Today, I come out of the woodwork to share some incredibly amazing productivity tools in a list I’ve been working on for the last 2 years, but have still narrowed down to the core tools that any entrepreneur, business owner, or agency should seriously consider adding to their toolkit. That’s you, right?

You won’t be disappointed.

If you love these productivity tools, tweet about them. Share them. Make videos. LinkedIn posts. Medium posts. Or just consider trying them and becoming a paying user of the ones that actually cost money. They are worth the expense especially if you need it for the work you do.

(Note: I disclose all relationships below, and none of this is incentivized. I chose these tools because they’ve saved my life countless times and I want them to to save yours.)

Website Monitoring & Security

When you own a domain name and some hosting space, be it shared hosting, a VPS, or a dedicated server, you’re going to want to check your website to ensure that it’s safe from any potential outside threat. A day after I installed one of the tools below, I learned that it discovered an 0-day exploit, that, if left untouched, could have caused an a threat actor to hack into my website and potentially advertise some Viagra or send you all to an OnlyFans page or malware. You never know.

But that’s not the only consideration when it comes to checking websites. Most of us want to know that our websites are up and accessible. We don’t want to wake up one day to a deluge of phone calls because our customers are finding that your website is down and they need to buy those diamond widgets NOW, NO exceptions. And there you are, wondering why your site is serving a 503 error.

Thus, without further ado, this section covers my favorite tools when it comes to keeping you abreast of potential threats on your systems, keeping them updated (somewhat manually), and keeping you notified if something happens to your site across the board, preventing you from losing out on those diamond widget sales. I mean, they’re pretty expensive and your customers deserve better.

Virusdie

Virusdie is an incredible tool that sits on your web server–a WordPress installation, your custom code, whatever it is that you have–and regularly scans your files to inform you if something is potentially dangerous.

I installed it, and two days later, I was informed about a 0-day hack on one of my WordPress plugins. Needless to say, I was so impressed. Admittedly, at first, I thought it was a false positive. But through a series of searches, I realized that it was the news of the day, that this WordPress plugin that existed on thousands of websites had been breached. Cool beans.

Virusdie also has a firewall, so if another IP address is up to no good and hitting your site, they’ll be told to get lost. It’s so good at what it does that I normally forget about it, but it does block about 1% of my traffic.

Pros: A super sleek interface that is beautiful to look at and use, as well as an active and engaged Facebook community. Great coverage of malware. It’s saved me more than once from real legitimate threats, including detecting one after a hacker broke in.

Cons: The occasional false positive might cause you to be on edge for a bit. But the team acts quickly, and I think I’ve seen one false positive in two years of using it. Its website firewall may also be a little too aggressive at times, banning your IP, but once you whitelist it, you’re good to go.

Virusdie, $15/mo for one website, $499/mo for 1000 websites (agency pricing), or $97 one-time for one website or $1197 for unlimited websites (lifetime pricing)

Hexometer

Hexometer is an incredible tool for monitoring a website’s status, which is perfect for any SEO or any digital marketer. Here’s why:

Hexometer tells you about the health of your website from perspectives you wouldn’t otherwise think: domain name expiration, detail on security headers, broken links, page performance data, JavaScript errors, and other health, SEO, and UX insights.

Now I know. It’s already in my calendar! Boom!

But more than that, you can get a great deal of website statistic data that includes availability monitoring insights, performance (on desktop and mobile), SEO data, tech stack, and security. The result: click on the image for full size.

When there are clients needing information or many cooks in the kitchen, having your site health at this bird’s eye view is an incredible help.

Pros: Fancy shmancy interface. The product is very proactive about what you need to do about your website.

Cons: Some of the data might be unclear. For example, the score of 1/4 in the DNS department doesn’t provide detailed DNS data, simply a printout of the DNS records. Additionally, the parent company, Hexact, is said to not focus on this product as much as some of their others, including Hexowatch, covered later in this article.

Hexometer, starting at $10/mo for 2 websites

InfiniteWP

When you’re managing multiple WordPress sites, either for yourself or for your clients, you want a simple central repository from which to update plugins and address potential issues. InfiniteWP’s specialty is in updating plugins, and you can get notified on a daily basis about which plugins require an update. It’s still a manual process from here on in, but the best thing this does is that it keeps you abreast of new updates without having to write something custom for the privilege or having to log into the site manually to perform another manual update.

Pros: Free easy to use. Support is friendly and great even at the free level. The process history allows you to see what was updated and loaded and when.

Cons: Sometimes new plugins released in zero-day can also break other parts of the site, so be sure to check thereafter and roll back if need be.

InfiniteWP, free for self-hosted, $147/yr for up to 10 sites for cloud-based, with incremental pricing up to $647/yr for unlimited sites

User Feedback

It’s important for any business owner in any area to be able to collect user feedback. That could be both having you generate the feedback for another business or having you collect the feedback for your own purposes. For example, if you’re trying to finagle with some sort of SEO tool but it’s not working, or you want to show a friend the weird bug you’re experiencing on Facebook, you’re going to want a tool to record your screen and easily share that with one click. On the other hand, you may want to survey your audience and see how they respond to a variety of questions. Simple forms like the free stuff (ahem, Google Forms) have a clunky interface and zero logic jumps. In other words, when someone answers YES to a question, there’s no way to avoid having them jump to questions that are only applicable to the people who answered NO.

There are a lot of better tools out there. Really. So without further ado, I’ll introduce you to them below:

BlockSurvey

BlockSurvey is by far my favorite forms tool out there. For those of you who use Typeform, it’s got the familiar interface with an extra element of decentralized storage, living on the blockchain, ensuring that if your data ever gets hacked, it’s not on some central hub at their headquarters somewhere. Collecting sensitive information? BlockSurvey will ensure you never run the risk of having your data ever getting into the wrong hands–ever.

BlockSurvey has a beautiful interface that enables you to truly do all the things that require all the wonderful things that forms require. You can support limitless inputs, like:

• Text (short and long)
• Number
• Email address
• Phone number
• Country
• Choices (radio button, multiple, drop down single/multiple, matrix single/multiple)
• Scales (rating, ranking, slider, opinion scale, experience management such as NPS, CSAT, or CET scoring)
• Consent
• Signature
• File Upload
• Date
• Image Capture
• Question Group
• Statement
• Payment collection (yup, you can pay on BlockSurvey using its Stripe integration)

The survey above is so complex, so involved, and has so many logic jumps that it looks like this. What you’re seeing below is a bunch of generic questions, and then as they provide certain locations, they get some questions that are targeted to that location, and then they continue the flow through the questions until the survey ends.

This is huge. This is insane. This is BlockSurvey for you and is what they do best.

Here’s how easy it is to create a survey. It’s so simple, significantly simpler than the other tools out there.

I am genuinely people are not using it yet. But as for me, BlockSurvey is such a great tool that I am now volunteering my time as their CMO in an advisory capacity, simply because I love it so much. There’s your disclosure, perhaps my proudest one.

Pros: Extremely easy to set up. Decentralized and on the blockchain.

Cons: Those confused about the blockchain might not get it.

BlockSurvey, $12/mo and upward, depending on number of responses and team members

Berrycast

Berrycast is a screen recorder that lets you record all or part of your screen with ease. It sits on the side of your window just like this:

And when you hover over that little tiny aqua line, it expands to this:

Then you choose the selector to either record your entire screen or a portion of it (say, if you want to hide the URL bar).

You can also add or remove your voice from the video, or add a photo of yourself on the bottom of the video, and if you have a premium plan, you can whitelabel everything with a dedicated CNAME, add team members, and add calls to action.

Here’s a walkthrough of Berrycast (note: I used Berrycast and converted all the other videos in this article to GIF with another tool I’ll explore later. And thanks to my friend Henry, who creates great tool walkthroughs, for allowing me to use him for the purpose of this video illustration and necessary annotations.)

After the video is finally uploaded, you’ll be able to hit “Copy Link” within the accompanying app and share it with your friends and colleagues. That’s it. No uploading to YouTube as an extra step—and you’ll even be notified when someone watches your video (hey, caught you).

Finally, after you share it, if they’re a member of the service, they’ll be identified; if they’re not, you’ll just be given a popup via app or email saying “Someone is watching VIDEONAME.” Sweet.

Pros: Lives right in the browser or in a standalone app. Support is friendly. New features introduced often.

Cons: Support can be slow to respond. App might have some bugs; for example, you may have to kill the task on Windows in order to get it to respond at times.

Disclosure: I did consultant/copy work for Berrycast earlier this year but I no longer maintain a professional relationship with them.

Berrycast, $10/user/month or a single $99 one-time fee (which includes unlimited videos but not personal branding)

Data & Analytics

I love data. Whether it’s a way of finding out who someone is (people data) to learning more about website health, data is my thing. Separately, I own a Garmin, WHOOP, and Oura, all data-driven tools that monitor my health on a daily basis.

Needless to say, this section requires no further introduction but to say that I highly recommend checking out these tools if you’re looking for some data. We’ll go into the what in the next 4 tools.

ContactOut

ContactOut is today’s Rapportive, which I used to be a huge fan of until it was acquired, with a LinkedIn skew. ContactOut is a tool that lets you find out contact information from anyone on LinkedIn. If it’s accessible, ContactOut has it. It’s perfect for lead gen, job outreach, finding information for email pitches, and much more.

ContactOut will pull your information and put it on a sidebar, then allow you to save the profile for potential group outreach. You can also do imports from a list of LinkedIn URLs so you don’t have to manually select one by one. The same applies to the reverse: providing emails and getting LinkedIn URLs. Finally, ContactOut can also provide data from a company URL, giving you the right people at each level.

Once you get the emails, you can then integrate Outlook or Gmail and do mail merges to send out emails. It integrates with job search boards such as Lever, JobAdder, Bullhorn, Workday, Cats, and Greenhouse, automation tools like Zapier, CRMs such as Salesforce and amoCRM,  and other productivity tools such as Google Sheets. Interestingly, these integrations speak to the career search from a recruitment perspective, but I’d say this could be great for media outreach, cold email (don’t quote me on that one), and other relatively helpful ways to connect personally to your desired people.

Finally, ContactedOut has a great search tool that already lets you see at a glance who is who online. I wonder which one of these owns tamarweinberg(at)gmail.com because I’ve always wanted it.

Pros: Easy-to-use interface. LinkedIn, email, or company import feature.

Cons: Limited only to LinkedIn.

