Tag: SMUG

Announcing the Chancellor’s Choice Awards

One of my basic approaches to social media is to maximize what can be done for free. I do this partly to prove a point; to eliminate excuses by showing how much you can do without spending a penny (and without requiring the support of IT).

And of course the other reason is: I’m cheap.

Having seen a recent article by Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal with a list of his favorite iPhone apps, and having just spent money on an iPhone application for the first time last weekend, I thought it would be good to create the Chancellor’s Choice Awards.

Chancellor’s Choice recipients are social media tools that have caused me to pry out the wallet and flip over the debit card to get the security code…to actually spend money on social media. These aren’t annual awards; I’ll present them whenever I buy something in social media and find it worth the cost. And they’re not subject to vote: they’re just my personal opinion (not that of my employer or the SMUG student body.) I welcome your nominations or contrary opinions, however. Leave them in the comments.

The Chancellor’s Choice award also carries no cash value, and there’s no lovely statuette or red carpet media gathering. If the recipients would care to offer tear-filled speeches in response, they can send me a link to their uploaded video, and I’ll update the award post to embed it.

The first Chancellor’s Choice award will be presented tonight. If you have non-free social media tool nominees to suggest, share them in the comments below.

SMUG is Global

One of the benefits of self-hosted WordPress is the ability to run Google Analytics. The statistics package on WordPress.com is nice, but in Google Analytics you can get much more in-depth information about your blog visitors.

Here’s a map from Google Analytics, which shows the location of visitors to SMUG during March (click to enlarge):

 

The Global Reach of SMUG
The Global Reach of SMUG

While we definitely have some gaps in countries that have not yet enrolled SMUGgles, it’s neat that we’ve had visitors from every continent except Antarctica.

I’ll have a future post with more about Google Analytics as an advantage of self-hosted WordPress, but when I saw this map I thought it would be fun to share.

Thanks to SMUGgles across the globe for your participation!

Facebook 201: Secret Groups as Your Free Small Business Intranet

I have a friend who has become seriously SMUG and wants to use Facebook and other social media tools in her home-based marketing business. She has an organization involved in selling stuff, and wants to be able to communicate with people in her marketing network, which is widely dispersed geographically.

In essence, she would like to create an intranet without the corporate firewall.

If her team members all had a company email address (e.g. personname@companyname.com), Yammer would be a great solution, and you can read all about it in the Yammer curriculum here at SMUG.

But that’s not the case in many small or home-based businesses, nor is it for my friend.

Let’s call her “Terri” (since that’s her name). One of “Terri’s” concerns is that when she does business-oriented work on Facebook, the things she posts get all mixed in with her personal Facebook feed. And while her business activities may not be super secret, she would like to keep personal and work activities somewhat segregated.

A Secret Group in Facebook can be a good answer in this case.

To use this, though, everyone in your group needs to be a Facebook “friend” — at least until you have invited them into your secret group, although there is a workaround, as I will explain below.

Here are the three steps to creating your free small business intranet, assuming you have already created your Facebook account. (You have done that, haven’t you?)

Continue reading “Facebook 201: Secret Groups as Your Free Small Business Intranet”

SMUG Speed Solution (I Think)

In an earlier post I lamented some issues we had been having with the SMUG service, in that pages were taking inordinately long to load: sometimes as long as 45 seconds, and occasionally even having some “timeouts.” Not the kind of timeouts modern parents give their children in lieu of spankings, but the kind that made me want to spank my hosting service provider.

Bill Ferris (@billfer) offered some good pointers in response, and suggested that I call my hosting provider to see if we could clarify the problem. But then, having applied some of his tips (and deactivating a couple of plug-ins), the response times seemed to get somewhat better.

So, like the typical male who cancels the doctor appointment when he starts feeling a little better, or who just learns to live with a little nagging health concern instead of getting to the root of the problem, I let the situation continue.

Yesterday, though, I had the blog equivalent of an out-of-hospital-cardiac arrest. When I tried to visit SMUG I got an “unable to create database connection error” message, and got a similar message when I tried to access my WordPress dashboard. The WordPress error message suggested I might want to contact my hosting service.

So I called GoDaddy, and as often happens the problem went away while I was on hold. But the friendly customer service guy checked into it further with those on the technical side, and apparently there had been some problems with the server on which SMUG is hosted, and they were in the process of solving them.

When I Tweeted about the issue, @paulacassin said:

@LeeAase YES! It’s not blindingly fast, but 3-4secs. Much better than before. 🙂 Looks like they tweaked something the right way

…and Monty Flinsch (@mflinsch) echoed the assessment.

So it appears we may have solved the problem. To confirm it, I would appreciate it if you would leave a comment indicating the approximate page load time you’re experiencing, and what kind of Internet service you have (i.e. T1, cable, dial-up, etc.)

I hope it’s not blindingly fast, because I would hate to be responsible for vision loss, but it would be nice if it could be just a little blurry, like Michael Johnson in the 200 meters.