Shercole

SmartStartNola Newsletter

shercole — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 20:40:47 +0000

SmartStartNola Newsletter will start this week! This newsletter will provide tips and resources to small business owners on a wide range of topics. We will have professional discuss everything from Public Relations to Finance. SmartStartNola wants to see every business in New Orleans grow and have a chance. Often time many small businesses don’t know what resources are out there, we want to put an into it. If interested in giving tips please leave a comment. If Interested in receiving the email please sign up on the front page.

Your Blogs Year-End Audit: Prepare For Next Year

shercole — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:07:00 +0000

2011 is quickly approaching us; it’s time to get our blogs ready for the New Year. Don’t go into the New Year with the same website problems, create a plan to maximize your website’s awareness and enrich efficiency for you and your site. Take a look at this list of tips to help you prepare for 2011.

Review 2010. Take time and review the statistics from your blog. Take a look at your heavy months, most popular posts, viewer locations and comments. This information will help you devise a plan to increase awareness for 2011.

- Analyze your blog and social media statistics.
- Review website comments and get a sense of what your readers love the most.
Full Story at Black Blog Media

Search Term Blogging Influence

shercole — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 10:42:00 +0000

If you are serious about blogging, you definitely want to use every tool at your disposal. Always look out for matching the things you to write, with what your readers want to see. A great way to stay up on understanding your readers is search terms. Figure out the things that they search for and how this relates or could potentially relate to your blog entries.

A great tool to help in understanding searches is Google Insight. It helps give you insight into the mind of your searcher. This tool allows you to discover key terms individuals in any area search for. Google Insight gives you additional opportunities to add key ideas into your focus and strategies for your website.

Full Story at Black Blog Media

8 Tips To Creating A Survey

shercole — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 11:41:00 +0000

In any type of business understanding your customers is imperative to operating efficiently. Customer satisfaction is essential in any business surviving. Websites are not excluded, you are still an entity providing a service. You are providing a service to your readers; whom are your customers. You must take time out and understand who your audience is and how they feel about what you are providing to them.

Make it a priority to make sure your customers/readers are satisfied with your services. You are not just blogging for you; but sharing your knowledge, thoughts and experiences with others. A great way to get feedback from your readers is by creating a survey. By creating a survey you get a sense of what your customers want as well as what are your current strengths and weaknesses.

Full Article on Black Blog Media

4 Tips for Managing Writers

shercole — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 11:40:00 +0000

As websites began to grow, adding more writers is usually the next step. We get to a point we are unable to produce all the necessary content on our own. Adding writers is all about management. When adding more than one writer, you must be prepared create a business environment to encourage professional conduct from your writers. Here are a few tips I follow to manage my writers:

1. Guidelines
Create a set of guidelines you want your writers to follow. This should include all blogging protocols you follow, writing styles and more. Once they sign on to write for you, make sure you give them as much information as possible about what you expect and what they should expect. It’s good practice to create an agreement for your writers to sign so you can ensure they are willing and understand the guidelines of your website.

Full Article at Black Blog Media

One Voice.One Mission. will include Technology

shercole — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 11:18:00 +0000

Recently, Transition New Orleans Task Forces presented recommendations to Mayor-elect Mitch Landrieu. The 17 Task Forces created solutions that adopted principles based around innovation, sustainability and accountability. With many of the recommendations, New Orleans new understanding of the importance of incorporating technology in the new vision for the city is evident.

The Cultural Economy Task Force was asked to create an environment that allows for the growth of the cultural economy and cultural industries. Among their recommendations two spoke to adopting innovation to enhance our cultural economy. The cultural economy not only includes entertainment and culinary arts but design and new media.

The Task Force would like for the new administration to work to integrate the creative workforce across industries for innovation and 21^st century economic development. This would include bolstering infrastructure that supports cultural economic development and creative production. This allows for more opportunities to integrate different technology educational opportunities and careers in New Orleans.

The Youth and Families Task Force was given the task of creating ways for the incoming administration to engage our city’s youth and families to promote equity, expand opportunities, and develop healthy families and communities. One recommendation presented looked to the new administration to develop ways to use public spaces including schools and recreation facilities to build community and to provide children, youth and families with safe places to play and learn. This could provide opportunities for individuals in the technology community to go throughout the city and create programming at recreation facilities to teach kids and families tech tools. A great an example of this type of programming is The Social Project, which has developed programs in the community to teach basic and advanced computer classes to individuals in the specified neighborhoods.

The City Contracting Task Force was given the task to create recommendations on general city contracting and Disadvantage Business Enterprise policies. Of the recommendations, the Task Force is asking the new administration to create a user friendly city contracts website. This is a great idea to create more information and interaction for citizens through the contracted city services.

Two favored recommendation came from the Customer Service Task Force. This committee was asked to create best practices, innovations and professional development opportunities to create a rewarding culture of public service in City Hall. One recommendation created was the update, expand and streamline of the City of New Orleans website. This gives our city an opportunity to create a state of the art website that is not only user friendly, but make interaction with City Hall easier and more efficient. There are many opportunities for the new administration to create a website that not only brings City Hall to the citizens but create an arena for citizens to interact online with each department. It would also be great to see the city utilize social media to get more information out to the citizens as well as present videos from different departments on their efforts monthly.

