Ole talked about how technology is dissapearing into the background. It is everywhere that we do not even notice it anymore and feel it is normal. But what is beyond digital?

A location based Micro blogging service Echofy – with this app only people that are in your area can answer your message and you can only send messages to the people in your area. Blogging with ‘close’ friends or Micro microblogging.

Then Ole went on to introduce Matthias Schrader (@mattesmattes) of Sinnerschrader the company behind NEXT and Martin Enderle of Deutsche Telekom the new partner of Next Berlin.

This is the third NEXT in Berlin.

Digital is no longer Sexy René Overmann

Now really starting with the first presentation of René Overmann – CEO Deutsch Telekom

This presentation was kind of weird as he talked about low pricing with many people from abroad that are not using the internet connection on their phone at Next due to the high coast of roaming.  See also Henriette’s post A thin red line from analogue to digital to connectness

As Overmann was really talking from a telco point of view and not the consumers view here “Bad news Prices go down, traffic goes up. Good news: connectivity matters.”

Telcos will change and open up. These are 4 steps that Deutsche Telekom is doing today:

• incubation (BT’s incubator located in Berlin – launched now)
• Venturing
• Enabling
• Partnering

The origins of the digital univers by George Dyson

George Dyson is a science historian (Wikipedia)

Dyson’s presentation went so fast and was so interesting for a techie like me I could not blog during his presentation. So I am borrowing something here:

“The world has flipped from reliable code on unreliable machines, to reliable hardware but bugs in code…

Where will this go?

Four ideas:

The last point is interesting, we are going back to analog computing instead of more digital. Not sure but it is an interesting vision.

See Adam Tinworth’s post on the Next blog The Future of the Network – and the History of the Computer for more about these two talks.

You can watch a talk of Dyson at TED in 2003 here

High Performance Mobile – Steve Souders

Steve Souders (@souders) of Google talked about the importance of fast loading sites on mobile devices. You can download the slides (29 Mb) from his site or watch it at Slideboom now

The most interesting points I got from this presentation:

• Today fast internet access is the third most important thing on a mobile phone.
• If you want you see what your website experience is on mobile devices do the test at Blaze Mobile.
• For the images on your website, resize them based on the screen size of the user. For this you can use sencha.io another option is adaptive-images.com
• With HTML5 you can use app cache (offline apps, longer cache)
• Local storage 5 Mb allocation per website (instead of cache)

Take aways that Steve gave at the end of the presentation:

1. mobile WPO – speed matters even more
2. run Page Speed (Google)
3. mobile best practices (reducing requests, image size)

More on this topic at the O’Reilly Velocity event in Berlin , London, US

Smartphone and Tablet Development in 2012/2013 – Sundeep Madra

Sundeep Madra (@sundeep) of Xtreme Labs – talked about Smartphone and Tablet Development in 2012/2013: Trends and Best Practices

Best Practices

Embrace design and touch

Create that A-ha moment. The app needs to be fast (must be below 15 seconds)

Rethink the maps application
Rethink behaviors – ordering from scanned pictures in the supermarket.

2012/2013 Trends
Some of the best apps to come will be the ones you don’t need to see or touch

• Siri is just the beginning

Top experience trends:

• 3 clicks reward
• <15x experience (waiting for train/bus)
• think about a life without a laptop (dropbox, CloudOn, Fuze)
• Tablets as a second screen (airplay, TV)
• Retina Display is breaking your designs
• it looks ugly if you don’t fix it, and your design team will need to spend a lot more extra time to fix this
• More powerful hardware (Quad Core SGS3) will open up the possibilties for more power clients applications

Top developement trends

• Hybrid Apps (HTML5 + Native)
• Very Fast Mobile Web Experience (Twitter recently changed design and now uses one third less bandwidth)
• Apple UUID change required rewiring your apps and to spend more time managing your user’s indenties across your portfolios
• WP7/Windows 8 – major tablet player?

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

NEXT Berlin opens – morning sessions

While writing an article about Facebook lists I was testing my groups. Clicking through the updates of my groups in the favorites I clicked on ‘Messages’ and ‘Other’.

There I saw it, messages from the last 4-5 months that I had completely missed. People asking questions, one potential client, attendees of my webinars that asked me to join the group.

I felt stupid for missing these messages, ashamed that I had not replied to these people in a few days and wondering why Facebook is not able to bring these messages to my attention in an easier way.

Okay, I can live without the spam and almost all of the messages from the pages I like, but I look like an arrogant person for not replying to people who send me real and honest questions.

Before I just received messages from pages in this ‘Other’ box, now you will see messages from people who are not ‘friends’ with you in this same hidden box.

You can find this box when you click ‘Messages’ and the secret box will be revealed as ‘Other’.

In the ‘Other’ inbox you will find messages from pages that you ‘Like’ (that nobody reads), spam AND messages from people who you are not connected with, not directly and not via a friend.

