I forgot my phone charger!!

Ok, I admit it...that title makes me laugh.

Seriously though, has this happened to you? It has DEFINITELY happened to me. Not only has that happened to me, but sometimes, I've been about to leave the house, when I realize my phone charge is low. So at that point I have to decide, I either:
Plug my phone in and leave it home to charge, the downside is that it means I'm unreachable when I'm out, but when I'm back I can check my messages.
Grab the plug and then plug it into my car via the power converter I have so that I can charge it on the move.
If I want to walk? I might just carry the cord and plug it in wherever I end up too..."Can I plug my phone in please?"
I don't know about you but I don't really like asking to use the electricity when I go somewhere...not really a big deal in a cafe, but if I'm going to someones house? Or to one of the places where my kids take classes maybe? Not my thing.

So when I saw this cool thing called an nPower PEG that not only already exists but is available now, I JUMPED RIGHT ON BOARD. It is just about the coolest thing ever as far as I'm concerned...it is a device that I plug my phone into, and carry around. Then all I have to do is walk around. It uses the kinetic energy from my movement to CHARGE MY PHONE.

Can you really ask for anything more? I didn't think so...but wait, I have something for you too...if you look for the picture of the device on MobilizeMom.me then you will see that there is a FREE SHIPPING code for you to use ;-) I had to share that with all my lovely readers...enjoy!

Please come back and tell me if/how it changes your life if you do decide to go get one... :-)

Forget about Teachers, Forget About Books, No More Stamps OR Address Books!!!

I've been using this service called SendOutCards for some time now, it is a website where you can load your contacts once, and from there you can design and send them real old school cards in the mail... for me it has been great for keeping in touch with Grandma, particularly because you can upload pictures (of kids in this case) and have them printed directly on the card. This saves SO MUCH TIME AND STRESS!! Just look at these two scenarios and the effort to accomplish each...

OLD SCHOOL:

• Take picture
• Print Picture by
• Printing it at home with your printer 
• Ordering it online and picking up in a store
• Bringing the film canister to a photo place and having them print it...be prepared to wait!
• Collect picture and move to next step..
• Bring Photo Home
• Go to store to buy a card 
• (or make one)
• Find or go to post office to get stamps 
• At home, assemble all the parts...photo in card, stamp on envelope
• Find Address book, write address on card (make sure you don't mess up!)
• Put it in the mailbox 
• or if you don't have the stamps to the post office to mail it there

NEW SCHOOL (SOC):

• Take picture (digital)
• Load it onto computer
• Login to SOC 
• Select card
• Select picture
• Type message
• SEND

So you get my drift right? It's  so so much easier, especially if you have a Chromebook you can use anywhere and you don't even have to go home to get the pictures on the computer...and it allows techies like me to stay in touch with the non-techies in a way that they understand, via paper. If you are interested I'm adding a link to my sidebar so that it can always easily be accessed there.

Healthy Rewards Program

Have you installed EveryMove yet on your mobile device? It is pretty slick, it works along with a variety of other tools (FitBit for example) and applications to track physical activity, where it goes beyond these though is that you actually earn points towards real rewards! You can earn an adventure (I signed up to earn points towards time at an Adventure Park) or any variety of other things. It seems like a cool way to both promote your stuff (by offering the rewards) and to earn stuff you might not otherwise pay for, or not pay as much for. I figure for the promotion benefits what you get is people who WANT what you have seeing what you have to offer whenever they use the program. This means they will either have a feeling of accomplishment when they get your offering that it will be affiliated with (warm fuzzies) or it means they might not reach their goal, and decide they want it anyway, without the discount and just go get it themselves. I suppose there is a tiny risk that someone might be angry that they did not earn a reward and might hold themselves back but I hope that is the minority! I think I had better go get some exercise so I can get some points towards that Adventure Park! 