ContactOut, free for up to 40 emails/month and 3 phone lookups, and then $29/mo for 1800 emails a year and 600 phone numbers a year all the way up to $199/mo for 12,000 emails/year and 600 phone numbers a year

LeadDelta

LeadDelta is a CRM for LinkedIn. Unlike ContactOut, LeadDelta is a tool that lets you aggregate information about your LinkedIn contacts via Chrome extension. The first time you run it, if you have many connections, you’ll need to do it carefully; LinkedIn frowns upon tools that seem automated and might flag this as bot activity if it feels that you are scraping the site. Therefore, you’ll have to pull the data of 100 names at every 24 hours, which means if you have 7,500 contacts, will take 75 days. You can rush this, but it may not be recommended.

Still, once it’s done, you’ll have a really helpful list of all the people in your network, along with their job title, location, contact information (email and phone).

You can also tag your people if you wish, but as you can see, this is not a feature I am utilizing.

LeadDelta also integrates with your LinkedIn mailbox, including Sales Navigator for those who have that subscription. The inbox integration also allows you to send personalized messaging, but since it’s under the purview of LinkedIn automation, I may advise against this part, at least not en masse.

Pros: Friendly user interface. Tagging capabilities. Integrations with other tools such as Zapier and Pabbly to CRMs. CSV export.

Cons: Chrome extension, not web based (which means challenging password manager integration; the information is indeed saved in the cloud). LinkedIn’s own limitations make it take quite awhile before the CRM is fully populated. Doesn’t easily track old CRM contacts without a manual push.

LeadDelta, $24.99/mo (or $16.66 if paid annually) for unlimited access to your CRM

66Analytics

66Analytics is a clean self-hosted analytics solution. It’s your way of learning who is visiting your site and how they’re interacting with it.

This includes your standard stuff, such as pages, referrers, countries, OSes, devices, browsers, UTMs (if you’re not using a hobby site like the one above), screen resolutions, and browser languages.

But here’s where it gets more interesting: you can also create and measure goals, learn about realtime site data, glean more visitor information, view heatmaps, and access video replays of how someone has interacted with your website. Sometimes this is a huge plus; otherwise, it may require tracking consent, so be sure to follow the laws of your respective jurisdictions.

Amazing. You literally can see how people interacted with your website on a user-by-user basis.

Pros: 66Analytics is like Google Analytics on steroids, and you have full control especially with advanced tracking.

Cons: Occasionally an upgrade can break the code, and you may have to purchase an extended license to get support (6 months are included with the regular purchase).

66Analytics (aff), $79 for self hosted or $549 for you to start your own paid service (perfect for agencies who need this feature for clients)

Hexowatch

Hexowatch is an incredible tool for a multitude of purposes, some of which use cases are below.

• Tracking competitor pages and being notified when HTML is changed, or when an image is updated, or when an A/B test commences. If you’re seeing yourself being pummeled by a competitor on some sort of ad copy in particular, monitor the landing page.
• A more fun (and one of my more exciting use cases) is monitoring price drops on websites that may not necessarily have tracking (Rakuten, Swagbucks, Honey, and Capital One Shopping can only do so much) but might have other uses. If you’re looking for a free piano, for example, you might want to be the first one to grab the newest piano at the Piano Adoption website when you’re notified about new availability in your area (this thing is global; have a look!)

One of the most amazing things about Hexowatch though isn’t just the fact that it monitors changes. It’s the way it monitors changes. There are 13 different monitoring methods (to date) on how Hexowatch watches everything to ensure true coverage.

They are:

• Visual monitoring: Hexowatch can literally see what’s on your page to tell you if there’s something you need to look at.
• HTML element monitoring: Hexowatch can monitor specific HTML elements, perhaps a button change, or a form update, or whatever it is that is changing within the HTML of the page–and it will let you know so you can stay ahead of it (and beat your competitors at their own game).
• Keyword monitoring: This one is a huge deal for all my SEO friends. If you’re doing any kind of keyword research and want to see the keyword density of content on a specific page, or to know if the keyword was altered or monitored altogether, this is yet another incredible competitive analysis resource that is easy to justify and will be great for any brand or agency doing this on behalf of your clients. How many of you are monitoring your customers? How many of you couldn’t have because tools like this weren’t available or were custom made? Well, never again.
• Technology monitoring: You can now easily see what tech stack is being used by sites in your competitive set, whether they’re using WooCommerce or Shopify, Duda or WordPress, whether they’re using a new analytics tool or cookie monitoring service. And all you have to do is put a URL in their system and let them do the rest.
• Source code monitoring: Some pages, like Techipedia’s own pages, haven’t been updated in ages (well, except for this post). Some other pages get updated often. You’ll be notified when the HTML or source code of your monitored page gets updated.
• Content monitoring: A little pro tip: old websites are often updated with new content just to stay fresh in the search engines. Content is never set-it-and-forget-it. Get notified when those pages get updated (and exactly with what).
• Automatic AI monitoring: This AI tool does a lot of the above in aggregate, looking at visual, content, HTML, and technology changes.
• Availability monitoring: This monitoring tool may be more aligned with your preferences: you’ll be notified when your own website goes down (or any other URL you elect to monitor).
• Domain WHOIS monitoring: I’m sure someone would’ve loved to see when I purchased tamar.com. This tool will let you know when domain ownership changes hands, or when registrant or nameserver information changes.
• Sitemap monitoring: You can also monitor an entire site’s sitemap and see if any web pages were deleted or added. This is another powerful way to observe your competitors’ overall performance (and what they’re doing to enhance or negate it).
• API monitoring: For developer types, you can manage APIs by looking at changes to endpoints and HTTP post responses.
• Backlink monitoring: Backlink monitoring is another super useful tool for Hexowatch users; who needs an SEO tool when you have this and are notified in real time of any changes?
• RSS feed monitoring: Finally, for those who still think Real Simple Syndication is an important thing, this feature will let you know when RSS feeds are updated.

You get a fancy chart of statistics as well with the results of your checks.

I’ve only dabbled with this tool so far and done basic checks, but there are a lot of uses I know my colleagues in the industry would appreciate.

In fact, one gem I discovered after writing this was that you can even monitor changes behind a login (if the site allows). There are a multitude of actions you can perform on the authentication window for you to be able to achieve this result.

Pros: Lots of different monitoring features. Friendly and helpful support.

Cons: Tricky learning curve. Might be difficult to get working behind logins, especially if bots are blocking the activity.

Hexowatch, $12.49/mo for 2000 checks to $83.25/mo for 25000 checks (business+ pricing), or $165 one-time for 4500 checks up to 25000 checks (lifetime pricing)

SEO, Social Media, & General Marketing

Good marketing tools often stagnate; they don’t innovate. That’s how I feel about one of my formerly favorite tools that also became too cost-prohibitive and took the road to go enterprise.

But the thing is, some of us are small business owners and can’t justify those expenses. What do we do?

Well, we learn about new tools instead. And trust me, these are good ones.

In the section below, I highlight two social media tools and one tool you didn’t think of that exists that takes the guesswork out of understanding your target audience. It does a lot of things you wouldn’t otherwise expect and deserves a mention here because it might be one of the most underrated gems out there. If you choose to give it a shot, you won’t be disappointed.

Publer

I’d been a big fan of the HootSuite owl for many years until the cost became too prohibitive for me to stomach. While I was grandfathered into a great plan, when I took a hiatus from social media for awhile, I let it go, and I was left to figure out how I was going to run my own social media accounts.

Truthfully, I was never a great fan of HootSuite’s streams, which sure, were good for some form of rapid social media response plan, I’d have the app pinned for ages and never checked it. There was too much noise, too little signal, even with all the different monitoring metrics I implemented.

In 2020, I found and fell in love with Publer, perhaps the easiest broadcast social media tool to use. Period. It was easy for me to schedule posts, assign team members and give them access to the right posts, and to do so in a drag-and-drop interface that by far exceeded whatever everyone else was doing. Plus, it was the first tool that I know of that had a seamless Instagram integration.

Publer supports posts from the following social networks:

• Twitter
• Facebook (Pages, Locations, Reels, and Groups)
• LinkedIn (Profiles and Pages)
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• TikTok
• Google My Business
• WordPress
• YouTube
• Telegram
• reddit (coming soon)
• Tumblr (coming soon)

It’s also super easy to move posts in Publer’s calendar, which is so easy to navigate. You can also customize content easily for each network, either on the calendar tool itself or within the post popup.

Publer aims to stay ahead of the pack with everything it is doing–literally. It’s truly an underdog, but it’s one of the most amazing social media gems out there.

Pros: Super easy to use. Incredibly fun interface. Doesn’t feel bloated like other tools. Supports a wide variety of social platforms and is often the first brand to do so, leading the pack and making it a true social media contender.

Cons: Mobile app does not have full functionality that the desktop has. It is only a broadcast tool, not an engagement tool (see Juphy below which handles the other half).

Publer, $0/mo for one user and 3 social media accounts, with sliding-scale pricing depending on the number of team members or accounts

Juphy

Marketing teams and customer service teams are often siloed, or you want to focus on one thing and not focus on the other. Therefore, to have Publer manage both broadcast and engagement is exactly what HootSuite did (but not as well as using a tool like Publer and Juphy).

Juphy monitors all inbound communication for your social media channel. It’s like Buffer, except it’s not as robust, yet it meets the criteria here because it is a tool you haven’t heard of before. My only gripe with Juphy outside an app that needs to be better developed is that it needs to also not add every single Facebook page you’ve become a manager of since 2012, because otherwise you’ll get massive upsells.

One awesome consolidated inbox. And yes, I know. I’ve been inbox zero since 2010. Still am 12 years later.

Pros: Simple interface. Team is responsive and fixes bugs.

Cons: If you add a single account, it will take every other account with it and tell you you have to pay for the privilege to use it especially if you exceed your current account limits. You will manually have to go in and delete the accounts one by one, but in the meantime, the site will be pestering you to upgrade.

Juphy, from $20/mo for up to 5 channels and up

Persona by Delve.AI

One of the hardest things one ever has to do when they start a business is understanding who they’re targeting. You might be of the opinion that you’re speaking to men between the ages of 45-54, but your audience might instead be women aged 25-54. You’ll never know for sure unless you start talking to your audience and polling them to understand exactly who they are.

Most of us don’t want to do this.

I struggled with this extraordinarily, because I launched a disruptive brand: perfume for mental health. Who is the audience? The person who likes perfume, or the person who likes mindfulness? It’s unisex too. Is it a man, or is it a woman? Would men care? I see plenty of men in the Facebook groups trying my perfume and loving it. But in one incident, I met Emily on reddit who was incredibly enthusiastic about the perfume until she saw the tagline, and said “perfume mental health? Not for me.” My messaging crushed the prospect.

And what did that mean? It meant that I still didn’t understand my audience, which is why I recommend Delve.AI’s Persona tool.