These messages don’t show up in your regular Facebook ‘Inbox’

You click ‘Messages’ in the left sidebar on your Facebook home page. Then you can click the special inbox ‘Other’.
Or use this direct link: facebook.com/messages/other/

Missed any messages

Did you miss any messages. How do you feel Facebook can improve this experience? Reply below.

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

Are you missing important messages on Facebook?

One of the reactions I got on this post was

“There is no information overload, only filter failure.”

Facebook is addressing this point and bringing the list of ‘Acquaintances’ to our attention.

You can use suggestions for the people you maybe want to move to the ‘Acquaintances’ list via this link: facebook.com/friends/organize. By moving people to this list means that you will see more updates from the people who you want to follow more closely.

When you click the above link, you will get the first suggestions of the people from your city or area that you haven’t interacted with lately. Deselect the people who you still want to see most of the updates in your news feed. Now click ‘Add to Acquaintances’:

The second suggestion is of friends that you haven’t interacted with lately. Again, deselect your friends that you still want to see most of the updates in your news feed. Now click ‘Add to Acquaintances’:

Now your news feed has more ‘room’ for updates from your friends that you want to see.

Facebook default lists

There are three important lists available for you by default:

• Close Friends: add your best friends to this list to see more of them in your news feed and get notified each time they post an update. You also have the option to turn these extra notifications off (see below).
• Acquaintances: This list is for connections you don’t need to stay in close touch with. Updates of the people in this list will rarely show up in your news feed.
• Restricted: This list is for people you’ve added as a friend but just don’t want to share with, like competitors or ex-collegues. When you add someone to your Restricted list, they will only be able to see your Public content or posts of yours that you tag them in.

Don’t worry your friends will not see when you add them to a list or that you moved them to the ‘Acquaintances’ list.

Notifications from your close friends list

I know by now that getting a notification for every update of your friends is frustrating at times. You may want to turn these notifications off:

1. In the home page (click Facebook logo), i.e. your news feed, find your Lists in the left-column
2. Click on the Close Friends list
3. Click on the Notifications dropdown at the top-right corner
4. Choose whether you want to turn off these extra notifications

Smart lists

Smart lists are lists that are created and update automatically by Facebook, based on info you have in common with select friends, like a school, job or city.

The list of your city has all of your friends who live within 5-200 miles of your city. You can change this distance to what feels good to you. You can move from 5 miles to 200 miles. This list updates automatically as your friends update their profiles.

Select the local area list for your news feed.

1. Click ‘Manage List’ on the top right
2. Click ‘Edit Radius…’
3. Slide the radius to your favorite distance

Custom lists

You can also create your own, custom lists to organize connections as you like. You choose who goes into these lists and what (if any) privacy restrictions apply. I have lists of marketing experts, independent professionals, clients,

You can add friends, people who invited to connect, connections to multiple friend lists. This gives me access to what my clients are talking about for example, or what the friends in my independent professionals list are talking about.

Arranging my lists

This is an overview of some of my lists.

When you add a list to your favorites you always have quick access to this news feed in your home page.

You can access your lists here facebook.com/bookmarks/lists

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

See more posts you care about in Facebook

Another important thing that drives me is, discovering ‘new’ things on the web and sharing it while adding my own thoughts to it. Here I have a focus on marketing and social media. More specifically, marketing and social media for independent professionals or the self-employed. For You.

I love this so much I would do it for free. Heck, I am doing lots of it for free just because I love sharing this with you. I share articles on ernohannink.com and ernohannink.nl [Dutch], there are 2 active Facebook pages where I share tips fb.me/ErnoHanninkEN [English] fb.me/ErnoHanninkNL [Dutch], free webinars, newsletters.

With some other enthusiasts we started WordCamp Netherlands and Social Media Club Amsterdam.

Basically I start these things so I can make independent professionals like yourself successful in your own way and build a foundation to support the self-employed in developing countries and rural areas. This is why:

Balance Entrepreneurship and family

Spending time with their family is not for everyone. There are entrepreneurs that want to build a big business and they will spent a lot of time doing this. Time they can not spend with their family, building the business is more important, at least for now.

I feel that having a wealthy balance between entrepreneurship and family is crucial to find happiness. With wealthy I mean you spend enough time with your family so you can see your kids grow up. There is no second time in seeing your kids grow and becoming their own individual.

With wealthy I also mean that you make enough money with your company that you can support your family. So you can pay the mortgage or rent, you can pay for food, you can pay for clothes and your kids’ education. In such a way that your partner does not need to worry if he or she will have enough money this month and next month.

I speak with coaches, trainers, and other independent professionals that are struggling each month to earn enough money. I also see entrepreneurs that earn enough money but are hardly at home.

There is a way that independent professionals can earn more money without working too many hours. I want to support, teach, mentor these self-employed people that want to move forward and enjoy this wealthy balance.

Developing Rural areas

In rural areas you see younger people and families moving to the bigger cities. These people are searching for happiness in another area with more jobs, more people, the right universities.

