’ve put in the sidebar of the blog (L-hand side). More on that in another post….

A check of traffic in the last 4 days revealed the following:

• 3% came from a Yahoo search (wow – didn’t know anyone used that anymore!!!)
• 7% came from a link on another blog
• 12% came from Twitter
• 15% came from a website that has a permanent link to my blog
• 27% came directly ie they have me bookmarked or on an RSS feed
• 36% came from Google searches

Interesting stuff & there are some pointers there as to where I should spend my energy for the greatest return. Even more interesting is to see what terms people use to search & subsequently find you. Here’s what some backtracking through Feedjit showed me:

• Someone from Canada searched on ‘hold a video conference’ and my blog came up 170 out of 22,700,000 results.
• Someone from Florida, Moscow & Jakarta searched on ‘CUVC’ (a new product in my industry) and my blog came up 2nd out of 72,300 results.
• Someone from Minnesota & India searched on ‘define telepresence’ and my blog came up 3rd out of 200,000 results.

This gives me some good information about what people are currently interested in & therefore the topics I should be covering and the terms I should be using for the best search engine results. I might add that I pay no fees to anyone to attain the great results in the above searches – I just keep providing good information that others read, pass on & link to. Something that you can do on your blog to get yourself high in the ratings