Finding Focus

When you are a blogger, for yourself or for a company, one of the best things that you can do to increase the traffic to your site is to find the people interested in your topic. Yes, I said topic. This has by far been my biggest problem in this world of blogging as my interests span the globe in things I am paying attention to and wanting to write about. I keep this blogger site up for technology tips and post when I feel I have something to share here. I also have one that is focused on Mom stuff, a garden site for all that Garden Stuff, and of course I use my KristinBennett.com for just about everything else, it is kind of the smorgasboard of me. Why I do all this is so that I can use the KristinBennett.com to collect all my content, and then I can parse it out or rewrite it to go into the topic specific blogs when needed...how do you go about doing this? How many sites do you have?

SOPA

Power of Social Media!!!

Today was awesome!! I was at home all day due to the snowpocalypse here in Seattle (I do NOT claim to know how to drive in the snow we Seattlites are notorious for claiming). It was last night I started hearing the murmurings of Wikipedia blacking out their site today...then I heard about it from RedditTroubledTeens, well saw it on facebook when the profile picture was changed to this:

I followed suit and started sharing only the relevant links as I saw them...my favorite being the YouTube video where Ben Huh makes a cameo appearance ... "The day the Lolcat died".

It was an absolute blast to experience the solidarity across the web, Google, Wikipedia and more all directing people to contact their representatives (and I did!).

Eventually I got a little distracted and was spreading some Troubled Teen stories around when I got the NYT Afternoon Update and the story that even a co-founder of SOPA was withdrawing support. After reading about that I joyfully scrolled through my facebook newsfeed via my iphone posting the news article in the comments of those just catching on that SOPA and PIPA are a real threat.

Maria Cantwell has posted something about #OPEN as she called it...something bipartisan that is better...we will see.

Now I will be working on using this experience to learn about spreading the important news I have to share about Mitt Romney's Troubled Teen Industry connections and how the kids at these programs keep dying that sort of thing... Inspiring day, absolutely inspiring.

Much love to Wikipedia, Ben Huh (LolCats), Google, and everyone else who joined in this movement of online occupation.

In Solidarity - Kristin Bennett

Crowdfunding

I just started my first attempt at this thing called crowdfunding today, if you are not familiar with it, it is when you put your idea/project/business up on a crowdfunding site, and people can invest in micro installments to reach your goal. Like the redwoods you see in the picture, it is based on the fact that we are not alone in the world, we are all here together, and the well being of each one of us is a benefit to us all.

It was at my leadership training course that this value was really instilled in me, the fact that we are all connected. Redwoods are extremely tall (that's an understatement) but the roots actually aren't very deep. They manage to stand tall because of the way their roots spread and intertwine to keep themselves and every other tree standing. I'm not a redwood but I'm definitely a redhead and this is an experiment to see if I can get the support that I need to do good. 

So it is in this way, that small donations from a lot of people, can lead to big things.

My first campaign is to fund the redesign of a site that has no funding otherwise, you can see the campaign HERE. Please check it out and let me know what kind of big idea you would like to see get funded in this way! 

Defining Your Blogs Niche

Now this is Marketing! by Russ and Lori, on Flickr

When you decide to start a blog and have the intention of it becoming a high traffic go-to place for people, it is generally good to focus down on a niche, or target market if you will. When you do this, the quality of people you will attract to the site is much higher, and since it is deliberate, you do not need to spend as much time doing it.

I think the best example of this from the work I have done is a site that I created, using the Ning platform, for Mother's diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. It was a niche that I found accidentally, a mom I was chatting with mentioned not having a place to go to talk to other moms with MS and when I did a pretty thorough search online I agreed! There seemed to be nothing there. I saw parents with MS, I saw Parenting forums within MS sites, and that was about it! Later I saw it as a small sub group of mothering sites, but there wasn't a high number of members, probably because the moms at the particular sites were already pretty filtered down to that sites niche.