Another great recommendation by Customer Service Task Force is to test, implement and rebrand a new “311 type” management system. 311 is a non-emergency information system for the city services of New Orleans, which is a one call system that provides information or accepts inquiries about city services. This could provide an opportunity for the new administration to create a state of the art system that connects technology, city hall representatives and citizens in new ways.

So many great ideas were recommended to Mayor-elect Mitch Landrieu from issues spanning from Social Innovation to Criminal Justice. I have high hopes he will implement many of the ideas represented and incorporate technology throughout City Hall. The hard working efforts of the transition team are apparent in their solutions to old problems through innovation, sustainability and accountability. Let’s all continue to do our part to increase the technology community in New Orleans and voice the issues and solutions to aid the one voice, one mission of the City of New Orleans.

For the complete report on all recommendations by the Task Forces, check out Transition New Orleans

Technology Community Defines Collaboration

shercole — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 11:17:00 +0000

Technology Community Defines Collaboration

Collaboration and Innovation runs hand and hand in the City of New Orleans. The technology community has made a point to show this city how to properly use collaboration through incorporating innovation, service, and resources in New Orleans. These communities has taken startups, entrepreneurs, freelancers, coders, web designers, and other lovers of technology and helped nurture and grow Post Katrina New Orleans.

Technology Community Grows Everyday

Since 2005, the technology community has created many new organizations, giving voices to a diverse group of individuals with like-minds. Some of the organizations included are NetSquared New Orleans, Social Media Club, GNOcode, RubyBayou, NewOrleansTech.Net, Evacuteer, NolaBroadSquad, and many others. The brain organization for many of the start- ups of these technology groups was NetSquared New Orleans. Net2No is a group of technology enthusiasts who get together on the first Tuesday of every month to network, share ideas, and help create social change in New Orleans. Through this organization many individuals have connected to collaborate on projects, events and much more. Each meeting brings together over 70 individuals passionate about New Orleans and technology. Through Net2No’s encouragement, many organizations where instantly given the resources and community to build new organizations.

Power of Collaboration

One of the best examples of collaboration in the technology community in New Orleans was BarCamp Nola. Barcamp was an event that happened on July 17-19, where individuals came together to share and learn in an open environment. Everyone was given opportunities to share presentations in areas of interest and expertise. It was a great event where attendees presented and actually took some new knowledge from all of their peers. Such topics covered were SMS mobile marketing, web entrepreneurship, Importance of mobile web, I-phone photography, Introduction to Ruby and many more. This is event proved the power of working together. There was one goal to learn from each other.

In the last day of the event, Tech professionals came together to build a website to honor the volunteers for the New Orleans Public Schools. Nola School Volunteers was a website created by BarCamp Nola attended in one day, featuring such things as a page to locate all the volunteers of the school system and much more. The technology community has taken an active role in helping the non-profit community by lending their talents to many organizations throughout the city.

Resource-Enabled Community

Within the technology community a great emphasis has been put on resources. Creating and sharing resources has been a mission. Throughout the city, there are classes being offered and co-working opportunities found every day. Organizations like the Louisiana Technology Council have done a great job to help technology entrepreneurs with workshops on web designing through wordpress as well as Social Media. Other organizations taking an active role in learning is Social Media Club, with roundtable discussions about social media and the hospitality industry and creative licensing. All around New Orleans, you can find other unique activities that help all those interested in news skills.

Technology Community Powers Co-Working

Another major wave taken place in New Orleans is co-working. All over the city, co-working opportunities or popping up, where individuals are coming together to complete work, share ideas, and collaborate. One of the leaders of this movement Chris Schultz, with his innovative business, LaunchPad provides co-working spaces downtown. While in Mid-City, co-working space can be found at Corporate Project Management Business center run by Reuben DeTiege, III. Besides the organized co-working, throughout the city at places such as the neighborhood coffee shop you will see many individuals coming together to get work done.

Collaboration no matter the industry has always been the key to expanding knowledge and access to resources. In New Orleans, the technology community has done a great job of taking this technique and creating a booming society. A society that allows individuals to learn from each other, work with each other, and create a better New Orleans one day at a time. New Orleans as a whole should take a lesson from this community and begin initiating this willingness to learning and sharing into its everyday activities.

What Is Twitter?

shercole — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 11:12:00 +0000

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers). Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow anybody to access them. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. The service is free to use over the Internet, but using SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Why? Because even basic updates are meaningful to family members, friends, or colleagues—especially when they’re timely.

Running late to a meeting? Your co–workers might find that useful.

· With Twitter, you can stay hyper–connected to your friends and always know what they’re doing. Or, you can stop following them any time. You can even set quiet times on Twitter so you’re not interrupted.