This has a negative effect for the areas they moved away from. There will be fewer people, so more people want to move away from these beautiful rural areas.

It starts with the young people who study and look for better jobs in cities and entrepreneurs that look for environments where they can find employees. It continues with people who look for jobs at the companies in the cities.

Leaving the older people in this area. They don’t want to move away to the city because they enjoy the calmness of the area.

It just means that we make these rural areas poor.

The internet is a great tool to stop this. You can build your company from home with a computer and internet connection.
You can build your own business or cooperate with other people and build a bigger company.

By teaching the self-employed how to be successful using the internet, and attracting clients, we can develop these rural areas or at least stop eroding them.

Leave a legacy

Like you, I have a number of basic needs. One spiritual need is that you and I want to leaf a legacy. We want to leaf something to the world that people will talk about after we are gone.

In helping independent professionals to build a successful business I believe that I am leaving a legacy.

Like Becky McCray is doing with Small Biz Survival and her book Small Town Rules – How Small Business and Big Brands Can Prosper in a Connected Economy.

Make the world a better place

Leaving a legacy is not enough. During my life I want to make the world a better place, even if it is just a little bit better.

I can help independent professional to gets clients, to earn enough money to support their family. To earn enough money using the internet so they can stay and develop the area they live in.

To have a successful business and spend plenty of time with the family.

Love it enough to do it for free?

I want this so bad, I could do it for free. However I also know now that I will be a lot more successful in this journey when I do make money.

This money can be used to build online courses, community sites, local workshops, makes it possible to travel to these areas and do presentations and workshops locally.

And more.

How can events support these goals

Live events bring people together.
Events make it easier for people to connect on a deeper level.

At events people can learn from the speakers and other attendees.
You can use the collective knowledge of the speakers and attendees to help each other.

Events are great to build a community.

Building the event

Together with Pieter van Osch (@pyotr) I want to build an inspiring and active event.
We want an event that helps you to make your business more successful using the internet as the driving tool.

During the event you work on ideas and cases for your business. We also want to use the collective intelligence of the attendees to supercharge a business, maybe yours.

We want to build more than an event, we want to build a community. Where people support each other also when the live event is over.

With this event we want to give independent professionals stories, cases and tools to grow their business

Do you want to join us at this event?
Do you want to become part of this community?
Do you want to grow your business and learn how you can use the internet to do this?

Show your support in the comments.
Soon more about this event.

credit photo Power Woman Francesca by Daniel Zedda

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

How can an event teach the self-employed to grow

On a day like this I just start answering these questions again.

Why am I doing this?
How can I attract a great community?
What is my strategy?

Every now and then you need to write down the answer to these questions again. There is no use working on things that just keeps you busy. I want to make a difference.
You want to make a difference.

Some of the answers I have written down this morning when I asked the Why question again. I want to:

• help the self-employed to help more people and spread their message
• help independent professionals to earn more money and support their community
• help entrepreneurs in developing a wealthy balance in building their business and enjoy their family

Finding your purpose and making a living at it

Last week I came across this venn diagram. It was shared a number of times on Facebook.

The original is by Dorothy Shapland and can be found on Reflecting on “What I do”

It is a great diagram that you can use to find your bliss.

Answer the following questions:

• What you love
• What the world needs
• What the world will pay for
• What you are good at

In the core of this diagram you will find your bliss. It is where the answers to these four questions come together.

My Bliss

As an example I will answer these questions as I have written down earlier today in my diary.

What the world needs

• Successful Entrepreneurs that help people
• Entrepreneurs that help to develop their region
• Wealthy balanced entrepreneurs so that can continue to do what they need to do and take care of their family

What the world will pay for

• Guidance and support for entrepreneurs that want to grow
• Training for entrepreneurs to move forward
• Meet similar entrepreneurs

What I do well

• Explain in a practical way
• Make the self-employed think about why
• Start and develop communities

What I love

• Discover new things and sharing it to make people enthusiastic
• Cultures and countries
• Building and supporting the community
• Spending time with the family

In my webinar on Choosing your target audience I used a similar diagram to write down your big goal.

Big Hairy Audacious Goals

The Hedgehog concept by Jim Collins from the book Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t (aff)

To find your BHAG you can answer these 3 questions:

• What can you be the best in world at
• What drives your economic engine
• What are you deeply passionate about

In the core of this Venn diagram is your Big Hairy Audacious Goal or BHAG.

This is also covered in my book Choose Your Target Audience which will be released in the next month.

Credit photo Buddhist Temple – Sala Thai

Your Bliss

Have you answered the 4 questions to find your bliss? Let me know what your bliss in the comments below.
Or share your Big Goal with the world below.

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

Finding your purpose and making a living at it

Do you feel the need to keep on eye on their updates in these social network sites? Do you feel you are missing updates of friends?

You could be right.

A study by researchers at Indiana University pegs the maximum number of friends a user can truly keep in contact with on sites like Twitter and Facebook at 150-200 people.