So back to the story, the site launched and it has been booming ever since, it's been mentioned 2 times in national publications, once in a magazine and once in a newsletter, and also in 2 local publications, a women's magazine and a local chapter mailing.

Easiest way to find your niche is to look around you, talk to the people you know. Think of all of these things and hopefully it'll come to you.

If it still doesn't come to you then just start blogging, as much as you can, and after a week or two (more if you haven't written much) look back over what you have written and see if you notice any trends in your writing. Once you do, you can focus on that.

Obviously if you have a business that does something in particular like a bookstore you probably already have a niche pretty well carved out, your local area + books, but think about what kind of books, what kind of people, maybe it will be about mystery books and tea (might want to serve/sell it too if you do that!) and cats if your store has one of those cats in the window that watches over everything. Something like that gives you both flexibility and also a focus for your blog to fall back on.

So what is your niche?

Finding GREAT Photos For Your Site

Photo by stefg74 on Flickr

I have found myself talking to people on both sides of what I'm about to describe at lot recently. This includes both photographers who want their work to be put to use as well as people who are not photographers who simply want some high quality photo's on their site.

There are places that you can get awesome free photos! For example the photo above was obtained from here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/freeuse/ which is a group on Flickr where photographers who want to share their photos can post them. They do for the most part all require that we photo appreciators give them credit where credit is due however! For example the photo above is by a user called stefg74 and if you click on the photo you can see more work by this photographer that they have on Flickr.

You can even search the group for particular pictures! For example, I got stung by a bee today. I like to blog about such eventful things (especially since I'm 'able' due to my finger that got stung not swelling up). I didn't have a good photo though, I suppose I could have thought about it, found a way to photograph my finger or hunt for a bee to photograph but no, I decided to search for a bee picture instead and you can see how I used it HERE. I got to write about my experience without worrying about taking the perfect picture for it!!

Likewise with this post, I just wasn't as specific, I looked at the photos and just found one that I really liked! I love coffee so this one seemed highly appropriate (thanks stefg74!!).

If you ever have questions about if it is ok to use a picture I recommend contacting the person who posted it!

How do I enhance my online presence?

If your goal is to be an online expert in anything there are a few sites that I recommend. There are exceptions and for some industries there are some specific sites you want to be sure to be a part of, but here are a few basics that are relevant for virtually all industries. I have linked to my profile in the first link of each so you can see some of what can be done, the second link is to the site itself and will most likely direct you to sign up if you haven't already.

Quora :: Quora.com is a site that is a place where people ask questions, and answer questions. Be sure to sign up as an individual, not a business as that is frowned upon. When you sign up, sign up to follow anything that you either know a lot about or are interested in. Once you do this, click on "Home" (left part of menu in top right) and then select the "Open Questions" to see some questions that you can potentially answer. After this look through the site, and feel free to contribute any wisdom you have to share on questions you see that you can add some value to. Have fun!

Klout :: Klout.com is a site that measures your influence, not so much of an influence builder per-say, it can let you know where you stand and give you a number of variables you can use to create goals to increase your influence. It measures things like the number of followers/friends you have on various social networking sites as well as what happens to the content you post. For example if your content is regularly "liked" "shared" or "retweeted" then your scores will go up. If your goals include being a go-to resource for information this is a great way to see where you are at. Be sure to connect to all of the various networks you are a part of to get a more accurate score, you can also sign up for the ones you aren't already a part of though if you don't plan to use them there isn't much point to this.

The following two sites are a little bit different in that they have first and foremost the specific purpose of growing business or finding employees/employment. They are also used, like the first two, as a way to boost our network and/or reputation however, let me explain:

LinkedIn :: LinkedIn.com is a site that you have hopefully heard of! It is a place to stay in touch with your past co-workers and look for jobs. Beyond this, many people don't know that it is also a place to build on your network, knowledge and reputation in a given field. There are groups that you can join and you can also write articles that will get your name out there in the topic you cover. When you join these groups it will also give you a relatively niche crowd to pose any questions related to the group topic. This is nice because you are asking (or answering!) people who know what is being talked about, much more direct way to get/give information than using your facebook friends for example.

