From the Brilliant Dave Nelsen, SOCIAL MEDIA GURU GUY!

Travel Apps

While I don’t have an objective measure to prove it, I believe that I am at least twice as productive as I was 5 years ago because of the various apps I use on my smartphone and tablet. I’m constantly surprised at how many business owners haven’t yet embraced this amazing new technology.

Here’s a typical example of how I use apps for improved productivity, in this case for travel.

Yesterday, I did morning and afternoon keynote presentations for groups in Houston, TX. At 4:00 PM. As I headed out into the unbelievable Houston rush hour traffic using Uber (a transportation app) to the airport, my TripIt app told me that my flight was cancelled. This was a serious problem. I had to be in Canton, OH by morning or I’d miss my next speaking engagement.

So I fire up my FlightBoard app, which shows every flight out of Houston during the next four hours. I see that Delta has a 5:50 PM departure running 15 minutes behind schedule and I can make that because Waze (my social GPS app) has a deadly reliable estimate of my arrival time at IAH (5:03 PM in case you’re curious).

So I fire up my Kayak app and discover that the Delta flight to Pittsburgh (via Altlanta) is available for less than $200. I buy the ticket and then launch my Delta app to get my boarding passes. I add these to my Apple Passbook app so they’ll be available on my Apple Watch when I reach the airport.

I board my Delta flight bound for Atlanta and we pull back from the gate 15 minutes late as projected. Unfortunately, within one minute, the pilot stops the plane and shuts down the engines. I can’t help but remember that DELTA is an acronym that stands for Doesn’t Ever Leave The Airport, but this time it’s not actually their fault. It’s a thunderstorm that has the entire airport under ground stop.

Finally, the lightning passes and we take off to Atlanta. As soon as the wheels touch down, I switch my iPhone out of “airplane mode” and receive a TripIt update. I’ll transcribe it for you here:

TripIt Pro [10:00 PM]: DL54 arr term N, gate E-35. 8m to make conn @ ATL DL1072 term N, gate E-16.

In short, I’ve got 8 minutes to make my connection. Did I mention that I’m sitting at the very back of the plane because I purchased my ticket just 90-minutes before departure?

FlightBoard also tells me that the Pittsburgh flight is indeed leaving in 8 minutes but upon finally disembarking, I run to gate E-16 anyway. Not surprisingly, when I get there the gate area is deserted, save for one friendly agent who says “Man, I held it for you as long as I could.” I’m sure it wasn’t even close.

So now I call my travel agent’s emergency 24-hour hotline for help. According to the agent, the next flight to Pittsburgh, Akron, Cleveland or anywhere close departs Atlanta at 8:30 AM tomorrow. This is really bad news, as my 3-hour keynote in Canton is scheduled to start at 8:00 AM. I’ll miss it entirely.

So back to FlightBoard. Miracle! It’s now 10:20 PM but the 10:04 PM Delta flight to Cleveland is showing a 60-minute delay. My travel agent can’t see it (or book it) in her system because it’s past departure time. FlightBoard shows the gate is B3. While I’ve got plenty of time to make it there, I run anyway. Long story short, I make the flight with time to spare. I’m the only guy on the plane who’s happy that it’s running behind schedule.

Before we take off, I use the Hertz app to book a car in Cleveland, and the Marriot app to book a Springfield Suites hotel in Akron. My Google Maps app shows that the hotel is roughly 2/3 of the way along the preferred route to my meeting in Canton, so I’ll have just a 30-minute drive in the morning.

Yes, it was short night but the iPhone alarm roused me on time, the Waze app found me the fastest route and informed me (always with a half mile advance notice) about police locations, objects on the road, and such. And Gas Buddy found me a place for a final “bio break” and energy drink just before my destination.

It all worked out OK and the client was delighted. Five years ago, this happy ending would have been impossible. Embrace your apps business people.

Should Your Business Go the Way of Google+?

Another great article from my good friend, speaker and social media guru, Dave Nelsen. 