Conclusion of the research

Social networks have changed they way we use to communicate. It is now easy to be connected with a huge number of other individuals. In this paper we show that social networks did not change human social capabilities.

We analyze a large dataset of Twitter conversations collected across six months involving millions of individuals to test the theoretical cognitive limit on the number of stable social relationships known as Dunbar’s number.

We found that even in the online world cognitive and biological constraints holds as predicted by Dunbar’s theory limiting users social activities….

Bruno Gonclaves and his colleagues studied the web of 380 million tweets sent by 3 million Twitter users over four years and found that most people start tweeting and increasing their number of Twitter friends until they become overwhelmed and pull back, focusing on contacts they have stronger connections to. The saturation point, as the researchers refer to it, occurs at about 150 -200 friends.

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar predicted that same number as the maximum tally of friends a person ought to be able to handle based on his study of other primates, and he did it in the 1990s, long before Twitter was ever conceived.

No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150.

R. I. M. Dunbar. Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. J. Human Evo., 22:469, 1992.
R. I. M. Dunbar. The social brain hypothesis. Evo. Anthro., 6:178, 1998.

I started looking for this number after a discussion earlier today on Facebook. A friend found that she was missing updates and she wanted to see more updates. She has over 1,000 connections on Facebook.

So I showed her this:
“Do you want to see more updates from your friends in your News Feed? Click ‘Sort’, top right of your News Need. Select ‘Most Recent’. It will not show you all but a lot more than ‘Top Stories’. I prefer ‘Top Stories’ I don’t mind missing updates of Spotify updates for example.”

But she already knew this option and she was looking for a way to see ALL updates of her friends.

You will always ‘miss’ updates. Actually, if you don’t know they are not there you will not miss the updates. What I mean, you will not feel that you are missing something.

There is only so much information we can absorb and connections we can keep up with as the research above shows. If you really want to miss nothing, you will have to drastically limit the number of connections on the social network sites.

This is not what I want. Looking for interesting people to follow and see the most interesting updates via tweets, retweets, shares and likes.

I let the software (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) do its work and my network does the rest. This way I will not see all the updates (thank you), I will have a chance to see the most important ones.

About three times a day I will look at the stream on Twitter and see what is going on. I do look at replies and direct messages and reply.

Credit image The world in Facebook

How do you connect

Do you connect with many people and don’t mind missing updates?
Are you keeping your online network small so you can keep up with your friends?

Share it.

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

Do you feel you are missing updates? Add no more than 150 connections.

From the moment I listened to Derek Halpern in 2011 at SOBCon in Chicago I have been following what he does. I love what he writes and how you can learn so much from his blog socialtriggers.com.

Derek did a number of great blog review interviews of well-known sites and people in the social media arena. He uses his expertise ‘magnifying glass’ to look at these websites.

See the 10 tips below.

SmartPassiveIncome.com

Pat Flyn’s website http://www.smartpassiveincome.com is being reviewed by Derek in this video.

Pat:

“This material is priceless, so I suggest you watch how even some of the more popular sites on the web can still be improved.”

KitchenTableCompanies.com

In this review, Derek looks at http://kitchentablecompanies.com for some advice. This is one of the websites by Chris Brogan.

AmyPorterfield.com

In this video Derek Halpern of SocialTriggers.com reviews Amy Porterfield’s website. Check out his tips and strategies to help you turn web traffic into leads and sales. He also gives actionable steps to increase conversation rates and overall user experience. To check out the changes Amy made to her site after this review, go to http://www.amyporterfield.com.

LewisHowes.com

How to Increase Sales and Convert Online Website Traffic into Sales. http://www.lewishowes.com/sales/how-to-increase-sales In this website optimization and “How to Increase Sales” online video Derek breaks down how Lewis can improve his website performance to receive more traffic, get more leads, and increase sales.

ConvinceAndConvert.com

Derek reviews Jay Baer’s ConvinceAndConvert.com regarding conversion rate, calls-to-action, and user experience

IanBrody.com

Derek Halpern reviews http://www.ianbrodie.com and shares tips on how to increase conversion of website visitors to subscribers (and eventually clients).

ThinkTraffic.net

Corbett Barr learned a lot of new conversion strategies from watching earlier videos with Derek, so when Derek offered to critique Think Traffic in the same way he agreed happily.

DeniseWakeman.com

Derek shows how to get more leads and points out missing lead generation opportunities on Denise Wakeman’s business blog site. Excellent tips for optimizing your blog so you can get more leads, build your list and convert more blog visitors into blog subscribers.

http://denisewakeman.com

LauraRoeder.com

Site review with Laura Roeder about LauraRoeder.com

DangerousTactics.com

Derek gives Dangerous Tactics.com a great critique. In the video they go over some really insightful tips on website optimization.

If you want to get a lot more leads coming in from your business website, this video gives you direct, actionable advice.