Persona takes a look at your site visitors simply by integrating your Google Analytics. After an analysis that takes a bit of time, it comes up with this super helpful chart of your most valuable users (and not-so-valuable ones) so that you know how to cater your messaging.

Now I know who I’m speaking to. Even though my brand is unisex, the women prefer the message. I get that entirely. (But men, it still smells great on you too.)

Further, Delve.ai’s tool can perform competitive analyses, provide answers to the WHO (visited), WHAT (did they do), WHEN (did they most often come), WHERE (did they come from), and HOW (did they browse) of your visitors, get industry insights about your visitors (which simply sheds light on the referral traffic), potential leads based on IP traffic (yay! New prospects!) and will soon be offering a tool to create social personas for your social media audience.

Pros: Great helpful analysis of websites in an easy-to-read fashion.

Cons: May need some setup (e.g. enabling demographic data in Google Analytics) before you maximize use. Interface could be slightly improved. It feels a little older than its time.

Persona by Delve.ai, free for one website, $89+/month for businesses or $209+/month for agencies.

Web Design

When it comes to web design, I’m not one who really dabbles in it. But the thing is: with tools like this, I can easily pass as an expert. First, there’s a tool that does it all for you: the whole 9 yards. Then, there’s a tool that lets you analyze elements on your site, including colors, meta tags, and more. Then, there’s a tool that edits images for you without having to download PhotoShop or GIMP. Another tool blurs out sensitive content. Yet another tool converts videos to animated GIFs.

Therefore, not only am I a web designer who can build beautiful websites thanks to Dorik, I can learn about DIVs and H1s on other websites like a boss with Hoverify, I can hide sensitive content when doing demos or creating videos with blurweb, I can make beautiful animations with VistaCreate’s GIF Converter, and I can also edit images like I actually know what I’m doing (I usually don’t).

Thanks to these tools, I wrote a lot of this post.

Dorik

Dorik might be my favorite new CMS. It is a WYSIWYG web builder, completely custom-made, that lets you create beautiful websites with ease.

Take these templates, for example. A coffee shop concept. A job board. A gym. A SaaS landing page. They’re all built in Dorik. They’re beautiful, load fast, and once you get the actual template loaded, they are so much fun to play with.

You can create blogs and use Dorik’s CMS tool, but it is best only for single products; there are other better solutions if you’re using a storefront. Dorik knows this and wants to focus on what they do best.

Dorik’s interface is super easy to use. With a little bit of time, you can be a master at creating websites. Plus, their support is fantastic.

It supports tons of different elements too, so you can truly create a dynamic website that loads fast and delights your customers.

Pros: Super fast websites. Easy to use. Great team. Closed ecosystem which makes it less vulnerable to outside hacks like a WordPress site which is open source and potentially easier to hack into.

Cons: Not as exhaustive as Elementor with all its plugins and feature-set.

Dorik, $4 per month per website, or $299+ for agency plans that includes multiple websites

Hoverify

Hoverify is an amazing tool for anyone with some familiarity of HTML or CSS or who wants to learn more. Hoverify is a Chrome extension that you activate by license key and lets you analyze content on a page. You can learn all about CSS elements, how they’re used, the fonts that are being utilized, and so much more.

Here are the different features that Hoverify supports:

• Inspect is perhaps the coolest tool, letting you truly analyze content, learn about fonts, CSS settings, and more. You can also play around with it in real time. Here’s an example of what you can glean from playing with the Inspect tool for a little bit (it can get noisy, but it’s totally customizable! The widgets are draggable, removable, and easy to manipulate.)
  
• Color Eyedropper will let you choose a section of the website and give you the hex codes/RGBA of anything onscreen.
• Assets will let you grab or see all the images on the site.
  
• Responsive lets you view your site in responsive mode without having to switch to your phone while simultaneously coding on a PC.
  
• Debug allows webmasters and standard users to clear the cache, cookies, and local storage right in the browser, saving you from having to do it in Chrome’s own settings. You can also debug meta tags, like finding out the charset of the site, the robots.txt preferences, viewports, og:properties, and more. It will also check all links for you and tell you what their status codes are, your HTML semantic elements, and even performs a spellcheck.
• Built with enables you to learn about the technology that powers your website, from hosting, tech stack (analytics, widgets, and frameworks), DNS, and SSL.
• Capture is Hoverify’s screenshot tool, allowing you to take screenshots in four possible ways: full page, selected area, visible part, and all tabs (all tabs! Super cool!)

Pros: Enterprise-level stuff in a cheap package. Great feature-set, and more is probably coming.

Cons: The Inspect tool does get noisy and somewhat unwieldy when you need to analyze lots of elements. Difficult to understand if you are not familiar with CSS.

Hoverify, $30/yr for up to 3 devices, or $49 one time for a limited time for up to 3 devices (lifetime pricing)

Lunapic

If you can call Lunapic anything, call it a Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Paint in webapp format. Lunapic lets you upload images and do a whole lot with them, so much that even the list here wouldn’t be comprehensive enough. But for my purposes, I use Lunapic for the following:

• Making images transparent (because Irfanview and other tools don’t cut it for me)
• Cropping images
• Grayscaling images
• Saving images to .webp format

Here’s an example from the brain.fm image I share later on in this article. I cropped it, changed the color saturation, changed it to a green hue, and then broke it into pieces. All of the history is available in thumbnails on the bottom of the page, making it super easy to step backward if you make a mistake.

It’s not the fastest tool (it is web-based, after all), but you can’t go wrong with the quality of the output here (sure, green cutouts isn’t the prettiest output, but the fact is, it did exactly what I wanted). There are fewer tools that do it better, including the bloated GIMP (and most of us aren’t paying hundreds for casual image editing).

If you want to know some more of what it can do, Lunapic can also:

• Open images from certain locations, like a URL, Dropbox, Imgur, Google Photos
• Animate it
• Post on social media, such as Imgur, Facebook, and Pinterest (and get prints on Zazzle)
• Review the color palette and histogram
• Get data on images, such as dimensions, frame, filesize, and filetype (it’s jif, not gif)
• Adjust images through the following functions: light levels, colors, color saturation, focus, dehazing, pixelation, color tint, color replacement, color spotting, color box, mirroring, mirroring and copying, flipping blurring, motion blurring, sharpening, straightening, perspective, brightness, alpha transparency, auto-brightness, color temperature, contrast, exposure, adaptive equalize, skin smoother, skin tanning, normalizing, redeye reduction, old photo colorization, and photo restore
• Drawing tools such as paint, tracing, text, background, remove background, watermark, simple captions, motivational/inspirational posters, paint bucket, color picker, silhouette maker, cosmetic surgery, blemish remover, smudge, speech bubbles, glass tile, stained glass, cutout shapes, censored boxes, tiny world, clipart, face blur, flag maker, holiday cards
• Borders such as sticker borders, drop shadows, rounded borders, color tint borders, blurred borders, virtual extending border, edge fade border, picture frame, custom frame, cellphone picture, filmstrip, polaroid, taped photo, vignette, beveled edges, glass buttons, dollar bill, snowflake border, and Christmas bulb
• Filters such as black & white, sepia, lomo, country flags, rainbow, negative, monochrome, neon, retro vintage, night vision, two tone, color gradient, color tint, harsh lighting, HDR, soft lighting, equalize, median, fire, lightning, water, thermal iridiscence effect, ginger effect, heatmap effect, lens flare, emboss, charcoal, lines, and others (in case that wasn’t enough for you and you actually read this far to catch my little commentary)
• Effects such as blending two images, gradient blend, masking blend, photo spread, Halloween effects, color bars, color glitch, kaleidoscope, Warhol effect x9, tilt shift, custom collage, Obama style poster, 3D cube, photo booth, Lego style, lomography collage, abstract outlines, implode, explode, ink portrait, pencil sketch, colored pencil sketch, surreal painting, painted, glitched, cartoon, coloring book, swirl, comic book style, and needlepoint
• Art effects such as famous art, collage, sketches, scribble, pen, Escher, fairy, beauty, Picasso, dreaming, illusion, floating, smoke, sadness, tattoos, graffiti, watercolor, fantasy, Kandinsky, Van Gogh, space, abstract, landscape, night, candy, Edtaonisl, paper folding, dark, splash, flames, grey, and others
• Animations such as video editing, transitions, sunburst, anim-polaroid, reflecting water, water droplets, snowfall, old movies, rotating cubes, groovy rainbow/color, kaleidoscoper, sparkles, pouring rain, blood rain, smoke clouds, scary/horror, jittery blur, in focus, inflate/deflate, floating hearts, fire, zoom, color cycle, custom animation, mirror dance, club lights, glitterize, and others.

I want Google to acquire all this technology for its phones. Please. This is super cool, especially because it is free for online use.

Pros: Absolutely free. Tons of features with more coming each day. Would probably be better as an app (because it is miles ahead of GIMP). Easy to step backward if a mistake is made.

Cons: A little slow to use, especially because each image is addressed individually. Somewhat challenging to manipulate.

Lunapic, free for online use

blurweb

blurweb is a tool that lets you create videos while blurring out certain parts of the video that might be sensitive. This is perfect for showing customers how to do something without exposing sensitive data of others. For example, this video, created with Berrycast, will show you the full capabilities of blurweb.

Pros: Easy to use, hides sensitive data. Retains that sensitive data if desired between reboots and website sessions.

Cons: Can often be difficult to hide exactly what you’re looking for. Sometimes difficult to remove the blur without disabling the plugin for awhile.

blurweb, 1 browser $19 lifetime, all the way up to $194 for 20

VistaCreate’s GIF Converter

For the purposes of this post, I wanted (or needed) to convert a lot of movies to GIF format so that people didn’t feel compelled to have to click into watching videos (plus, the autoplay of animated GIFs beats the friction of the click. The wonder of psychology). I mention this in this article because I tried several. On one hand, Adobe’s version kept seeing the upload for a split section, then bumping me back to where I first started. On the other, one of the smaller no-name brand tools sent me a GIF with a ton of noise in the background. Yet another didn’t work at all, providing me with no download links, just a lot of wasted time.

After much frustration, I realized that there needed to be acknowledgment of the tool that actually does work, and that was this baby.

Pros: Free to use. Fast.

Cons: Some images can save with weird artifacts.

VistaCreate’s GIF Converter, free for use for all (but try VistaCreate’s paid tool, a competitor to Canva)

General Productivity

It’s hard to adequately describe this section. This section includes a music product, an app that compares text, and a productivity/task list (personal, not team). It’s one of those “they’re good enough to be mentioned, so let’s stick them under this general umbrella.”