He's so smart!!

On a single day in early March, two compatriots independently sent me different articles about Google+. The story from CNN Money was titled, “Google+ is about to be broken up.” The piece from The Independent (a UK publication) was titled, “Google Plus might be dead, as ‘Streams’ and ‘Photos’ take its place.”

As a devoted Apple fan I find it rather odd to be helping tout Google, Apple’s archenemy in mobile. Google ‘stole’ countless ideas from Apple’s iOS (aka iPhone operating system) for their Android operating system and today powers more than 6-times as many smartphones globally as Apple. Of course tablets (iPads, which also run iOS) are a different story, still favoring Apple.

For whatever reason - probably because everybody likes to see big successes (people or companies) stumble - these articles present the Google+ “evolution" as negative news. The Germans have a specific word for the secret delight that we all take in seeing another’s misfortunes: Schadenfreude.

But is Google+ really failing?

Perhaps you’re familiar with compete.com (aka an independent, third-party measurement service) that tracks unique monthly visitors to virtually all websites. According to compete.com between February 2014 and January 2015 (the most recent data available as I write) Google+ (plus.google.com) grew by almost 40% and now exceeds 65 million monthly users (about 20% of the US population).

Also according to compete.com, after peaking in March 2014 Facebook.com visitors actually declined by 4% through January 2015. It now looks like a definite down trend. Yes, according to these stats Facebook is still 2.5 times larger than Google+, but a year ago Facebook was more than 3.5 times bigger. Of course this is just one measure; it doesn’t tell the whole story (level of engagement, etc.). Still, Google+ doesn’t exactly look dead to me.

Breaking up is not the same thing as being dead. In fact, it looks like Facebook is breaking up too. Have you noticed that Facebook never integrated Instagram (a $1B purchase) or WhatsApp (a $22B acquisition)? At the same time Facebook now offers an enhanced news feed as a separate app (Paper) ... and their texting function as yet another separate app (Messenger). I now use these various apps far more than Facebook.com.

Facebook and Google+ are both doing essentially the same thing ... not because they’re failing, but because all businesses must adapt to the mobile revolution. They’re being driven by the tsunami of smart mobile devices, which now outsell traditional computers by 6-1 (and are pulling away). I predict that someday Google+ and Facebook will be held up together as models of leaders that made the early transition - from the web to mobile - that all winning companies will make to survive.

Google clearly cares deeply about succeeding in “social” (Google+ is their fourth try, following Orkut, Wave, and Buzz) and they have awesome market power. You would ignore Google+ (or the resulting collection of social/mobile/communication apps that evolve from it) at your company’s peril because Google also dominates mobile (Android), search and video, services that are together evolving under a new umbrella called Google “My Business.”

Remember that half of all Internet traffic starts with a search. Google will happily send traffic to your competitors if not to you. Even as an Apple fan, I plan to be Google’s friend too.

You can find more formal details here: 

Dialog Consulting 

To contact Dave directly:

Dave@DialogConsulting.com

Smart Stuff from Dave Nelsen

Dave Nelsen is so smart! You can read his columns in my ezine every month and believe me, you'll learn something every time. I do!

Handy Link Shorteners
by Dave Nelsen

Yesterday, a friend sent me a link to a video he thought would be of interest:

http://play.simpletruths.com/movie/10-rules-for-success-v/?cm_mmc=ExactTarget-_-FR-_-11.02.12-_-GOLSmovie&j=23707&e=JohnQPublic@gmail.com&l=3516_HTML&u=1034392&mid=7001668&jb=20

Since this was in an email message, it was easy enough to click, but beyond being big and ugly, there’s a simpler and more powerful way to share links. This is especially valuable when we’re sharing verbally, or otherwise require more concise communication. Twitter anyone? This link 

alone (without any accompanying message) is 177 characters, far beyond Twitter’s strict 140-character limit.

