Nothing like coming home from a long weekend and not having the internet for a few days! It was a week of catching up here at Breaking Even Communications. Also, almost as if to drive me crazier, my computer hardware began failing me. First my printer, then my mouse, and finally my keyboard (well, the ‘5’ key) all bit it within 72 hours. Still, I managed to accomplish a few things this week.

Tweetdeck: the software with a dark background that's lighting up my life.
I installed Tweetdeck on my computer, and have been kicking myself for not doing it sooner.
To be fair, there is a lot of free software that I rely on almost daily: Google Reader, Feedburner, Joomla!, WordPress… Somehow installing another piece of software to manage my social networking stuff seemed ridiculous.

Then for some reason, I began noticing I was hearing about Tweetdeck….a lot. I finally thought I’d do it. Install one more piece of software to make my life theoretically easier…
I’m starting to organize the people I follow into categories (like ‘fellow nerds’, which thankfully no one can see) and you know what? Following hundreds of people on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn now seems much more manageable! Sure the software is a little buggy like my Twitter friend Robert Palmer pointed out but hey, it works much better than keeping it straight in my brain.
I attended a Hubspot webinar about the science of social media.
If you do anything with internet marketing (or as they refer to it, inbound marketing), you can’t ignore Hubspot. They are a great resource not only as their own site but as a community of people around the site.
They periodically offer free webinars and attending my first this past week about the science of social media, led by Dan Zarrella. I thought it was a pretty interesting talk (and about 12,000 other people thought it was interesting enough to attend as well). While some of the principles were very general (memes and crowd behavior), I did also learn a few tips like you can use bit.ly to not only shorten links but track stats on them. (Ah, that’s why people use it!) and was finally inspired to create a FriendFeed account.
There’s always more to learn and taking the time to professionally develop once in awhile is good for all small business owners.
I presented as part of a panel for the Ellsworth Chamber of Commerce’s Eggs and Issues seminar.
When the Ellsworth Chamber was talking about doing a seminar about electronic communications and business, I said I’d be happy to help. A small group of us over the last two months have been sending notes back and forth coordinating our presentations (nothing more embarrassing than presenting the same information as the person before you because you didn’t discuss it beforehand!) The big day was early this Tuesday morning.
About forty people turned up for breakfast and to listen to four of us talk about different aspects of the internet and business (I talked about social media). It was a good group and there will be follow ups over the course of the next few months concentrating on each specific topic. I did the usual giving out of business cards and trying to be a non-boring presenter so here’s hoping it translates to some business!
And now it’s off to the White Mountains for some skiing. Have a good weekend everyone!

Need marketing help?

X