10 tips I learned from these Derek Halpern Blog critique videos

1. Understand what your goal is with your website/blog
2. Highlight evergreen articles with content buckets
3. Add a feature box with your email opt in box
4. Have a descriptive headline for the newsletter
5. Use audience centered text for subscribing to your newsletter
6. Add a small testimonial quote below the opt in form
7. Pick 3-10 categories for you blog
8. Use only one category for each post
9. Use opt in forms on more locations in your site
10. One Page – One Goal

Credit: photo Upside Down by YLegrand

How do you want to improve your site tomorrow

Listening to these tips, what do you want to change on your site tomorrow?
What quick fix do you want to apply?

Write your fix and URL in the comments below.

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

Convert Traffic to subscribers with these 10 – Derek Halpern – tips

In Chapter 3 of his book, Martin talks about mirror neurons (Mirror Neuron on Wikipedia). Interesting part of the book on how we experience feelings by looking at others doing something.

Martin mentions a ‘smile research’ on the effect of joy or happiness on shoppers. Some of the results are:

• Visiting a shop with a smiling salesclerk gives you more happy feelings
• A smiling salesclerk makes you want to visit the shop again

Then Martin refers to a fmri-research by Tsukiura and Cabeza showing photos of smiling and neutral looking people. For the testpanel it was easier to remember the names of the photos with smiling people.

We are drawn to people that smile and we want to remember the names of people that are nice to us, just in case we meet them again.

5 tips for your perfect profile photo that attracts clients:

1. Smile

Smile on your profile photo so people want to remember your name and you create likability.

Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) writes in ‘Enchantment’ about how you can get ‘likability’. For me building trust is really important, people need to trust you before they want to buy from you. So people need to like and trust you.

When you approach people with a smile on your face, you will notice that the other person will be more open and often starts smiling too. This has a lot of effect on your first meeting with this person. Test it at the next networking event you visit.

The same is true for first virtual meetings. A photo that clearly shows you with a smile will be received with more confidence.

With a real and open smile we use 2 muscles in our face:

• Zygomatic major muscle (which raises the corners of your mouth)
• Orbicularis oculi muscle (which raises the cheeks and forms “crow’s feet” around your eyes)

This kind of open smile is called the ‘Duchenne smile’ and indicates genuine emotion. Named after the French physician Guillaume Duchenne.

Make sure you have a beautiful ‘Duchenne smile’ on the photo that you use for your online profiles to gain likability and makes people want to remember your name.

The photo for your identification (drivers license, ID, passport) does not make a good profile photo since you don’t smile on it.

2. Show your Face

Use a photo with as much of your face as possible in the frame. A face is the most important point how people recognize and remember you, thus trust you.

A photo where you are completely in the frame, tells us something about the way you dress, maybe about what you do, where you are, your posture, but we can hardly see your face.

A profile image with a logo is more business like and therefor less reliable. On a profile with a logo we expect more marketing talk and less real conversations. Social networks are all about real conversations. Interactions between people.

Use a profile photo where we can see your face.

3. Large profile photo

On Twitter you can upload an image of maximum 700kb. On Facebook and LinkedIn there is an upload limit of 4 Mb. On YouTube maximum size is 1600×1600 pixels.

Most of the profile images or avatars are square. When you upload a rectangular photo you need to crop the image on the site. You can also edit your photo and make it square before uploading. Use software like paint.net or Snagit to do this.

Save the profile image with a filename that includes your name and file size, i.e. firstname-lastname-400×400

Formats: jpg, png or gif.
An overview of the displayed sizes for the most important social network sites.

Twitter timeline: 48 x 48px
Twitter profile: 128 x 128px

LinkedIn timeline: 50 x 50 px
LinkedIn profile: 80 x 80px

Google+ timeline: 48 x 48 px
Google+ profile: 200 x 200 px

Facebook timeline: 50 x 50 px
Facebook profile: 180 x 180 px
Facebook page: 180 x 180 px

YouTube timeline: 46 x 46 px
YouTube profile: 88 x 88 px

The images are shown in these sizes on the timeline or your profile. You can prepare your profile photo of 400 x 400 px of about 500kb. This size can be used on all platforms and the site will reduce the photo to the above mentioned dimensions.

The advantage of uploading a larger sized photo is that there is a larger photo with higher quality connected to the profile photo. When people click the profile photo they will see the originally uploaded photo.

4. Consistency

Use the same profile photo on all the social networks. Use the same username on all the social networks.
This way people can always find and recognize you in all the networks.

When people are getting into a new social network they are looking for familiar faces to connect. When you use the same photo, people will connect with your more easily. Consistency builds trust.

Using the same photo builds trust.

Often I hear “I see you everywhere.” This means that they see my profile photo on the social networks they are using.

5. Gravatar

A good solution to get consistency on your profile photo while commenting on blogs, is Gravatar. On this platform your profile photo can be connected to one or more email addresses. When you comment on a blog and the blog uses Gravatar, your profile photo will be shown next to your comment.