Interestingly, much of the information in the URL is tracking data that is not required to reach the destination site. Notice that roughly 1/3 of the way into the address there’s a question 

mark. After that the information is purely optional. You don’t need the embedded date, email address, click source, etc., to reach the site. The following link will get you there just as well:

http://play.simpletruths.com/movie/10-rules-for-success-v

Still that’s a bit long for Twitter and a lot to communicate verbally, so we also have link shorteners. These services are provided by Facebook, Twitter, su.pr, tinyurl.com (a surprisingly long name in a short business) and many others. My favorite is bit.ly.

These services create short addresses that automatically redirect to our longer addresses. On 

the bit.ly website (also known as bitly.com if an address ending in ‘.ly’ freaks you out) I paste my long link in the upper right corner where it says ‘Paste a link here...’ and voila! up pops my new 

short link:

http://bit.ly/RGFv4P

Note that the letters are case sensitive but there are just 6 of them; nice and easy. Wait, it 

gets better. You can customize these links with easy-to-remember names. For one purpose oranother, I do this almost every week. 

For example, as a public speaker, I frequently share the address of my speaker demo video 

posted on blip.tv (a clean, professional video sharing site with several advantages over YouTube). Here is the link in its native format: 

 blip.tv/social-media-for-business/dave-nelsen-social-media-speaker-and-consultant-5831867

That’s a lot to type (or to place on a business card). So after shortening the address with bit.ly, I click ‘Customize’ in the first pop-up box and change the address to: www.bit.ly/meet_dave (note the underscore character between the words to create the appearance of a ‘space’ - nice for readability).

That’s very cool but it gets even better because bit.ly tracks how many clicks you get. Just click the ‘i’ (for information) that appears as you hover over a given link in your bit.ly dashboard and you’ll be able to see the click frequency. This is especially handy when sharing a link with a 

single individual - you’ll know if they’ve clicked or not. 

There is one last piece of this puzzle. Links can be encoded so that they are read automatically 

by a Quick Response (QR) Reader App on a smartphone. Shorter links encode more cleanly. The original (long) link to my video encodes as shown on the left, whereas the shortened version encodes as shown on the right.

 

As you can see, the QR Code on the right is simpler and therefore easier to scan. This makes it printable at a smaller size, more practical, say, on a business card. 

So next time you want to share a link, and even track the clicks, use one of these handy link shorteners and maybe also a QR Code. 

By the way, the emailed video from my friend who’s still using the long links is excellent. It’s a 3-minute reminder about the 10 simple truths for achieving your goals. Use one of the three links I’ve provided to access it yourself. I think I know which one you’ll try.

You can find more formal details here: 

wesocialize.biz 

To contact Dave directly:

dave@wesocialize.biz

Dave Nelsen, Social Media Guru

Dave Nelsen is scary smart about social media. My brain's about to explode after he spoke to my two Vistage groups this week! If your company needs help in this area he's your guy.

 

Dave has a column in my Ezine every month. Sign up now to receive my monthly newsletter and never his is freaky-good advice!

Networking and Social Media

The next MIKKI & FRIENDS TELESEMINAR is on

NETWORKING AND SOCIAL MEDIA
on October 23, 2009 at 12:00 Noon (CST)
Register with the button on the left.

Mikki Williams, CSP on Networking

Networking is the ultimate contact sport. It's the success skill for sales people, managers, top executives, and for anyone who wishes to get ahead personally and professionally. In this era of networking through social media it is important to be cognizant of human networking as well. To be successful you must understand the value proposition of both. Relearn some simple and creative techniques to make an impact and develop mutually beneficial relationships, then apply these critical skills for fun and profit!

and

Samantha Hoffman on Social Media

More and more large companies are using social media to stir up interest in their products or services, and it's working to their advantage. But for the small business it's essential. Learn about social media to decide what's right for you and your company. For the small business without a website a blog is a powerful tool to create an Internet presence and create interest. Use Twitter to promote a product or service. and to reach new customers. Log onto Facebook to connect with your customers or friends. For a small investment of your time social media can help you to reap big benefits in promoting your business.