This is a guest post written by Mathew Ronald.
When it comes to QR code marketing, one cannot place enough emphasis on the importance of location. Get it right and you will be able to draw in large number of people to scan your QR codes. However, get it wrong and you will find that people are not too keen on scanning your QR codes. Following are 4 locations where QR codes work best: Continue reading
This is a guest post by Jeff Gellar.
The old fashioned methods of tracking the employee work time, including the punch-clock and handwritten timesheets, are rapidly discarded in favor of the software platforms that allow automatic work time tracking at the push of a button. The two aforementioned antiquated strategies may have been favored 20 or 30 years ago, but in the age of apps, smartphones and tablets, they no longer constitute feasible alternatives. Continue reading
This is a guest post by Alex Cole.
When you run a business, the whole point of having payroll service software is to make it much easier to make payments to your employees. This means that when you are trying to buy such software, you need to find solutions that will take over most of the processes related to making such payments. Continue reading
This is a guest post by Chad Faith.
You don’t have to be a facility manager or the person in charge of maintaining the equipment to realize just how much panic and stress comes out of a simple malfunctioning on a key machine. If you feel that you had enough headaches due to these minor problems, perhaps it is high time you learn a bit about the CMMS software. Continue reading
If you have missed out on cloud computing, then one application of this may be coming to a city near you. Perhaps without realizing it, you may be using a cloud computing application such as Google Docs. Many may also be using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system such as that provided by SalesForce.com which is also on the cloud.
Now you can see some further cloud computing applications when VMware Takes Virtualization on the Road With VMware Express.
VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced that VMware Express will hit the road this week. VMware Express is a state-of-the-art mobile datacenter, demo lab and briefing center designed to bring desktop virtualization and cloud computing solutions from VMware directly to customers and partners across the United States and Canada. VMware Express Virtualization Tour 2010 will stop in 150 cities and is sponsored by AMD, Cisco, Dell, EMC, MDS Micro, NetApp and Xsigo.
VMware desktop and server virtualization solutions decouple business-critical applications from the underlying hardware and provide unprecedented flexibility and reliability. VMware backup systems are available to ensure complete security and robustness.
The Vsphere brings you your own private cloud with datacenter virtualization. Through this, you can optimize IT service delivery and deliver the highest levels of application service agreements with the lowest total cost per application. You can get up to speed on this by following some of the Vmware vsphere training videos that are available.
To give you a full grounding in all these applications, Vmware training courses can expand your horizons on what is possible. As you might say, the sky’s the limit.
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One aspect of the Internet that is somewhat mind-boggling is that every moment 24/7 there are other people out there with whom you may share some common interests. There are a variety of ways by which you can find kindred spirits. It may be something as simple as Twitter or a little more complex with say Facebook. Such meeting places are profilerating all the time. In some ways it’s a little like that space that the Greeks called ‘agora’ or market place. There is lots of noise and chatter and people meeting up with people to discuss the issues of the day and to transact all manner of business activities.
Sometimes you may have some task that you want done and you are just a little over-loaded at the moment. In a physical agora, you might just raise your hand and your voice to get a little attention and then in a loud voice proclaim what help you need. Online you can do the equivalent even using Twitter or Facebook or perhaps more appropriately some free ad service such as Craigs List. If you make the right connection, then someone who can work from home can complete the task for you. Since such online vehicles are just to help communication, it is up to you to create all the arrangements such that you get satisfactory work done and the helper gets paid for his or her efforts. An important issue here of course is how to establish mutual trust between the two parties so that both can know they will achieve satisfaction in their transaction.
Payment is less of an issue now since reputable services such as PayPal or Google Checkout exist to make sure that payments are made with full security.
Now a new online ‘agora’ has been created by ShortTask.com that handles all the mechanics of ensuring that the work to be done is handled in a trust-worthy way to the satisfaction of both the Seeker of help and the person who will provide the solution.
If you wish to Work at Home then on the ShortTask website you can do a Short Task Review to make sure that what is required in the task is what you might wish to deliver. If you wish to offer yourself as a Solver on some task that some Seeker has posted, then ShortTask provides the framework within which you can complete the task and receive appropriate renmeration. The mechanics can handle a wide variety of tasks so this should have an appeal as a one-stop place to get the help you need.
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If terms like URL shortener or RT are unclear to you, then you may be missing the next major trend in social media. The last major trend which is still active is Twitter where, as Collective Thoughts suggested you can create your own Social Bites – (which are) Like Sound Bites But Different
We are all used to “Sound Bites” – a short few seconds of words which are normally taken out of context to create sensational headlines. Few people realise that speech writers have for years worked on developing speeches to include a couple of perfect “sound bites” for use by others. Of course while some social media is audio based we are much more likely to rely on humble text to create a “social bite”.
What Is A Social Bite? – A social bite is a short piece of text to describe an article, post or idea which is easy to understand and easy to distribute through viral networks. A social bite must still carry the post’s message and goal but in a way that quickly impacts with users. The Perfect Social Bite has two parts, the hook and the line.
The hook are the words within the message – the thing to grab attention. This is doubly important as the hook will have no context once it has left the site. For example a hook is unlikely to reference the site so must be compelling, so that someone would visit the page without knowing where they were going. The line is simply the url, sometimes this will be the page url but more likely to conserve space a url shortening service would be used. This compounds the need for a good hook as the only other potential reference to the site will be hidden.
Done well, social bites can be very effective, so the Twitter stream now seems to have more social bites than mere status messages as in ( … off to feed the dog. 
)
If you are unaware of ReTweeting, then this is the next big buzz item in the Twitter world.
A ReTweet is based upon the word Tweet. Tweet is slang used in Twitter that means whatever message you post up on Twitter is considered a Tweet. Hence a ReTweet is a Tweet that is re-copied that begins with either a RT or ReTweet.
Techchrunch wrote a post on how ReTweets are viewed as a proxy for Authority in the Twitter world. This means that the more Retweets you gain from other Twitter users based on the article you have written or have found and submitted to the Twitter world, will prove that you are an Authoritative expert in Twitter.
Your tweeting efforts therefore should be focused on creating social bites that will receive the maximum retreats. That is where the choice of URL shortening can be important.. Lee Odden did a fine survey and review of URL shorteners and covered the following URL shorteners:
He found that cli.gs was the most used and certainly it has many fine features including powerful analytics. One of its most useful features is that it can be used in a plugin by Joe Dolson (WP to Twitter) that automatically creates a tweet when a WordPress post is published.
One URL shortener that was not included was that created by Digg. It has received some adverse reactions since it puts the original post within an iFrame that is part of the Digg online presence.
Another one that is just now in beta might appear to be similar in ‘framing’ the original post. However I go along with Pallab in saying that su.pr from StumbleUpon is Awesome.
Like Digg, su.pr also frames the contents of the target webpage and displays floating toolbars which is what make su.pr so awesome. The sidebar automatically highlights other popular content from your website(s) and encourages the reader to further explore. Not only that, su.pr also provides the option to retweet your message, and share the link on Facebook. Other options include the standard thumbs up and thumbs down buttons and option to stumble through the URL submitter’s favourites.
That ReTweet (RT) option is highly visible in the top right corner and should maximize the chances of getting even more RTs. If you want to see what it looks like just check out the URL in the following social bite.
StumbleUpon is one of the more effective social media in bringing website visitor traffic, so this URL shortener should be a most useful complement.
Check out some of the latest posts on the other SMM blogs.