As such, here they are. Each of them makes you productive in whatever way you need. But if you want the ultimate productivity, you will go ahead and try out all three.

brain.fm

When you’re in the zone, you may want some tunes to keep you there. Thanks to my friend Pamela Lund, I am a fan of brain.fm, which plays electronic music that is scientifically engineered to keep you focused on the work in front of you. Recommended for use with headphones only in intervals of 30 minutes (each “song” is 30 minutes long), brain.fm gives you four types of neuroscience-y music: for focusing, relaxation, sleep, and meditation. Within each of these categories, you can go deeper:

• Focus: deep work, creative flow, study & read, light work
• Relax: chill, recharge, destress, unwind
• Sleep: deep sleep, guided sleep, sleep & wake, wind down
• Meditate: unguided, guided

You can mark off music you love, music you hate (to ensure you never hear it again), and the best part: it really does improve your focus. (Do words with lyrics ever distract you? I thought so.)

Tip: want more science backed self-care tips? I wrote a massive guide on it last year. (It took me almost a year!)

Pros: “Science-backed” electronic music. Lots of categories and new music being added regularly.

Cons: Best experience in headphones, which isn’t always an option for some. Should work well with 5:1 speaker systems but the bass might be strong in those instances.

Brain.fm, $6.99/mo or $49.99/year. Get a free month here with my personal redemption code (otherwise, go with the 3 day trial…but don’t say I didn’t warn you)

DiffChecker

DiffChecker is a free tool that lets you see the difference between two text files. I’m assuming it’s based off the Linux tool of the same origin, diff, which also compares the difference between two files.

Thing is, I’m a pretty big Linux geek, and I never got behind diff on a Linux user interface. Being able to see the difference between two files, to see exactly what was removed in file #1 compared to file #2, has made the world of difference for me, making sure I don’t overwrite or restore changes in files, and it has saved me countless times. Thanks to Roger Montti for flagging me about this one; it’s better than any of the alternatives I’ve ever seen.

This is beautiful! It’s red. And green. It’s not like WordPress, which makes you hunt between unchanged and changed text (note the text I used!). It’s something I wish I knew about earlier in my life.

Pros: Simplest diff checker there is.

Cons: Confusing for someone who might not understand what diff is intended to do.

DiffChecker, free for regular use, $9/mo without ads, real time functionality, and more

TickTick

TickTick is my todo list, much like Remember the Milk was in the past. A more affordable option, TickTick lets me integrate my calendar into my todo list, and makes it super simple for me to feel accomplished because I actually did something productive today.

(And for those of you who follow me on Duolingo, now you know why I have a nearly 1500 day streak.)

TickTick also includes a mobile app, a pomodoro timer, a stopwatch feature. By checking off my tiny to-do items and focusing on the big picture of the day, I feel less stressed as I have one less thing to do.

The downside of TickTick is that their support leaves a lot to be desired. I might be compelled to create my own competing tool one day to address that issue.

Oh, and it’s got my favorite: dark mode.

Pros: Easy-to-use task list. Works with Google Calendar. Active online community (solely of users) on reddit.

Cons: Support simply sucks.

TickTick, free to get started or premium for $27.99/yr

So there you have it: more than 20 of my favorite productivity tools that I use when I need to take care of serious business. For agencies and businesses and particular, they may be the best investment you’ll make, saving you time, energy, and a whole lot of money (even if they feel expensive to boot).

The post 20 MUST TRY Essential Productivity Tools for Business & Agency Owners You Probably Have Never Heard of for 2023 appeared first on Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg.

I haven’t been actively blogging in this space, but that’s not to say I haven’t been busy. Through the work I’ve been doing over the last few years, I’ve also grown passionate about a side pursuit and something I purely embrace simply to help others determine where they’ve come from. In August, my book The Adoptee’s Guide to DNA Testing: How to Use Genetic Genealogy to Discover Your Long-Lost Family was published. Not an adoptee? Don’t stop reading. Neither am I. Here’s the story of how all of this came to be — and why this book is relevant to you regardless of your background.

In 2014, I attended the South by Southwest Interactive Festival as I had done in previous years to connect with some of the most awesome minds in the industry. There, I attended one meaningful party that ended up effectively changing my life. Thanks to the awesome Kristi Wells, I connected with Ancestry’s staff and the rest has been history. At the event, I took a DNA test. I had no idea what the results would give me, but I’ve learned much since.

When my results came in a few weeks later, I didn’t recognize any names. At that point, even though the team at Ancestry had said these are true relatives, I had my doubts. I had thousands of fourth cousins and none of the names were familiar. This was what Ancestry said they encountered as well — “we ran the numbers again and they were accurate. These people were related,” I remembered them saying to us.

I hadn’t realized that a great chunk of the earliest testers on Ancestry beyond curious people like me had stories of unknown parentage. The first person who contacted me, Franceska, had a mother who was adopted. She said that both I and a cousin I actually knew were her closest matches. This, to me, seemed to indicate something, but I hadn’t been able to ascertain what. Later, after over a year of research, we’d find that my great great grandfather had a brother (also news to us) whose grandson had a very brief relationship with a nurse when he was in a hospital bed in World War II. That relationship resulted in a birth of a daughter, but the mother never told the father. The adoptees’ father, my cousin, died in 1985. His children never knew. Neither did the mother’s children, for that matter. My newly discovered cousin’s mother is still alive in her and is more than 90 years old, but vehemently denies the existence of this daughter (who unfortunately recently passed away) to this day.

This was the beginning of multiple journeys for me. Franceska was only one of dozens of people who had similar stories. I started working with a number of adoptees and others, quite a few who believed their fathers to be people who were not the fathers who raised them (and solved several of those mysteries within my own distant family). I learned that testing myself versus an older generation wasn’t wise; we only get 50% of our parents’ DNA, so if you want to find family, you want all that 100%. I got in the habit of testing my parents, grandparents, and even some distant relatives just to be able to figure out what DNA segments connected us and how I can use that data to connect to other distant family, adoptees or not, to determine how I am related to all of these listed matches on my Ancestry list. I began using every service, watched as sites popped up that helped users understand this data better, and encouraged people on different services to consolidate their data so that we can start analyzing it. Naturally, by testing anyone and everyone with some shared DNA, I was able to learn quite a lot about myself and help countless others.

I hadn’t realized how many people are facing similar challenges, be it that their birth parents are unknown or that they’re looking for family, but I actually wouldn’t mind sitting on the phone with someone for two hours explaining to them how to use a website, or getting some information from someone and then creating an instructional 25 minute YouTube video on what their findings meant. This showed me that there was a necessity for additional instruction on how to understand exactly what comes out of a DNA test.

So, like I’ve done in the past, I wrote a book. The Adoptee’s Guide to DNA Testing covers the science of genetic genealogy and then goes into detail about Ancestry, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA, and MyHeritage, the primary autosomal (you’ll learn what that means too) DNA testing sites. (For those of you who do in fact know what that means, don’t worry, mtDNA and Y-DNA are covered as well.) Then, it talks about some third party tools that enhance that experience to make DNA testing even more exciting.

Like the title says, the book has an adoptee skew (the publishers needed to define a market!), and I’ve certainly fielded the “are you adopted?” question many many times (the book shows you my results; I’m not), but everyone, and I mean everyone has a story like this in their family, even if they don’t know it yet. (Yes, Pandora’s box will be opened. It surprised me too, and I admittedly was very surprised when Franceska first reached out.) My mother-in-law has two first cousins (who knows, maybe there are more) that we discovered through genetic testing. It’s been fun and exciting to make these connections — since I have always been about relationships, I’m excited to discover these people and learn their stories. Minimally, I’m excited to learn about these new connections and find out exactly how we’re connected. It’s fun to create that exact association, especially when your genetic makeup makes that kind of difficult, thanks to a phenomenon known as endogamy (marriage within the tribe for generations upon generations. This topic is also covered in the book).

If you’ve been curious about DNA and have tested and don’t know what to make of the information, you need to read this book. If you want to find family, you need to read this book. If you are an adoptee or someone with unknown parentage or know someone who is and would like to help them, you need to read this book.

The bottom line: if you’re interested in genetic genealogy, the basic science behind it (I’m by no means a scientist and only got a 3 in AP Bio!), and want to do more with your data, you’ll get some extra info — but you need to read this book.

It’s been a trip to write; I hope it takes you on a trip to read and to later discover what your family genetics hold.

The post My Newest Book: All About Genetic Genealogy appeared first on Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg.

I first heard about Heather Armstrong, aka Dooce, through Lisa about a decade ago. She was a popular blogger — a damn good writer, much like Lisa (who still reigns among one of my favorite writers ever). I didn’t catch onto the Dooce blog, mostly because I was consumed with other pursuits at the time, but I saw Heather speak at SXSW, admired her when I read the occasional article, and agree she was a trendsetter in her own right.

Looking back at Heather Armstrong’s rise to Internet stardom, I associate her with two main things:

• She was a pioneer in the mommyblogging world. She gave rise to a whole gaggle of mommybloggers, many of whom would later try to ride on her coattails to receive freebies in exchange for their influence. It wasn’t her own doing, but I do think that Heather, with her excellent writing and anecdotes, started a movement.
• She made Maytag cave when customer service failed her because her influence was strong enough to make that happen.

Heather stopped blogging in the frequency that she had a few years ago to focus on other projects, and perhaps that’s for good reason.

Influence is everywhere–but that’s not necessarily a good thing

Social media has given rise to a great deal of Internet superstars, many who have an expectation of entitlement once they have gotten past a certain threshold of visibility. At one point, people would have considered me an “Internet sensation” too, in fact, within the online marketing niche. I still have people approach me in awe of my influence and the number of followers I have on social media, though I am quick to acknowledge that I had more followers on Twitter at one point, have barely tweeted in the public eye in almost three years, and by choice, my influence is waning.

It’s because I think that influence is dangerous — for me and for others.

Fame, for awhile, got to my head. About 10 years ago when Andy Beal was doing a book signing of Radically Transparent at a search engine conference, I cut the line in front of a bunch of patient people because I was “that person” who shouldn’t have to wait when I could just join a friend (and when you’re influential, you have many) who could help me bypass the whole thing. When Lisa observed that behavior afterward, she made me realize that my priorities weren’t in the right place. She was right. It was a humbling experience to understand that influence and visibility lends itself to ego — which is true for just about everyone at one point and sometimes lasts throughout that influence. Just think of all your favorite celebs, some of whom want to be in the spotlight and others who are more grounded prefer to keep their distance. I still have friends who prefer to flaunt their social stature. For me, I had to take a step back and prioritize that which was more important to me. It wasn’t fame or visibility or a way to have a bigger name.

