Helping your business to do more business
Over the past few months you'd probably have needed to be a member of a stone age tribe in the deepest indonesian jungle in order to have missed all the buzz around Twitter. The Wimbledon commentators have even been talking about it during their between game banter, it's certainly wormed it's way into popular culture relatively quickly!
While I'm not a big fan of social networking I eventually decided that I'd better take a look at this Twitter thing. So a couple of weeks ago I signed up and started tweeting (which is apparently the jargon for posting an entry on Twitter). I soon got fed up with the web interface on the main site which requires you to refresh the browser every so often in order to see if there are any new tweets, and so I set about looking for a desktop application that could run in the background while I work.
The first application I tried was Tweetr, which was OK but I did find it a little bit limiting. Firstly, I couldn't work out how to shorten a URL (which is a must when the character limit for a tweet is 140 characters) and secondly there was no spell checker. Normally I can spell pretty well but occasionally I get it wrong and when I do I like the 'comfort blanket' that applications like Outlook and Word give in that they can check your spelling for you (preferably as you type).
After about a week I'd had enough of Tweetr and looked again, this time I found a client called Twhirl which is a lot more sophisticated than Tweetr. I quickly discovered that it supports spell checking, albeit in American English - but that's better than nothing; I just need to remember it's a colour not a color. It also has a very intuitive interface, I soon found out how to shorten a URL and other features which appeared to be lacking in Tweetr are readily available (like the ability to see who is following you and who you are following). It is certainly a well designed interface, so well done Twhirl developers!
If you'd like to follow me on Twitter my profile is simply @Convallis.
Unsurprisingly for the IT industry AJAX is an acronym. What is stands for isn't really that important, what it represents is, I think more important. It covers a set of technologies that have actually been included in browsers for a long time, but it seems that they only really came to attention once someone came up with the AJAX moniker.
In these challenging financial times, we are all aware how important and cost effective it is to retain existing customers and build future loyalty when securing new business.
The single most important aspect of any IT maintenance regime is ensuring that we have regular backups of our data, and that those backups would work in the case of disaster. Ideally a backup should not require the involvement of the single greatest point of failure, us, unfortunately we humans tend to be the weak link.
Hopefully, at a minimum, your marketing activities will help you to increase your contacts and thus build the profile of your company. This means that over time you will end up with hundreds if not thousands of contacts in your contacts database, be that our own ConvallisCRM, an Excel spreadsheet or a shoebox full of business cards.