Gravatar is owned by Automattic, the same people of WordPress.com. This means that when you comment on a WordPress blog or hub that it often will use the profile photo that you uploaded to Gravatar.

Use Gravatar to be recognized with your comments.

Ribbons and logos

There are times that people want to show they support something by using Ribbons.

Twibbon and PicBadge are sites where you can add a ribbon or batch to your profile photo.

For most of these ribbons I have no clue what these mean or what you support. Do you?

Limit the usage of ribbons or batches on your profile photo. The photo is already small and with the ribbon you might draw away the attention from your face.

Your face is unique. A way to be different. Use it.

Comparison of different profile photos

See some profile photos in this presentation of Social Media Hive. Find out what profile photos you favor and use that when you create your profile photo.

Source:

• Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy is Wrong (aff)
• Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions (afF)
• Smile Research http://swoba.hhs.se/hastba/papers/hastba2003_2007.pdf
• Duke University – ‘Just a smile’, Leitzell, K., Scientific American, April/May 2008

Credit Photo: True Passion by Uggboy

Do you change your profile photo

Do you change your profile photo often?
Do people recognize you from your profile photo when they meet you in person?

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

The perfect profile photo for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and more – 5 tips

I know the photo is a bit older, but I love it

The Expert

Becky McCray (@beckymccray) lives in Hopetown, Oklakoma (population of about 30).

Becky is involved with a number of businesses:

• The Ranche at home
• Allen’s Retail Liquor
• Small Biz Survival
• Beck McCray and Associates
• Tourism Currents
• and she is a speaker
• And she is the co-author of Small Town Rules

Her life goal “Help rural entrepreneurs prosper so they can make their rural area prosper.”

Watch the interview

Becky shares her life mission and how important content is to attract clients for her business. Love here idea of how a niche is like a mirror for your ideal client so they can recognize themselves.
Watch the video interview with Becky McCray. You can also download the audio of this interview.

Becky McCray on Rural Entrepreneurship and attracting clients from Erno Hannink on Vimeo.

We talk about her various businesses the liquor store, the cattle range, Tourism Currents and more.
Interesting themes in the interview are:

The 4 seasons in a business

The number of businesses she has and actively is involved and how she manages all these businesses. With priority lists for each business and regular moments during the day she focusses on one business.

A lot of time goes in writing posts for the blogs of these businesses.

How important it is to have a niche and a life theme. It makes it easier to say no to projects that are coming on your path.

And of course we talk about her new book Small Town Rules: How Big Brands and Small Businesses Can Prosper in a Connected Economy (Que Biz-Tech) (aff).

What are the Small Town Rules?

The Change in the Economy

Rule 1. Plan for zero. There will be tough years ahead.
Rule 2. Spend creative brainpower before spending dollars.
Rule 3. Multiply lines of income to diversify your risk.

The Change in Technology

Rule 4. Work anywhere, anywhen through technology.
Rule 5. Treat customers like community.

The Change in Society

Rule 6. Be proud of being small.
Rule 7. Build your local connections.

Becky’s website

You can connect with Becky on Twitter (@beckymccray), LinkedIn and Facebook or Like her page on Tourism Currents or SmallBizSurvival.

I have to show the website of Small Biz Survival too. This is how I got to know Becky years ago.

Do you feel like a Small town business

Is your business like a small town? Do you talk a lot with your target audience on the web? Do you connect, involved in a community?

Credit photo: Rebekah Workman www.rebekahworkman.com

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

Becky McCray on small towns and making rural entrepreneurs prosper #30DTC

Here they are, in alphabetical order, the best male bloggers. Psst it is not 30 but 36.

My idea is to give you new content ideas, inspiration for your bog. Add the ones you like the most to your feedreader or subscribe to their newsletters and get inspiration delivered to you.

Alan Weiss

Alan Weiss (@BentleyGTCSpeed) blogs on contrarianconsulting.com. He is famous from his books like Million Dollar Consulting, Million Dollar Speaking, and Million Dollar Coaching.

Posts like Traits of My Most Successful Mentoring Clients

Blog Tyrant

The Blog Tyrant (@BlogTyrant) is a mystirious young man from Australie that already sold a few blogs successfully and writes on blogtyrant.com.

Read posts of home like 5 Link Bait Post Types That Get You More Email Subscribers

Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) writes on chrisbrogan.com, one of the most visited blogs in this area. No 3 on the AdAge Power150. A great guy.

Read posts like Learn From Adele – Build Your Platform. Amazing that he writes these posts every day and it takes Chris about 20 minutes to write these kind of posts.

Chris Garrett

Chris Garrett (@chrisgarrett) knows a lot about blogging and buidling your business by sharing what you know. You can find him on www.chrisg.com/blog/

I love articles like When Should You Start Selling from Your Blog? from the most conventional unconventional guy.

Christopher Penn

Christopher S. Penn (@cspenn) has a nice tone of voice in his blog www.christopherspenn.com

Interesting posts on analytics like: Are you doing a quarterly metrics review?