The only social network I’m really social on (and still, selectively so) is one where I have 600 followers, and I haven’t updated most of my social profiles with what I’m up to presently. In fact, most of my good friends have no idea. I don’t want people to know so that I can be under scrutiny since I have (or had) a certain level of influence. I prefer to keep it that way.

Maybe I’m more of an introvert than you all thought.

Influence shouldn’t be a shortcut to better treatment

I’ve always been of the opinion that your voice can be heard loud and clear if you bitch and moan online. In fact, I’ve worked with a number of brands in service and support because I am passionate about great rapid service, offering it so that people don’t have to bitch and moan altogether. I prefer to create a cohesive service machine so that people aren’t leveraging their influence as a first or even last resort. (I do recognize that people will do it anyway for convenience sake, but I also still believe that people on Twitter who have to add a period before a username to be seen by their friends in a public forum are just exploiting you.)

Still, the consumer transition of service complaints into the social media world to achieve satisfactory resolution (which wouldn’t otherwise happen through traditional channels) was entirely necessary. I will never disagree of the importance for brands to bring “human” back into service again, treating customers as if they’re people and responding in a friendly way, not in a robotic formal manner without recognizing that there’s a person behind the screen. Drones serving drones is not the future and should live in our distant past. Service needs to reign supreme in all industries because that is where our future is headed, in restoring humanity and emotion into the model. And social media has contributed to this transformation.

One night last week, I had a situation at Overstock that required executive escalation. After two failed standard support attempts, I conveyed the situation to a respected friend and colleague of mine, and he said that I should leverage my influence to make things happen. “I did that [to another brand] recently and they responded pretty quickly–and you have MUCH more influence … than I do,” he told me.

I immediately shunned the idea. That’s not me. Influence is often exploited by those who wield it. Why am I better than you or anyone else who doesn’t have that influence? Why do companies have to cave to influence? We’re all paying customers, are we not?

But that’s the exact message influence tells. “She’s better than you because she has more friends on social media.” Therefore, it should be expected of me to yell loud, and when the brand responds, I should be treated better than someone else since I am more important than a customer of equal loyalty status because I have a few more eyeballs on me online.

I don’t agree with that philosophy. If Jennifer Lawrence walks into a store, should the clerk bend over backward and serve her at the expense of other customers? Do you know who I am? Would Jennifer even want that? I’d hope not. She seems pretty down to earth to me.

I’m not Dooce. I’m not going to pull a Maytag. I don’t disagree with Heather Armstrong in how she made Maytag respond to her, because her situation and the media uproar that followed was a necessary wake-up call for brands to recognize that social media is bringing the voice of all people to a public forum. I still completely agree that social media is a better platform for support than others because real time support needs to pervade the entire organization, but yet social media support is the only place that really happens. We’re now at the point that we’re all influencers and we all have a voice, albeit some with larger followings than others. Heather’s situation with Maytag was a significant step for brands to acknowledge the importance of listening to consumers period. But I won’t ride that wave because my influence is more significant than that of others — and neither should anyone else anymore. It’s why I stepped back. I’m a person, I’m a consumer, and we are all relevant in the context of good service.

What I do think, though, is for brands to consider the people behind every single complaint, to be a little less rigid about sticking to policy and more focused on maintaining customer loyalty, especially when it makes sense for the company to step outside confined boundaries. In my situation, I accessed a product page, and 4 minutes later without warning, the price jumped. A few minutes after that, I added the item to the cart and the new price — not the price I had accessed the item at — was reflected in my cart, a whopping 43% more than I had prepared to buy it at. And yet, the low level support reps didn’t want to hear any of it. It was then that asserting my influence was suggested.

I ended up escalating it my own way (and privately) to make it right. Fortunately, Overstock didn’t disappoint. After a phone call from a manager who identified with my situation, even telling me point blank that she completely understood that there was no timer indicating a sale that was to end imminently, and emphasizing with the specifics of my complaint (“I wouldn’t know to look for it either,”), the company made it right. What they got from me was my continued loyalty and a blog post out of it.

But most brands, including Overstock’s low level support team, have ways to go. Great service requires everyone to be aligned so that escalation shouldn’t even be necessary. If brands want to delight customers, they will put all of their employees on the same level, giving them creative oversight to accommodate a customer need where appropriate. I understand that not all brands are of the financial stability to make such accommodations, and that’s fine — if you are small enough that you truly can’t, it is important to remind the customer that as a brand, you’re human too. (I’d appreciate leveling with the consumer at any stage over a monotonous emotionless response that expresses an unwillingness to help; “we’d love to help you but can’t afford to” makes me still appreciate that the brand would if they could.) However, it certainly helps when you’re there and can.

We’re in an era where we all are online, some more than others. But we’re all online. Where service is concerned, many of us transitioned into the online era when we recognized that brands weren’t helpful through traditional channels; things just got done leveraging our social influence. We’re still at the point where social media is still treated as a more important and relevant channel to get support — many brands prioritize social requests more than a phone call or email and give customers better care and attention. And that’s wholly flawed logic. Just because a certain demographic of user is still using the phone doesn’t mean that person isn’t less important or less influential. Maybe they just don’t want to abuse their power for gain. They shouldn’t have to. Brands should just be awesome from the get-go.

If there’s one takeaway from the rise of social media support, it’s that brands need to take that mindset of super-fast support and make it a reality at every touch point. And then, you know what? People might not use a public forum to ridicule a brand and demand assistance altogether.

Great service is about treating all customers equally and acknowledging their importance so that they don’t have to yell and scream on social media or on these more modern channels where they have a following. Great service also requires an emotional element, and many brands just don’t give that a second thought.

In 2017, may we hope that brands catch up with the customer and put the people back in service. We’ll all be better for it.

The post I’m not Dooce (and Why Influence is a Dangerous Thing) appeared first on Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg.

Last year, Derek Low shared his experience traveling across the US by train for $213. His trip? 3,400 miles from San Francisco to New York.

My husband, being a train buff, had his own plans, and earlier this month, we embarked with my 6-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter on a nearly 4,000 mile trip (total was 3,968+ miles) from NYC to Washington DC to Chicago to Denver to Salt Lake City to San Francisco to Los Angeles. And we did it for free (technically, for 70,000 Amtrak Guest Rewards [AGR] points). The full interactive map of our experience is below, as captured by the Android app called GeoTracker.

You’ll notice we missed some underground connections, as GPS signals are lost. Naturally, that meant we didn’t capture the 18 “states” (17 states plus our nation’s capitol) we covered in full (NY, where the trip began, is nowhere to be found), and that probably means our full mileage wasn’t totally calculated. But in the end, our trip took us through:

• New York
• New Jersey
• Pennsylvania
• Maryland
• Delaware
• Washington DC
• Virginia
• West Virginia
• Ohio
• Kentucky
• Indiana
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Nebraska
• Colorado
• Utah
• Nevada
• California

Note: The first 5 miles of this isn’t accounted for since it refers to the first miles underground from NY>NJ. Also, we didn’t go 154mph. The max speed any of our 3 trains–we went on three routes total–was allowed to go was 110mph along the Northeast Corridor (NEC). Away from the NEC, max speed is 79mph due to the rails not being designed for high speeds. But even then, there were many parts of the trip that were slower than 79mph due to freight train traffic, single tracking, slow orders, and maintenance. And I wouldn’t trust the vertical distance number either.

So how did we accomplish this? And how did the kids do? Let’s talk about the experience in detail.

A Free Amtrak Trip? Yes

I didn’t make it up when I said our trip was entirely free. The cash equivalent for this trip would have been $3,400, which is quite different than the $213 Derek paid.

What we did unfortunately isn’t as easy to do in 2016 as it was in 2015, but in truth, it all comes down to points. Amtrak has a guest rewards program that allows points, or miles, to be redeemed for rail travel. We’re not frequent train travelers, so we didn’t accumulate most of the points through Amtrak in the most traditional fashion. Instead, we leveraged other promotions, transferring points into the Amtrak program. For example, one can sign up for credit cards for a bonus, and that is exactly what we did.

The thing that differentiates the 2016 program from the 2015 program is a zone system. The points cost for 2015 travel between zones was fixed regardless of the price of the train ticket in dollars. Therefore, if you went from zone 1 to zone 2, the cost in points would be the same even if the route was longer or more costly. However, in 2016, the amount of points needed to ride more expensive routes increased in correspondence with the ticket price in dollars of the route. Just like ticket prices fluctuate based on demand, so do point prices–but this was not the case in 2015. Thus, it is slightly more difficult to accumulate the points necessary to take the exact route that we took to go for free, though it is still possible to take cheaper routes and to put money into the itinerary if desired.

Our Itinerary

We took three trains to maximize the value of our points under the old program and to give us great scenery and have fun family time. The total travel time was 5 days with minimal stops as outlined below.

The first train was from NYC to Chicago via Washington DC, on the Cardinal (train #51). You may argue that this is counter-intuitive to go south and then go north… which is probably why the train was relatively empty (edit: nope, someone from Amtrak told me that this was due to seasonality). Mind you, it was also Superbowl Sunday. (No, we didn’t watch the game, but people on our train tried!)

The first leg began at 6:45am EST Sunday and we left on time. We arrived to Chicago around 10am CST Monday and had three hours to kill at Union Station before we boarded our second train. We spent a lot of that time walking around the Chicago French Market and sitting in Amtrak’s Metropolitan Lounge.

The second train, the California Zephyr (train #5), was from Chicago to San Francisco (technically Emeryville, which is across the bay, next to Oakland) via Denver and Salt Lake City. This was our longest segment. We boarded on a Monday at 1:15pm CST for a 2pm CST departure and did not get to San Francisco until 3:15pm PST on Wednesday. (Notice the timezone tracking? Try to keep track of timezones when you’re on a train and don’t know when you’re actually moving into a new timezone. That was … interesting.)

We spent the night at the Hyatt House Emeryville, a beautiful hotel right across the street from the Emeryville station with nice views. In the evening, we took BART under the bay into San Francisco and spent a night on the town sightseeing and riding cable cars. The following morning, we took our third train, the 8am PST train, on the Coast Starlight (train #11) and rode down the California “coast” for an arrival at LA 12 hours later, which was our final destination (we got in at 8:30pm PST).

In case you were wondering what we did after that, we made it an excursion (not limited only to trains) where we spent a few days in Los Angeles and then we returned home–by plane.

Also, in case you were wondering, here is the actual performance of the train against our schedule (departure and arrival times)–we did quite well and ultimately arrived early at the end of each leg.

• Cardinal
• California Zephyr
• Coast Starlight

Our Overall Room Experience

Bearing in mind that we had kids, we didn’t sit in coach or the newer business class seats (which are fancier seats in an open space, similar to coach, but with Internet, and only available on some trains). Instead, we traveled in sleeping cars in roomettes (two for the four of us), which are “first class” cars (officially called “sleeper class” by Amtrak) with private bathrooms (where applicable), beds, and doors. This was very important for our privacy and also ensured that the kids actually didn’t bother the people around them.