Biznik :: Biznik.com is a social network for small business owners that is actually about networking not just in line but IN PERSON. When you look at my page, what you see when you look at the groups I'm a part of is probably going to be totally different than the groups you see when you are logged into your account/profile. This is because the groups I am a part of for the most part are local to Seattle, and likewise unless you too are in Seattle, you will see groups local to you so long as you have properly filled out your profile. I find these meetings very useful for meeting local business owners to do business with and to share/learn from each others experiences. To boost your reputation in this field you can, like linkedin write articles and participate in discussions, and you also can organize events in your field! The benefit of this is that you can share your knowledge to people who want to learn (potentially gaining clients!) and also design networking events to your liking.

There are lots and lots of other sites for networking and they can all be used to boost your reputation, these four I think are most relevant to EVERY business owner though. If you are interested in what I recommend for your industry please ask in the comments and I will let you know as soon as possible in a later blog post!

How To Get Honest "Likes" From Customers

One reason that you may want to create a page on Facebook is to measure and increase the connections with your customers. This can be done as easily as adding a line to your receipt, email, invoice, or other relevant document or even a sign by your cash register if you are in a store saying something like:

"Thank you for your business, if you "Like" us please let us know!"

(search for "StrawberryTech Tips" on Facebook.com)

What I like about this more passive way of getting "Likes" is that it is an ask that is based on the customer actually taking the action based on if they actually like you/your business. This means that the quality of likes is high and those are the likes most likely to stick around and lead to referrals etc. Notice that instead of writing the url which if on a piece of paper is a lot of typing I gave a search phrase. Before doing this be sure you check and confirm that the particular search phrase you use isn't going to confuse anyone by producing results that are too similar. For example if you search for someones first name, chances are that many people will show up which is even often the case if you use their last name too if it is a common one! Be careful about what phrase you use.

This is a way of asking in a non-manipulative way for customers to acknowledge they like doing business with you publicly. Often it does take asking, only a select few will go out of their way on their own to remember to find and like someone on facebook.

BEFORE YOU DO ANY OF THIS...
Be sure to create your page on facebook, you can do this by logging into facebook, scrolling to the very bottom of the page, clicking "Create a Page" and following the steps, on the step where it asks you to invite your friends I recommend unchecking the box and instead finishing the page, revising, and then selectively letting people know. This way you can ensure that your address, description, picture/logo, and everything else is there before people are invited to the site and you get flooded with messages letting you know it isn't.

Have you used any of the techniques shared here to ask for likes? Did you learn anything? Please share below if so!

Asked to "Like" an Empty Page?

Wow, it's getting worse each day.

These free classes encouraging small businesses to join the herds and just get on facebook and get people to like you are really messing things up.

Today I was invited to an event, that was announcing the launch of a new facebook page which:

1. Was for a company I knew nothing about
2. Didn't have a link to this new facebook page
3. Had no information about the company/service on the page (which I eventually found through the person's page that invited me)

This completely defeats the purpose of creating a page on Facebook.

Creating a page on facebook, twitter, or any other social media network needs to be done for a reason, as a step towards a goal. Sometimes this is something as simple as to step up brand awareness, increase sales, or to spread news or information of some sort.

Just collecting likes to collect likes without having information on the page is like asking everyone in the world for a high five without having 'done' anything to warrant it. They'll do it probably, but it doesn't mean as much without any meaning or goals behind it.

MySpace sold for $35 million...down from $580. Ouch.

It sure is interesting to watch the trends over the years with social media. I remember when MySpace was kind of cool, and then quickly got trashy. I remember seeing way to much skin and way too much skins too (referring to the tacky designs that people were applying).

I'm wondering if it will ever be more of a viable product for promoting more musicians and other media or if it is really over with.

What do you think?