Companies encourage their hard working employees to reap the benefits of work-life balance, to go on vacation, and take a break from the office every now and then to recharge.
For some of us, getting out of the office isn’t difficult but for the 15% of workers that forfeited their vacation days last year— it is. What makes leaving the office so difficult? One answer that comes to mind is the avalanche of emails that you receive when you get back to the office. Opening your Outlook to find 50+ or even 100+ unread emails waiting for your response can be overwhelming.
Fortunately there’s HitMeLater.com, a cool website created by Philip Kaplan, that lets you hit the snooze button on your emails. Simply forward an email from your inbox to 24@hitmelater.com and they’ll resend the email to you 24 hours later.
Even more helpful, you can swap out the number 24 to any other number or day. For example, if I want an email to be sent back to me two hours later, I just forward the email to 2@hitmelater.com. How easy is that?
So the next time you feel like your drowning in a sea of emails, try HitMeLater to see if it lightens up your workload. I know I will.
As an undergrad, I played video games during the day, partied hard all night, and just barely had enough time for my classes. My future career was the last thing on my mind. I figured that if I got straight A’s, I’ll eventually find a job that I like and that pays well. If this is you, boy are you mistaken.
The time to think about your career is now. Monster.com and your career center help you apply for jobs. Vault.com helps you research companies. But there’s nothing out there that helps you find out what you want to do career-wise or that helps you get there. Furthermore, most career sites are so boring that you would rather go back to work or homework than to spend time on the site. That’s why we created FD Career.
Our career approach is simple, yet unique – live your life as if it were a video game. Think about the last video game you played. Did you just sit around idly waiting for things to come to you, or did you explore the map, slay demons, and gain new abilities and features? There is a direct relation to real life. Think about what you did last week? Did you sit around, watch TV, and play video games, or are you a go-getter who constantly meets new people, reads articles and books, and looks for every way to develop yourself personally and professionally?
In FD Career, every time you gain an internship, get a high GPA, or become a leader of an organization, you gain experience points and level-up. As you increase in level, you gain prestige, get new abilities and features, get access to new areas of the site, and are able to recruit with more prestigious firms. This is what we call the FD RPG.
What do you want to do with your career? If you want to be a Consultant, you can go on FD Career and choose the Path of Business. From there, you can take Quests to level-up in 5 different personal qualities:
Education – Knowledge in your field
Experience – Your ability to execute your knowledge
Leadership – Leading teams
Social – Your overall social influence
Initiative – Your motivation and drive to develop yourself
For example, an Experience Quest for a Consultant could be a business analysis quest. The user would have to solve a profitability problem that a company is having and submit their solutions online on our website. Our panel will judge your recommendations and give you experience points accordingly. A Social Quest could be to increase your social status and influence using Twitter. The quest could be to increase your number of followers to 100.
We plan on launching our first nation-wide competition this October. The competition will be to create a market penetration and product development strategy for a real life company. The winning team will be featured on our website and could be funded the money to execute their business plan.
The next time you’re watching TV or playing video games, ask yourself, “Isn’t there something more fun than this?” There is, and we have it at FD Career.
I have officially dumped YouTube. He was old, played out, and everyone got a piece of him. I moved on to a player that’s shiny and new. His name is Viddler.
I discovered Viddler from Demo Girl’s screencast on ididwork and didn’t think much of the player until I saw Viddler’s president, Rob Sandie, showcasing how you can customize your player.
We’re talking about customizing the shade and color of your player, a custom logo, and yes—you can even decide where your videos link to!
I’m all for customization and Viddler just took it to the next level. Here’s my custom logo in a recent video did for my company called “Sharing is Easy“. It’s not as cool as Rob’s. You won’t see a guy dancing in the background but it’s a start. 🙂
For an awesome step by step tutorial on how to customize your Viddler player, check out Alex Carpenter’s blog. He even has screenshots of other custom logos by Viddler creators.
Earlier this month, our company was invited to be guest speakers at Becky Carroll’s Marketing via New Media class at UCSD Extension. Carroll’s class focuses on how social media can leverage customer loyalty and engagement. In fact, the book that she uses in her course is Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff—a definite must read for any company looking to gain insight and engagement from their consumers.