Below is a pretty accurate video tour of a roomette. To be very clear, though, this video is only applicable to the first train we were on (the Cardinal). The second and third trains we boarded felt narrower with no bathroom in the room; instead, there was a bathroom down the hall and three other bathrooms downstairs (the two final trains for us were double decker trains; the first train was only a single level train).

The single level sleeping car, called a Viewliner, had windows for the upper and lower berths (visible from the beds), but the double decker train, called a Superliner, only had windows on the lower berth, making it impossible for those on the top bunk to see anything.

Speaking of bunks, the kids were on the top. As a mom, this terrifies me, especially on a moving train, but there are seatbelt straps that extend from the bottom of the bunk that get attached to the ceiling, so people up there won’t roll out. Another thing about these bunks: it is very important to be mindful of the bed above your head, because if you stand up and forget it’s lowered, you will hit your head HARD. I did it three times.

Oh yes, there were showers too. The objective of showering in an Amtrak is that you’re not supposed to like it! In fact, there’s little pressure and the water doesn’t usually stay on or the temperature is out of whack. But hey, that was similar to the hotel we stayed at on solid ground in Los Angeles too.

On the first train, it was very difficult and annoying, not to mention narrow, to go to the bathroom in a tiny little toilet in your room. Therefore, we did prefer initially to use the more public bathrooms available to the entire train–until that public bathroom started smelling really really bad. Then, I took the extra effort to enjoy using the bathroom that was right next to me in my roomette, which ended up being pretty convenient at night.

There are two types of first class sleeping accommodations: the roomettes we were in and bedrooms. The bedrooms were a lot larger and more comfortable, and those bedrooms have bathrooms inside them, but I realized on the second and third trains that the bedrooms got pretty smelly! I had to hold my breath when walking through to get to my room from the dining car. I guess it was a blessing that we didn’t have private bathrooms in our rooms for most of the trip.

On the second night on the California Zephyr, there was an issue with heating–it was so bad that it must’ve been close to 80-85 degrees only in my room and we were temporarily displaced to a much more comfortable room. Fortunately, the sleeping car attendant, Brandon S., was kind enough to accommodate that room swap–it would have been brutal otherwise. Meanwhile, it was close to 100 degrees during the daytime with the sunlight shining into the car.

Another thing about the whole experience: there are different cars throughout the train that you can maneuver through. On the trains we were on, there were two sleeping cars (each consisting of bedrooms and roomettes), a car with business class seating (if available, pictured below), coach car(s), a sightseer-lounge car (also if available and also pictured below; alternatively, there’s a plain lounge car), and a dining car. There is also a cafe (which we never went to). On the double decker trains, luggage can be stored downstairs near three bathrooms, but on the single level trains, you store them right above you in your room, making it harder to get to. I preferred going downstairs.

Do Kids Do This?

It seems most parents don’t trust their kids to go on long excursions like these. We ended up seeing very few children the entire trip, and most of them were on the shortest leg (8 hours).

I saw one kid possibly a few years older than my children for a bit of our first leg, but then it was pretty empty until we ran into another girl a little older than my son on our last leg (and a younger baby, which impressed me).

So how do you entertain a kid? Fortunately, we live in the digital era, so we kept our children busy with Amazon Fire tablets and DVDs, not to mention my son enjoys taking photographs and had many opportunities to do so. For the most part, the children were super well-behaved. James, the attendant in the first dining car on the Cardinal (an awesome guy, by the way), praised the kids every time they went into the car for a meal.

Still, you can’t assume little kids are going to be little angels for 5 full days. Kids are kids, and siblings are siblings. There was one tiny instance when my children raised their voices and the old lady who had just gotten on the train had to make a big stink of it even though she had a door she could’ve easily closed to ignore the literal 10 second outburst. Meanwhile, by the end of the trip 6 hours later, she said “you’re a good mom.” Regardless, the argument I had with her confronting them put a little bit of a damper on the trip for awhile. This is the same lady who made a lunch reservation, and when it was announced, her husband was in the bathroom, so she spent 20 minutes knocking on the bathroom door to tell her him that he’s going to be late and to hurry up! I think the guy had to go and wasn’t going to get out of the bathroom to eat… but I digress. We all know that we don’t always have the best neighbors (and we also know that it goes both ways!)

The Food

Let’s talk about the food situation for a bit. First, sleeper car passengers get meals included for free. Coach passengers will have to pay for their meals; business class passengers may get a voucher to partially pay for meals, but it’s best to check with Amtrak on the specifics. On each and every leg we were on, the food was the same: reheated frozen food (for the most part). I should note, though, that we keep kosher, so our food opportunities were even more limited (read: airline food. Literally. The company that furnishes the food for us also caters to several airlines, but this is another method of transport so I suppose that’s to be expected).

Despite ordering food in advance and making very specific orders for the ~40 meals we were planning on having on the train, there were a lot of mistakes made: either the food didn’t make it on the train (we didn’t get breakfast after boarding in NYC and food was delivered to our car only in Washington DC) or they didn’t give us what we ordered. In fact, by the end of the final leg, we had nothing at all. The food was simply gone, despite assurances that the food would be there (and we called in advance to not only order the food but later to confirm its arrival on each train). There were also major problems with the kitchen staff not reading the heating instructions, so things exploded in our cute little airline packaging. It was a fun five days.

The lack of meals (and the disinterest in eating the same thing again and again) required us to improvise, so we occasionally had to opt into vegan options (garden salads with kosher dressing) and even eating Haagen-Dazs ice cream for lunch (which is kosher) instead of the food we ordered. Still, I’d also argue that eating lettuce and tomato with dressing is tastier than a lot of the kosher food, especially due to very little variety. Think about it this way: eating the same boring airline food for 5 days is not ideal. Trust me on that.

Speaking of variety, though, this isn’t limited to the kosher palate. There are not many options at all on any of the trains–and if you had a later reservation, food mostly ran out regardless of whatever dietary restrictions you adhered to. All of the legs have the same meals, regardless of whether you’re ordering a special meal or not. Even if you weren’t doing the kosher thing, you’d still get bored of the food, in all likelihood. Here is a link that contains the regular menus for each of Amtrak’s trains, including the ones we rode.

My suggestion: bring snacks. Lots and lots of snacks. Of course, you run into the dilemma of “but I get free meals” if you have a sleeper car, but you may not end up eating most of your meals anyhow and need something to hold you over.

Why?

So why would anybody do this? I mentioned before that it’s a great opportunity to bond with your family and to, frankly, chill. But there’s more to the excursion than just sitting and hanging out with people you know, live with, or love. There’s a tremendous opportunity to experience scenery like never before.

The railroad tracks go through desolate and otherwise inaccessible areas that provide stunning views of the landscape. One of our train routes, the California Zephyr route, is considered the most scenic Amtrak trip you can take in the United States, with beautiful views seen within the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Plus, the same train travels along 267 miles of the Colorado River. You may think that riding along this route in the winter would be boring or full of snow and no color from flowers, but you would be wrong. The snow-capped mountains made for beautiful winter scenes, and the snow allowed you to see evidence of all the wildlife. There were animal tracks everywhere, giving you views of where animals trekked in the forests and through streams–not to mention there were also plenty of animal sightings, such as elk, deer, cows, horses, bald eagles, and dogs that would chase the trains as they passed. (Side note: In the more tempered part of the trip, we saw at least two dead cows being eaten by crows and vultures. Sorry, we didn’t get photos of those.)

Another important planning note is that winter means there are fewer hours of daylight which reduces the ability to see all the scenes and sights, but thankfully, the most important elements of the trip are seen during daylight if the train is on time. We couldn’t have asked for better weather; we were so lucky to have wonderful sunny skies throughout and really got to capture the beauty that surrounded us while we zoomed (edit: that may be an exaggeration. In some more scenic areas, we were going about 30 mph) through these various regions.

At our last leg, the Coast Starlight took us on the California Coast, high atop the cliffs looking at desolate beaches. The views were stunning, though I do wonder why that part of California isn’t very populated. It was very solitary for much of that coastline travel, and there were very few signs of life.

Pictures

Yeah, I got an Amber Alert in Virginia. (And yeah, I didn’t know how to take a screenshot on my new cell phone.)

When we started going through the Colorado Rockies, we had these incredible views–including this one of a freight train in the distance on the track in front of us, slowing us down and giving us more time to relish in the sights.

Not long after that, we stumbled upon this herd of elk.

This is the Colorado River in the Rockies. As mentioned, we passed through 267 miles of it by train.

Can you see the cows?

We saw nearly all of our sunrises and sunsets. This is sunrise in Nevada.

This is Donner Lake in California.

In the distance, you can see Mountain View.

More beautiful California.

And this is some of the other scenery we enjoyed.

Cows cows cows.

My Verdict

As your average Jane and not a member of the Amtrak religion, I was hesitant to go on this trip from the moment it was booked; in fact, I tried to postpone having my husband make his reservations as much as possible. I’m more of a homebody than someone who rides on trains all day. If I have work-related things to focus on (I was on vacation except for the occasional client email), it is even harder because I knew it’d be hard for me to do work without the Internet.

Bearing that in mind, I made sure to buy a Verizon MiFi that gave my laptop Internet access, especially because the train cars occasionally do have Internet, but the Amtrak Internet is slow and leaves much to be desired. At the end of the day, I was much happier on my MiFi. Note if you do something like this, you need a data plan that supports it. I used about 10GB total during my one week trip (not much video or music streaming, but I definitely consumed a lot of graphics and wasn’t a stranger to check-ins on Facebook, which likely consumed most of that data).

I ended up not using my laptop as much as I thought, with more of an emphasis on doing work on my Android phone, and that worked well. (And yes, that still consumed data, so you still need a decent data plan!)

I also want to acknowledge that we did hit some dead zones where the Internet didn’t work, giving me more opportunities to absorb my surroundings (scenery and people).

Even with beds, the roomettes aren’t that comfortable, so there were rough nights for us. But despite this and the issues with food and heating, I’d do it again. There’s something really relaxing about going on a train through some of the most beautiful scenery you’ve ever seen–not to mention this was a great experience for me to spend more time with my husband and two of my three kids (we have a younger one we left behind with family). As mentioned, the weather in most of the areas couldn’t have been better; the Colorado Rockies were gorgeous and there was not even a cloud in the sky. We saw animals and trains in the distance, and again, it was even cute finding dogs chasing the train as we passed through farmland in California. Nowhere could you experience American landscape like you would be able to on a train. There’s no way you can travel through 18 “states” in such a relaxing and carefree manner because someone is at the wheel and you’re just along for the ride–not to mention you don’t have to worry about traffic either, and getting in early each time is an added bonus. This is an unforgettable experience that’s highly worth it, especially when you go with people you love. (I highly recommend not going alone. But if you do go alone, you will be sure to meet new people in the dining car where you must sit at a table of 4, coach cars, or lounge/sightseeing cars.) Take the time to get to know the train crews too; many are very nice and have great stories to tell.

