Have just added the first in a series of articles on my use of PersonalBrain. Here is the first on Thought Types.
Browsing Posts published by David C. Buchan
Oh dear! Cossie’s wife gave away 200 videos of his collection without permission. It proved a trigger for some self reflection and a wonderful, enlightening story. Collections are bits and pieces. What do we really choose to take ownership for?
Two weeks ago I realised I had misplaced my Sandisk Cruzer 32GB USB drive. Confident there was no critical data on it I chalked it up to experience and purchased a replacement, the remarkable Sandisk Cruzer Blade 16GB. Why not buy a replacement that is 1/4 the physical dimensions of something you’ve just lost.
Yesterday, when ironing a pair of trousers I found my 32GB USB. It had been through the washing machine, hung outside all day in a wet pocket and then been passed over by a hot iron.
Not confident of success I inserted it into a computer and all my data was there.
I’ve since done 24 hours of write testing (10 complete passes) using the eHow instructions for testing USB drives and it passed. Truly amazing. Now, where did I put it?
Do you have business cards in a nice holder on your desk? Where else?
I’ve just taken delivery of 1, 000 new business cards. Here is where have mine and where I think you should have yours. After all, what is the cost of missing business or a new relationship because there is no card to hand.
- In the business card holder on your desk (that’s the obvious one).
- In your business card dispenser — carry it with you alongside your purse/wallet. Holds more cards and in perfect condition.
- In your purse/wallet — check these regularly and replace any that are tatty.
- In you car’s glovebox — for when you get to a networking event and run out of cards.
- In your laptop bag — you never know who else you’ll met when at a client’s doing work.
- In your business card holder (the one with pockets for cards) — because you always have it with you so that you can hand out cards of people you know when making referrals (You don’t? Perhaps you should think about doing so).
- In your folio that you use to take notes.
- In your iPhone/iPad protective cover if it has a place for cards.
- In the back of any name tag holders you wear at regular events.
- In your jacket pockets — as long as you remember to take them out before dry cleaning.
You may be thinking I’ve only got 250 cards as that’s all that comes in a box. Order more. The fewer you have the lower the chance you’ll hand them out. In the back of your mind is “I’ve only got a few. I have to make them count. Perhaps I don’t hand this one out.” Print economies of scale mean 1,000 costs less than 2 x 250.
It took me 5 minutes to distribute my cards as I’ve described above. 200/1,000 now stored within easy reach. There may be more places. Think outside the (business card delivery) box.
This morning I was asked to join BranchOut via Facebook. It’s a tool to assist networking and I’ve joined but don’t know how long I’ll stay. In theory, the more people you are connected to, the greater the opportunity to provide and receive networking referrals. While the theory is great there are practical considerations.
- One more place for you to keep your profile up to date – old information does not facilitate good referrals.
- The same people tend to connect to each other. Outside of LinkedIn (the grandaddy of them all) how many other people does the network bring in and is the extra maintenance time worth it?
BranchOut has facebook integration and that can’t be ignored. I’ll look at it and see what happens. ReferralKey is the same. Ultimately what you get out of these tools is what you have the time to put in. Online professional networks help you find people to talk to. They are not a substitute for conversation.
The social media (twitter, facebook, LinkedIn) space can be confusing for many people in business. It is a new paradigm and picking the start point is difficult. To assist I’ve created a map of this new space as I see it. As you navigate around you’ll see the what, benefits, misconceptions, measurement and activity of each.
If you can’t see anything you may need to expand it by clicking the small down arrow shown. Click on a title (a thought in PersonalBrain terms – the underlyinng display technology here) to see more. You can’t break anything so click away. The top half shows navigation and the bottom half additional links or downloads.
It is very easy to dismiss these technologies as irrelevant or as three (or more) things I need to learn and don’t have the time for. As you move around the map above you will begin to note that many aspects are similar. I’m not saying understand one and you understand them all, but I am saying that if you take the time to learn and play you will find most of what you learn is transferable to another platform.
Each platform has a list of its key differentiating factors (What’s inside?), common misconceptions (how many of these have you been thinking), a longer list of benefits, an idea of the metrics available for measurement and finally a list of common activities a business might undertake.
It has been a month since I read The Secret to Digital Sanity by Shelley Hayduk, one of PersonalBrain’s regular authors. In the article she discusses the difference between capture tools such a PersonalBrain or Evernote and flow tools of which twitter and facebook are examples. The latter two deliver information not designed to be captured.
I’ve been following her ideas and have found the realisation that I don’t need to read every tweet or facebook post very relaxing. If I miss a few days of tweets it is now common for me to swipe through all but the last 24 hours without any guilt. And, importantly without any major loss of information.
If there is something I need to capture or spend more time with then I use Twitterlator’s integration with Instapaper to save the link for later processing into PersonalBrain. A secondary reason for flicking things to Instapaper is that I find reading web pages on my iphone annoyingly slow — the loading delay interrupts my flow.
So at the risk of me now interrupting your flow take a few minutes to read Shelley’s ideas on digital flow to keep yourself sane in the digital noise that now constantly surrounds us.
I’ve just been reading some of the excellent marketing posts appearing on the 360 Results blog. Useful RSS feeds like this one get added straight into my Google Reader account…well sometimes. A RSS feed by the way is a list of all blog posts on a website. By subscribing to the RSS feed the news from multiple sites come to you instead of you going to all of them.
Many people, including 360 Results, have a link to their RSS feed (either RSS as text or an industry standard icon from feedicons.com) that gives what appears to be a page full of random text. What I want to do is immediately add the feed to my feed reader.
With a link directly to the feed, I have to copy the URL, open my feed reader, click add subscription, paste and click ok.
Or with a bit of setup work and a Google feedburner account such as exists here on Quantum Gardener the resulting page is nicely formatted and has one-click links to add the feed to most of the popular on-line readers. See what our RSS feed looks like at http://feeds.feedburner.com/quantumngardener. Isn’t that more inviting?
In a world of competing information the 10 minutes of setup to help your readers gain access to your news is worthwhile. And yes, I’ve added the 360 Results blog. The content is worth the extra steps.
When you first hear about someone’s business do you pigeon hole them?
Getting beyond the pigeon hole should be your aim. Ask questions and listen. It is always worth it.
I’ve just set up another blog (more on that to come) and have been holding back from writing. It didn’t feel like the right place to put down any thoughts. Yesterday I got the look and feel as I wanted it and thought that perhaps blogging on-screen is just like writing on paper. You need the right material. In this case it took finding the perfect WordPress theme. And just like my Waterman fountain pen combining with my Moleskine notebook, I’m going shopping this morning for a better keyboard.