Daniel Pink

Daniel Pink (@danielpink) author of the great book Drive writes informative posts, does videos and podcasts on www.danpink.com.

An informative post by Daniel, on the Pomodoro method: Can a tomato make you more productive?

Dan Zarella

Not sure but Dan (@danzarrella) is a bit behind on posting, last post from January but he has great statistics and information on danzarrella.com.

An example post with interesting stats and graphics [Infographic] How to Get More Clicks on Twitter

Darren Rowse

Darren (@problogger) played a major role for me to get started with blogging back in 2005. You can still read regular posts by Darren on www.problogger.net/blog/ and many other guest bloggers.

Posts are about blogging, ads, products and more, like this post How to Pitch Your Dream Company for a Win/Win/Win Blogging Collaboration [Case Study].

David Meerman Scott

David Meerman Scott (@dmscott) is a wonderfull speaker, as the attendees of SMC Amsterdam can confirm. He wrote a number of books and ebooks including the best seller and writes often on www.webinknow.com

I love what David writes on marketing and leadership strategies. Posts that make you go mmmm, like How to do something audacious

Derek Halpern

Derek Halpern (@derekhalpern) writes at Social Triggers about how psychology helps you get traffic and sales. A very interesting angle. Derek catapulted his blog with blog reviews on blogs of well known bloggers. Like these videos with Denise Wakeman, Smart Passive Income Laura Roeder, Lewis Howes and many more.

Posts like The #1 Sales Killer On Your Site—And How to Get Rid Of It For Good are really interesting. Go read Derek’s blog.

Eric Reis

Eric Reis (@ericries) author of The Lean Startup writes at www.startuplessonslearned.com. Eric used the principles of Lean Manufacturing to startups.

Watch the talk in this video: That old-time startup religion

Eugene Farber

Eugene Farber (@eugenefarber) writes about content on www.contentstrategyhub.com.

Posts like will Straight from the Source: Blog Post Ideas for Value-Packed Content will help ou to create better posts.

Garr Reynolds

Do you do presetations? You should as an entrepreneur. Learn more about presenting on Garr Reynolds’ blog www.presentationzen.com. You can find Garr on Twitter (@presentationzen)

There are plenty of posts by Garr on his blog to learn more about presentating, like Progress and the intentional selection of less.

Glen Allsop

A blog that I learned about a few months ago and boy does Glenn (@viperchill) give me valuable information on www.viperchill.com. He shares How To’s, case studies and user guides.

Read behind the scene of his premium product launch and case study 7 steps to creating million dollar web apps with Joost de Valk.

Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) is a venture capatalist but he also launches his own companies like All Top and uses social media to promote these ventures. Read more on http://blog.guykawasaki.com/, How to Change the World. A practical blog for impractical people.

Guy is an author and gives great presentations on entrepreneurship. Read his posts like Raising Money: What Not to Say and What Not to Believe and How to Create an Enchanting Pitch #OfficeandGuyK

Hector Cuevas

Hector Cuevas (@hectorcuevas) is the Inbound Pro and writes at www.inboundpro.net/blog. Inbound marketing is everything I believe in. It is about attracting your target audience, instead of pushing your information.

Hector wrote a number of ebooks as a free resource for you, The Ultimate Guide to Writing & Selling an Ebook in 7 Weeks or his 7 Simple Action Steps To Build An Unshakable Blog Foundation with his scatter strategy in step 7.

James Altucher

James Altucher (@jaltucher) is a trader, investor, writer, and entrepreneur and writes on www.jamesaltucher.com/. He writes all kind of things and it is fun to read his posts.

Read these 9 things in How to Be Less Stupid by James. For entrepreneurs it is good to read The 100 Rules for Being a Good Entrepreneur and The Easiest Way to Succeed as an Entrepreneur

Jay Baer

Jay Baer (@jaybaer) calls himself a hype-free social media and content strategist and speaker. Jay and guest bloggers write at www.convinceandconvert.com

Read this interesting post Fight Premature Monetization – Add a Second Step to Your Content Marketing on how important this is when people look at 10 resources before they buy from you. You will also learn from this video with Derek Halpern on better website conversion.

Jason Cohen

Jason Cohen (@asmartbear) is the founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear Software. He shares his posts on blog.asmartbear.com/ and writes about startups and marketing.

Interesting post by Jason: Intense Asymmetry and Self-Flagellation

This is one of the great new blogs I found while creating this inspiration overview.

Jeff Bullas

Jeff Bullas (@jeffbullas) and some guest bloggers, blog at www.jeffbullas.com about social media marketing for business.

He writes about Pinterest, Facebook, and other social networking sites or more general about Why Content is the Foundation of your Social Media Marketing.

John Jantsch

John Jantsch (@ducttape) writes at www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/ and I follow his writing (including the books) for a long time now. This blog is really about marketing for the small business.