· Twitter puts you in control and becomes a modern antidote to information overload.

How can this help your nonprofit?

· Free Publicity- A free opportunity to spread the word about your organization to viewers all across the world.

· Create dialogue and receive feedback about issues important to your organization.

· Inform people on different issues in your community in real time. You can tweet just about anything; from what’s happening at a meeting, something that just happen in the community, etc.

· It’s your information share- You control what you want anyone to know.

How to use Twitter?

1. Sign Up for an account at twitter.com (Make sure to create a username that represent your organization)

2. Add a picture and a background that represents your organization.

3. Add a quick bio line about your organization and add your website URL.

4. Hook up your account to your mobile phone

5. Introduce yourself in a tweet.

· You can send a Twitter message, or “Tweet,” from any of your registered devices. From the Web page, enter a message in the entry window at the top of the page.

· From a mobile phone, send an SMS message to 40404. Your phone’s caller ID is attached to your Twitter account, so the system will know it’s from you.

· From IM, message TwitterIM if you’re on AOL, or twitter@twitter.com if you’re on Jabber/GTalk.

· In all these cases, all your “followers” will see your message on their own Twitter pages and possibly on their mobile devices as well.

-Follow Folks

· On the Web: to add a friend, first be sure you are logged into your account. Then go to his or her Twitter page and press the “Add” link in the “Actions” box. To find a user page, use the search box on your own Twitter page.

· Once you click “Add,” you’ll start to see his or her Tweets on your page if his or her account is set for public access. If the account is private, the system will send a “friend” request that must be approved before you start to see updates.

· You also can see who your friends are following by hovering your mouse pointer over the pictures in the sidebar on your friends’ pages. Those pictures are of their friends–the users they are following. If you click on one of those pictures, you’ll go to that user’s page, where you can add him or her, too.

(Make sure to keep it simple, state your message clearly, and use unique content, and communicate with your followers (Note: Your followers are the ones who will recommend you to be followed by others))

Here is a guide to using Twitter

http://news.cnet.com/newbies-guide-to-twitter/

Great First Follows

http://twitter.com/nonprofitorgs

http://twitter.com/openworldsite

http://twitter.com/startupnola

http://twitter.com/Net2NO

http://twitter.com/cacno

http://twitter.com/workNOLA

http://twitter.com/ARCNO

http://twitter.com/NOMA1910

http://twitter.com/youngleadership

http://twitter.com/policypitch

http://twitter.com/nprnews

http://twitter.com/504ward

http://twitter.com/NOLAnews

Social Media for Non Profits

shercole — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 10:58:00 +0000

What is Social Media?

It’s internet and mobile based tools for sharing and discussing information. It integrates technology, telecommunications, and social interaction. Its speed networking and information technology.

For Non Profits?

Social media technology provides an opportunity for Non profits to connect with other non profits, connect with people who may be interested in your cause, connections with possible funders. Also, it provides an opportunity for non profits to disseminate information locally and nationally for your organization. It’s a relatively cheap tool that enables anyone to publish or access information. It gives everyone with internet access equal opportunities to receive and disseminate information.

4 Key Points of Social Media

1. Reach- Provide scale and enable anyone to reach a global audience. (Ex: Local Organization reaching global audience; reaching people locally who at one time organizations had no contact with.)

2. Accessibility- Social media tools are generally available to anyone at little or no cost. (Most social media tools are free. The main thing you need is to figure out how to use the tools, but they are there for you.)

3. Usability-Anyone can operate the means of production. ( It’s pretty easy once you start to play around with the tools and decide what exactly you want to do with them)

4. Recency- Is capable of virtually instanteous responses; only the participants determine any delay in response. (You can share information within seconds)

Social media depends on interaction between people as the discussion and integrations of words to build shared-meaning, using technology.

Examples

Blogs, picture-sharing, v-logs, wall postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowd sourcing, and voice over IP.

Examples of social media applications, Google groups (reference social networking), Wikipedia (reference), Myspace (social networking) Facebook, Last.Fm (personal music), You Tube (social networking and video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Flickr (photo sharing), Twitter (social networking and micro blogging).

Communication

Blogs: Blogger, Livejournal, Typepad, WordPress, and more.

Internet forums: Vbullentin, Phpbb

Microblogs: Twitter, Jaiku

Social Network Creations: Ning

Social Networking: Avatars United, Bebo, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Orkirt, Skyrock, Netlog

Social Network Aggregations: Friendfeed

Events: Upcoming.org, Eventful, Meetup.com

Collaboration

Wikis: Wikipedia, PBWiki, Wetpaint

Social Bookmarking: Delicious, StumbleUpon,

Social News Sites: Digg, Mixx, Reddit

Opinion Sites: epinions, Yelp

Multimedia

Photosharing: Flickr, Zoomr, Photobucket, SmugMug

Videosharing: YouTube, Vimeo, Revver, Livecasting, Ustream, Justin.tv

Audio and Music Sharing: imeem, last.fm, the hype machine

Virtual Worlds: Second Life