In the last 12 months, I went on a road trip (from NY to Chicago) and on a train trip. I’ve always been more of a frequent flyer (though lately I’ve grown fearful of flying). I’m definitely starting to prefer having long distance trips on wheels, be it train wheels or your own vehicle. The experience is unbelievable and it’s a great way to enjoy the world and the people who matter most to you.

The post Across the USA by Train… With Kids and For $0 appeared first on Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg.

Are you the kind of person who updates social media often?

I’m curious to know if you’ve found that your broadcasts have (re)invited people into your lives, people you may know through your career, school, religious circle, or whatever, who have approached you about something that they may have picked up through your social media updates.

It probably feels weird. “Who is this guy coming out of nowhere to contact me, and why?”

What people who broadcast often may not realize (or perhaps they do with their attention seeking updates), being seemingly approachable is likely an unintended consequence of posting often. If you post often, don’t be surprised if you give off the impression that you are inviting people to contact you.

“Hey, I’m broadcasting to my 1st degree network. Hopefully, someone’s paying attention, because you know, otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing this. I obviously have an audience and I’m looking to solicit some sort of reaction.”

The louder you talk, the farther it goes, and sometimes, there’s an opportunity there — for someone to help you, for someone to use you*, or for someone to simply share with you.

(*Yeah, approachability may not necessarily be all rainbows and fairies.)

The more top of mind you are, naturally, the more the people consuming your updates are thinking about you, and opportunities to do any of the above could arise.

I have a friend who loves sharing her love of coffee. Naturally, some cool coffee product comes out, and I share it with her (though if you ask her if I did, she probably won’t remember. Lots of people are doing the same, after all. She has an audience). She’s responsive, she’s great. She is the epitome of approachability and she handles herself well with everyone who she is clearly embracing through her updates.

That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

And when I shared this story with her, she said what I should’ve said all along: “To me, my social media posts and interactions are not about being selfish or self serving. It’s about connecting with people.”

In many cases, that reaction comes in the form of some sort of Like or comment. Or a retweet or a share. But you can and should expect people to reach out and contact you directly.

And you should be prepared to respond. Appropriately. Like you do with your updates.

After all, you’re already posting like crazy anyway. The right thing in social media etiquette would be to reciprocate directly, just as you are doing when you’re broadcasting to your entire social network.

I want to reinforce this point and drive it home. My coffee friend does this right. But not everyone does, especially those who particularly overshare every personal tidbit, yet they ignore the help that their attention-craving updates are commanding.

Because honestly, this has been gnawing at me. The alternative is self-serving. But then again, I suppose that’s what some people are going for: making updates that are self-serving, and being unwilling to help people who want to help you because you are posting (and potentially asking for help).

What’s the point?!

When I shared this idea with a friend of mine, she told me that the point is that it’s possible that people “forget the medium is really a two way street because they’re used to it and because they use social media to vent and/or curate a certain image of themselves and are therefore not necessarily looking for feedback.” Yeah, well, I have news for you, people. It is called social media. You need to give and take, not just do one of the above.

(Then again, there’s this thing called human nature. Not everyone knows how to give and take. Your behaviors shine through your actions more than you think, even if you claim you’re not that kind of person. Even if you’re an introvert in real life and an “extrovert” online. You’re digging a hole and building a picture that’s more obvious than you’d ever know.)

Some of these updates are calls for help. You need to be willing to accept that help. You need to be willing to embrace the approachability that you are inviting with these updates. If you aren’t prepared, don’t post those updates.

I had a friend a few months back who posted things repeatedly that truly resonated with me. I had some similar experiences, and I recommended a book for her to start reading so that we can discuss this together and so that I could help her steer her life in a better way. I was prepared to give this person an ear, to offer her time, to mentor her.

I wanted, as this particular personal social network commanded, to be a real friend.

She seemed receptive to hear what I had to say, except it was more of a “in one ear and out the other.”

This may mimic real life a bit. You admit that you’re fat, but you refuse to seek help. You’re depressed, you tell your friend, but don’t want to take the next step to see a therapist or get on medication.

You are your own biggest obstacle.

For months, I’ve had the following potential status update planned:

I just want to rant for a moment: If you post a lot on Facebook, you give off the impression that you’re approchable, because who doesn’t post on Facebook if not to garner attention and acknowledgment of the things that are going on in their lives? So when someone offers to help you privately, don’t blow them off. Don’t ignore the suggestions that they’re giving you BECAUSE they are giving you the decency of paying attention to your Facebook status, specifically giving you advice that they know could truly help you. That’s what friends are for, no? If you refuse to acknowledge such good faith approaches, you just do not deserve to have these people as your friends. Sometimes, I wonder why good people even bother trying to give attention to people who take it for granted.

It’s not me. It’s them. Especially in this case. Social media gives rise to these self-serving behaviors that people aren’t even cognizant of. We are using this relatively new medium to show different versions of ourselves, so we believe, but we’re not.

Still, if you’re posting often, be advised that you are opening a door for communication. There’s no way around this. If you have an audience, people feel like they can relate to or respond to what you’re sharing. Accept it, don’t dismiss it. (And by the way, if you’re the person who is initiating the communicating, don’t forget that if you’re not broadcasting as they are, they may want to know what you’re up to. Your friend definitely feels approachable, but coming to them out of the blue when you’re just the opposite will likely mean you need to catch up!)

Social media has changed the game. People are now silencing themselves out of fear of inviting the wrong comments in. People are silencing themselves because they prefer to keep a low profile. People are also doing quite the opposite, inviting criticism and controversy, or because they don’t mind being a broadcast medium for everything they believe in, everything they find funny, their political views, their religious views, and the food they had for dinner last night. What you post changes how people perceive you. What you post may be a wake-up call to your friend to reach out — and hopefully for good reasons. Just be prepared for this, and be sure to treat them well. After all, if they didn’t care, they wouldn’t be contacting you.

Photo Credit: Surrounded by Pigeons

The post On Approachability. appeared first on Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg.

So, you built a working product. People use it, they love it, and they tell their friends to use it.

You grow your footprint. Awesome!

Naturally, people who like you want you to get better. They email you bug reports. They email you suggestions. They email you because they want you to succeed.

So why would you be so goddamn stupid to ignore that?

There’s a product I blogged about before. I won’t identify them by name, but if you follow me on Facebook, you’ll see that I recently called them out on their Facebook wall using almost the same words as my post subject.

Often, people are surprised that I migrated away from marketing to customer experience.

Here’s the truth of why that happened: so many people enlist in marketing to acquire new users, but don’t give a rat’s ass about customer retention.

Customer retention comes primarily from one thing: customer experience.

As a customer, I have been so heavily inconvenienced by so many companies in the service realm, indicating a void that so desperately needs to be filled. I mean, don’t you feel great when a company does right by you? Do you feel the same way when a company markets something well to millions of people?

For the last 3 years, I have been aggressively creating evangelists of people who have tried products and services I represent. (Many of you know one of those products.) Outside an amazing marketing initiative I spearheaded twice (all of which had to do with one on one touchpoints and customer experience anyhow), I have grown paid customer communities more in the last 2.5 years than in the previous 5 years combined.

And why? Because I rely on creating superior customer experiences. And yes, that means one on one relationships.

What do you trust more: some commercial you see on TV or some Facebook ad you stumbled upon — or word of mouth from a trusted friend about the same product?

All things being equal, you flock to the friend. Hell, there’s no contest. Sure, if the company has a boatload of money and is able to pay for so much visibility all over my Facebook feed, I may notice and that brand awareness will be there.

But that brand awareness isn’t trust.

I will take an endorsement from 1 friend over 300 ads I get to exposed to about your product any day. If that ad makes much of an impression, I may eventually ask my friend about the product, but I probably won’t buy unless I get some sort of endorsement from people I know — especially if the product or service is costly.

I consider myself a former marketer. Marketers study psychology, thinking about creative ideas and execution. But for a true marketer, the execution is one to many. For me, one to many never converts enough for it to be useful for me.

“Oh, I can broadcast to 100 people. Maybe two or three people will buy.”

Lame. Sorry.

Let’s look at the numbers. Thinking display media, there is some concrete data that we can work with. With an industry wide click-through rate (CTR) of 0.06% (down from 0.09% just a few years ago), if your landing page is not bad, you may convert 10%. Then, when buying 130k of impressions (something that could be thousands of dollars) you are converting somewhere close to 8 users. Let’s say the cost of your product is just a few bucks. You paid THAT much for THAT return? Lousy.

Funny I say that when I’ve sold media for almost a decade. It works for some, and I’m happy to sell it to people who want awareness and not conversions (I’ll actually tell you not to advertise if you are very lead focused, since I’m not in it for the money even if I profit financially if you advertise with me and you’re naive enough to think it will do more — many people do! You know, superior customer experience, after all.)

Let’s back up for a moment: for most people, the issue is closer to home. Throw marketing out the window. That’s not what matters. What matters is getting people to market for you. And that starts with a great product experience. No, I didn’t say a great product. The key word here is experience.

Experience comes from outreach and communication.

You could have an amazing product. If your customer experience is horrible, all things being equal, people will find a better product. And if they don’t, they’ll just create one.

But if you have a crappy-ish product that works, and you show your customers that they are everything in the world to you and you roll out the red carpet, and more importantly, innovate for them, specifically responding to feedback and enhancing the offering so that the word “crappy-ish” no longer identifies you, guess what?

You are better at what you do. Much better.

And if you instead represent a working product that isn’t crappy, yet you take your customers seriously to the tune of responding to every email that warrants a response, you’re doing great! You’re probably doing what your competitors aren’t and you will continue growing. Be prepared to innovate, sure, but your can get better by doing something simple and today: HIT THE REPLY BUTTON and type a few words.

If I have such a great customer experience, something that is unparalleled by anyone offering customer service right now, do you think I would NOT talk about it? (They consider me an early adopter and I’ve been spitting this information at you for years now. Are any of you fools listening?!)

It all starts with responsiveness. This means spending some time responding to emails. This means if email isn’t your thing, finding someone who will gladly take that responsibility from you (this is what I do, people!)