With that said, we were definitely excited to meet her class (especially me since I’m a big fan of public speaking). We presented what Brickfish® was and how companies can use our platform to launch a social media advertising campaign. Below is the presentation that we shared with her class that night:
Again, special thanks to Becky Carroll and her students for letting us speak. You can learn more about how her students are embracing social media by reading her blog at Teaching Social Media.
By the way, if you’re attending the 2008 BlogWorld Conference, be sure to check out the Creating Customer Loyalty with Social Media panel as Carroll will be one of the moderators.
Every morning our team meets to discuss items we’ve been focusing on, what’s been completed, and projects we need extra time on. This week I wanted to try something different so I rallied a couple of my co-workers to try out ididwork.com. It’s a simple and easy-to-use web app that lets you keep a log of the work that you and your teammates have completed. With ididwork, we were able to view status updates from each member on our team which kept us in the loop during the day.
Fig. 1 Work categorized by tags.
In addition to microblogging our status updates, team members were able to analyze how much of their work was dedicated to a specific tag (see Fig. 1) and how much time was spent on a task. Employees can even send their work logs to managers for feedback and review. These reports can be exported into Excel or a PDF and you can edit your settings to automatically send a report to your manager as often as you like (i.e. weekly, every 2 weeks, etcetera). ididwork also has a graph that illustrates the number of entries your posted in a day or in a week (see Fig. 2).
Fig. 2 Number of Entries per Day.
The web app isn’t going to replace our morning meetings, but it helps us analyze how we can be more productive at work. For example, if ad hoc reports for clients make up 70% of my day, it would be a good idea to work with engineering on how to automate those reports.
For an awesome demo of ididwork.com, check out Demo Girl’s video tutorial below:
Would you use ididwork? If so, what would your tags be?
Special thanks to our friends at BatchBlue for creating BatchBook, an easy-to-use CRM software, that has literally saved us hours organizing our contacts and managing our communications with partners. Not only do they have a remarkable product, excellent customer service, but they have cool t-shirts too!
Special thanks to Jun Loayza, Chief Marketing Officer at Future Delivery, for this post on 12seconds. Don’t forget to check out his blog on Living the Startup Life.
12 seconds is not a lot of time for a lot.You can’t really watch a Youtube video, read a blog post, or even microwave a hot pocket (the entrepreneur’s food of choice).However, in today’s society where attention spans are short and the barriers to meet new people have significantly decreased, short busts of information and messaging are exactly what fill the gaps between the work we do at the office or when we’re stuck with writer’s block.
Enter 12seconds.tv.Think of it as the Twitter for YouTube.If you use Twitter, you know that this is a breeding ground for bloggers and startups to keep in touch, share ideas and information, and promote their products or brand.So it follows that 12seconds could potentially be used in the same way.
While browsing through my friend’s short impromptu videos I think to myself, “This is going to be the next Twitter!”… and I’ll tell you why:
12 seconds is perfect for bloggers who want to convey a simple burst of information
It easily syncs with your Twitter so that you automatically post your video link on your Twitter as soon as you record your vid
It doesn’t suffer from decision paralysis.On Youtube, you can create a video about ANYTHING.On 12Seconds, it greatly limits your decision making and makes you focus on one core theme for the vid.
For a while I wanted to be a “Youtube star.”We’ve all seen them, those people who have the weekly wrap-up show or some funny little sitcom that they post up every other day.However, I just don’t have the time, let alone the creativity and resources to become a star.Plus, it’s so saturated that even if I had good content, I just wouldn’t be discovered.This is why I’m so excited about 12Seconds!I have the opportunity to apply all that I’ve learned about what sticks with YouTube, Twitter, and blogging and apply it to 12Seconds.It’s brand new so there is no competition, I can stand out immediately, and I can be a pioneer in the types of 12Second vids that I have.