Read posts like The Three Most Important Factors of Business Success and How to Discover Your Perfect Target Customer in 5 Steps

Leo Babauta

Leo Babauta (@zen_habits) writes at zenhabits.net. Zen Habits is about finding simplicity in the daily chaos of our lives. It’s about clearing the clutter so we can focus on what’s important, create something amazing, find happiness.

A peace of simplicity in this large list. Build some peace in your every day live as an entrepreneur and read his posts like A Powerful Three-Step Algorithm for Happiness or A Survival Guide for Beating Information Addiction

Lewis Howes

Lewis Howes (@lewishowes) is a great athlete turned into a LinkedIn, webinar pro and making lots of money with it. Always good te learn on www.lewishowes.com.

Interested in doing a webinar? Read this post and ebook The Ultimate Webinar Marketing Guide by Lewis.

Mack Collier

Mack Collier (@mackcollier) writes in his hub www.mackcollier.com – even though he writes more for larger companies, lots of the posts can be used by you as an independent professional.

Posts like What’s the Difference Between a Brand Advocate and a Brand Ambassador? and Think Like a Rockstar: How Taylor Swift Connects With Her Fans At Concerts will help you to create your social media strategy.

Mark Schaefer

Mark Schaefer (@markwschaefer) is about grow. We are all in marketing to grow our company, reputation, our customers, ourselves. Mark and guest authors write at www.businessesgrow.com/blog/.

Mark writes about Twitter and other social media.

Martyn Chamberlin

Martyn Chamberlin (@twohourblogger) is the Two Hour Blogger – he is calls himself a Visual artist. Martyn is a Front end web developer and let’s not forget a college student. So what is stopping you?

He writes interesting posts like The Most Painful Way to Becoming a Proficient Professional in Your Vertical – is school the right way?

Michael Hyatt

Michael (@michaelhyatt) loves to help people live and lead on purpose. He is the Chairman of Thomas Nelson Publishers and blogs daily at michaelhyatt.com.

It is great how open Michael is in his blog and you can learn how he created his ebook and podcast for example. Listen to his podcast #006: the power of incremental change

Michael Port

Michael Port (@michaelport) is the author of the book Book Yourself Solid www.bookyourselfsolid.com/blog/. A great book where you will learn to grow your business.

Enjoy Michael’s posts like, Your Logo doesn’t matter.

Mitch Joel

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If you want to learn about good writing, reporter style writing, read Mitch Joel’s daily posts on www.twistimage.com/blog/. His book ‘Six Pixels of Seperation’ (2009) is a must read. His new book Ctrl Alt Del is scheduled for Spring 2013. Follow him Twitter (@mitchjoel)

Read posts like The E-commerce Tipping Point and No Pictures Allowed, and listen to the podcast The Realities Of Being Brandwashed with Martin Lindstrom of Brandwashed.

Neil Patel

Neil (@neilpatel) writes great blog posts on quicksprout.com. I have already learned so much from his content. @neilpatel

This is a great taste of his valuable content, The Marketer’s Guide to Blogging

Neville Hobson

Neville Hobson (@jangles) does a weekly podcast with Shel Holtz on FIR and publishes it and other posts on www.nevillehobson.com.

Neville writes about Business, Communication, Technology. And shiny new objects. Like Website backups: 4 ways to protect your investment

Pat Flynn

Pat Flynn (@patflynn) writes at www.smartpassiveincome.com about passive income that you can generate. Great articles and valuable examples.

What is really great is that Pat is sharing his earnings each month like, My Monthly Report – March 2012

Rohit Bhargava

Rohit Bhargave (@rohitbhargava) writes at www.rohitbhargava.com, and I like what he writes. We got his previous book Personality not Included translated in Dutch and published at A.W. Bruna.

An example of Rohit’s writing 5 Insights From The 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.

Seth Godin

Seth Godin (@thisissethsblog) is not really on Twitter but you can follow his daily posts on sethgodin.typepad.com. Author of books like Linchpin, Tribes, Purple Cow and many more.

Short posts, longer posts, thought provoking, marketing like this one, Making big decisions about money

Shel Israel

Shel Israel (@shelisrael) writes at globalneighbourhoods.net and has a new book out. Presentations is an important part for you as an solopreneur to get the word out. So learn about good presentations with this book.

This is one of the posts about his book A Stellar Presentations Excerpt: The Three Questions

Tim Sanders

Tim Sanders (@sanderssays) is a great author and speaker you can read more about him via sanderssays.typepad.com. Watch the review of Today we are Rich.

Love this post Rehearse Before You Create
David Lynch: “It takes four hours to get one hour of creative work done.”

Selection

Again it was really difficult to make this selection. Some bloggers did not make the list although I like what they wrote, but they are not blogging anymore or the topic is a bit off for independent professionals.

You Like?

Suggestions

Do you have any great men blogger coming to you via your RSS reader or your inbox that inspire you and is about marketing, social media, entrepreneurship? Share it with us below.

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

30 best male bloggers #30bestof #30DTC