So how can you stand out at 12Seconds?Still a little early to tell, but here are my predictions:
Pick a topic and stick to it.Your friends read your blog or twitter because they’re your friends and are interested in you. People outside your network could care less about what you do on your own time.If you want a steady stream of subscribers, you need to become a thought leader on a topic.I predict something similar on 12Seconds.What kind of entertainment value you’re able to present to your viewer is up to your creativity and personality.
Start conversations.You’re not able to video reply someone on 12Seconds yet, but I’m sure you’ll be able to do that eventually.But, you are able to do it if you have the person’s Twitter.Just add the “@username” to your video’s title and you’ll reply to them via your Twitter account.
Use the blog widget.There are twitter, meebo, and flickr widgets, so why not use the 12Second widget?This is such a great way for you to personally interact with your readership.
I feel that anything right now that is targeting bloggers and providing them with a vehicle to get their message and personal brand out there is hitting at gold.Look at Twitter and Plurk.You can even take Tradevibes as a great example: if you provide a group of people with a tool to distribute their brand or product, the group of people will use it and run with it.
I predict that 12Seconds will be successful, so hurry up and get your username before someone takes it!See you on the channels…
* If you would like an invite to 12Seconds, feel free to reach out to me at jun (dot) Loayza (at) gmail.com
Today’s Guest Blogger is Erin from The State That I Am In. Erin currently teaches preschool special education and shares her thoughts on how she’s managed to incorporate social media with her students and their parents.
I became a blogger shortly after I got married, when I was finishing up graduate school.I’m not really sure why I started a blog then.I didn’t even read blogs at the time.An acquaintance had a blog, and it looked like fun to me.I’d always tried to keep a journal growing up, but I really hate my handwriting and have no patience for writing things out by hand.Plus, I think my thoughts are really important and people should want to read them!
I signed up for a blogger account and spent hours stressing over posting and changing colors and whatnot.I posted randomness about my life (I still do) and gradually began reading and commenting on other blogs.Eventually, I moved from blogger to typepad, from typepad to wordpress.com, and from wordpress.com to my very own self-hosted wordpress blog.I love writing on my blog and have gotten to know so many great people through it! Blogging has become my main hobby, but up until last year, I had never really thought that blogging could be more than a hobby.
At the beginning of the last school year, I became my building’s instructional technology facilitator.In addition to teaching my wee ones, it was my job to teach other teachers how to use the technology we had available to us.Funny how my blogging hobby had actually given me the skills to be qualified to do this.If you’ve ever worked with preschool teachers, you’ll find that they are generally afraid of technology.I actually had to show 10 teachers in my building how to set up and turn on their computers last year!
I knew it was going to be a tricky year.I was going to have to prove to the other teachers that using technology would be worth their time.While talking to another district teacher, I found out that she was starting a blog for her kindergarten students.The idea intrigued me, but I was hesitant at first.What were my preschool special education students – most of whom function at the level of a two-year-old – going to do with a blog?I decided to just go ahead and give it a try.If it didn’t work, it didn’t work.
I spent quite a bit of time on my home visits at the beginning of the year explaining to parents what a blog was.Some parents were naturally hesitant to have their child’s picture appear on the blog, but most agreed to try it.My first couple of posts were just summaries of our days at school with random pictures.As I played around more with the blog, I started adding slideshows, which were a huge, hit with the parents and my students!I also then got permission from every single parent to have his or her child appear on the blog.I loved having the blog as a way to bring families into the classroom, and my kids loved seeing themselves and their accomplishments.I was even able to record myself reading some of our favorite books so that the kids could listen to the story at home!
Overall, my classroom blog has been a huge success and I plan to do even more with it this coming school year.I now have other teachers in my building who are interested in blogging, and I get frequent e-mails from teachers across the country about how to get started.Blogging may have started out as just a hobby for me, but I now have a personal blog, a classroom blog, and a business website that includes a blog.Social networking tools, like blogging, are a great way to get to know people online, but they are also a great way to enhance your work life and build your business.
I work very hard to keep my personal and professional Internet lives separate.If you are interested in seeing my classroom blog or business site, please e-mail me at stateiamin1 [at] gmail [dot] com for the links!