If you don’t care about the future of your business, stay the course. But if you have taken money from investors, even if you don’t have your own families to support and don’t care about that money you “borrowed”, you owe it to everyone else to give your users and customers a decent experience. Why is it fair to crash and burn when you have other people riding on your successes?

We are in year 2015 now. With the accessibility of tech and the ease of communication, you cannot ignore it. Shockingly, some of the worst offenders run tech companies (and they’re not even that big!) Why are you squandering this opportunity?

Don’t be that brand. Don’t be that company that doesn’t care (you do care, do you? Then show it). Because if you don’t do it, your competitor has an obligation to do it themselves. That’s a competitive edge that will have you sitting on the sidewalk while your competitor is zooming ahead and winning.

This is something that is SO INCREDIBLY EASY TO FIX!

So why aren’t you?

Photo credit: Jose Juan Figueroa. Also, this article originally appeared on Real Time Email.

The post How to Create a Kickass Product Without Touching the Dev Cycle appeared first on Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg.

She friended me on Facebook. Not once, not twice, but a few times.

Her profile photo made her look fantastic. Clearly, the plastic surgery worked. The way she flaunted her assets in photo after photo made her a prime candidate for some Sports Illustrated spread. She probably was too short to be a real model, I’d concluded.

I never met her. Didn’t know her. I don’t even remember her name. But every time that friend request came in, I reminded myself that I don’t have to justify why I’m not going to accept the request. I already justified many times over that I don’t accept Facebook friend requests from people I don’t know, not only on my blog (already five years old now, wow!) but also under the Favorite Quotes part of the About page on my profile, something people would never check. (And why is the Favorite Quotes thing still even there? For what its worth, it’s been effective in 0.2% of instances!)

I still find myself being thrown in a marketer’s camp. I wrote a bestselling book on social media marketing, and that is what I became known for, though social media marketing is already dead. After writing regularly about the virtues of social media marketing, it finally culminated in 2011 when I said point blank: social media marketing is typically a failure. Most people don’t know how to define objectives, and frankly, even with well-defined objectives, you just can’t do social media marketing by itself and assume you’re going to build traction or visibility. I began offering more services than social media marketing, but as I realized that most of my previous partner agencies didn’t do great with marketing despite their industry-wide acclaim, I moved away from marketing almost exclusively.

And yet.

You can’t shake a title. It’s kind of like people saying that some tragedy that befalls them will not define them. Reading an article on the Sandy Hook elementary shooting of 2012, one of the teachers in the attack said “I won’t be defined by this.” Except unless something bigger comes her way, she will be. No one has any other basis for comparison.

So I’ll have to settle for the incorrect categorization, kind of like my friend Brian Solis who has been trying to dissociate with PR for quite some time.

This means I’m still perceived as a key marketer. Except for now, despite working behind the scenes on just about everything and keeping a super low profile (I do have three kids aged 6 and under, after all), I’m not.

As I look through the mutual friends of these contacts, I realize that I’m very different from these marketing types, not just in terms of my actual day job and practices but in terms of the people whose company I choose.

I am less known (than I should be–I’m still seen as some one trick social media marketing pony) for building kickass communities. But that’s something I do damn better than most, and this is where I am not like any one of these guys: it all starts with one on one relationships, something my ISFJ personality craves over some massive market strategy where I can be singing from the rooftops and attracting a big crowd.

Because to me, it all starts with one person. Each person matters. But I will not collect people to further my agenda. That’s not genuine.

Let’s return to my friend, this model-wannabe, for a moment. Today, her friend request came in. She had over a dozen friends in common with me–from all walks of life, but mostly in the marketing discipline. I knew very clearly that this nonexistent pretty woman didn’t know any of them. More importantly, they didn’t know her (her? Him?) because she didn’t exist.

It is absolutely amazing how many friends I have who blindly accept friend requests from non-real people. These friend requests I get with people who have clearly fake profiles is alarming–and then to see that they have mutual friends with so many of my real friends is ridiculous.

Marketing people, this is all on you. And this is why, more than ever, I want to disconnect from being your typical marketer. I am not someone who builds numbers so that I can easily pitch them later. (And I realize most of you aren’t doing that, but still don’t distinguish between what’s real and what’s fake! The most shocking thing to me about all of this is that these marketing folks who are in this bucket are actually legitimate hardworking people, who are not at all the sleazy types!)

Build real relationships, not relationships so that you can accumulate numbers! If you don’t know them, why are you accepting the friend requests? What does that do for you? Do you really think they are interested in you, or are they interested in making their profile look as legitimate as possible so that they can spam their Facebook feed with some Ray Ban glasses crap that you will hopefully see and act on? (Come on, you can’t say you never saw this ever happen.)

There’s something to be said about genuine social networks that allow people to connect with their loved ones. But then there’s a whole slew of people who get an ego boost when they receive friendship connections from people they don’t know, but who may have heard of their name in some blog or something. That’s where it starts. But it keeps going, giving these new people a chance to justify the acceptance as “Oh, but she’s friends with A, B, and C, so she must be okay to connect with.”

Dude, it’s not. If you don’t know them, you won’t get to know them either when you have 4,961 Facebook friends. So what’s the point? Do these social networks truly have value to you, or is it all a numbers game?

Hopefully the friendships you have are real. Sure, I’ve got nearly 2,000 friends, but they are people I truly know personally from all walks of life, from preschool to college, then to the industry (folks I met at conferences on multiple occasions), all the way to the neighbors I just met who moved into the house nearby. They’re all real. I choose each friendship wisely because I want to know them better, truly engage with them (though I wish Facebook had an RSS reader so I could see all updates, not just the ones Facebook sends me, but I digress).

Are your friendships real?

And if not, why not?

Photo credit: Brittany Smith

The post Build Relationships. Not Numbers. appeared first on Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg.

A lot of you have learned about recently launched Wiselike, and many of you signed up due to the prompting of your friends or my Facebook announcement.

Well, let me fill you in on something: I’m not one of the three cofounders, but I’ve been involved in this labor of love for the last five months. Wiselike is the culmination of a project created by CEO Kyu Lee, who has always been interested in career paths and had created several projects to learn about what people do and how they got there.

With the rising popularity of AMAs, creating Wiselike was a natural progression. In short, Wiselike lets everyone host their own perpetual AMA, regardless of whatever industry you’re in (you could be a sanitation dude, a stripper, a forest ranger, an army general, a company CEO, or whatever else–it’s for anyone and everyone!). Still, I should add that the focus should be on professional pursuits! (Of course, you can joke around too, but just be advised that we’ll all see it )

Here are some ways to use Wiselike:

• For reputation management, especially as Google gives more authority to this new domain over time.
• For marketing purposes. Book authors, for example, can use Wiselike to promote upcoming titles coming out. Launching a new blog, company, or startup? Use your Wiselike page to tell people.
• Your resume. Have a look at how this guy is doing it. P.S. I think you should hire him.
• For event promotion. You can promote upcoming events through Wiselike. Just say “Hi, my name is XXXX, and I run the SXSW festival. Ask me anything.” People interested in attending the festival will. Promise. Especially if your conference has some sort of presence already.
• Addressing stories in the top news. Let’s say CES or Fashion Week is around the corner. Want to promote your product in anticipation for the launch? Use Wiselike as a platform to give people a head’s up on what’s around the corner — you can even do Q&A after the launch (in case of embargo) too. Hit me up via featured at wiselike dot com if you’re interested in being featured!
• For thought leadership. This is a given. Wiselike is all about thought leadership.
• Town halls. I had a recent phone call with a friend whose town I used to live in. The neighborhood is currently experiencing its own “scandal” of sorts and a lot of misconceptions are going on. As such, there’s the need to address the community in a very transparent way. Wiselike makes this possible.
• Private company transparency meetings: And this was already done! We were approached by a company recently who wanted to have their CEO answer questions in a private fashion that was completely internal to the company.
• Candidacy platforms. Running for president? How cool would it be to ask Donald Trump some questions on the platform? Or…for now, we won’t aim so high. So let’s look at this guy’s profile–he’s running for school board and is already using it.
• People setting records straight. It would be the perfect time for Noel Biderman, Ashley Madison’s former CEO, to speak up about what happened so that his words aren’t construed by the media. Because doesn’t that happen enough already?
• To answer questions you know you’ve answered a gazillion times. If you’re an expert in something, you probably are asked the same questions repeatedly. Wouldn’t it be a good idea if you had a place to send people to, both to show them how you’ve answered in the past and to show them where they can ask you subsequent questions? This guy’s done that.
• To boost your ego. Yes, come on. Doesn’t it feel good when someone wants to know more about you? Studies show that people really enjoy talking about themselves.

By the way, unlike other questions or platforms out there, if you don’t want to answer the question, it won’t be visible to the public. This gives you complete control over your online presence without any spam or unfavorable conversations on your profile. You want to shape your online presence? Now you can.

Here are some already live AMAs that have been held on the site:

• Hillel Fuld, who Business Insider called the Robert Scoble of Israel (he’s a tech startup genius)
• Susan Bennett, who you all know as Siri
• Eric Whitacre, a Grammy winning composer and conductor
• Graciela Chichilnisky, an authority on climate change who authored a paper that won the Nobel Prize
• Ruth Kedar, the creator of the first Google logo (hey, she was scheduled before we knew about it, but the timing couldn’t have been better!)
• Peter Dragone, who invented the Keurig
• AJ Jacobs, who writes about incredible journeys and who has a crazy family tree of 280 million members–you’re probably on it (so am I! AJ is my uncle’s ex-wife’s uncle’s ex-wife’s first cousin’s husband first cousin once removed husband’s great niece’s husband – and no, those repetitions are intentional)
• Vincent Connare, the creator of the Comic Sans font (yeah, baby)
• Kevin Briggs, who is known to have stopped over 200 suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge
• Wayne Fromm, the inventor of the selfie stick
• Alex Cox, a British film director and nonfiction author (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, anyone?)
• Jeff Charbonneau, the 2013 National Teacher of the Year
• Bryan Peterson, author of the widely acclaimed introductory photography book, Understanding Exposure

So clearly, if you join, you’re in good company! And it’s an obvious eclectic crowd. You’ll fit right in.

The sky’s the limit on this. Take advantage of the opportunity to use your profile, (grow your clients’ profiles! C’mon marketing people, this is great for them too), grow your presence, and be wise…like you and I both know you are.

The post 12 Ways to Improve Your Online Reputation with Wiselike appeared first on Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg.

In short, it’s easy to work remotely these days, especially with the tools available to us in this day and age. Without a doubt, you’ll be rocking the productivity angle when you use them, at home or in the office.

(But I’ll fight the remote fight, because it makes you more productive, especially with these tools.)

So what tools do I use (beyond this old list, though some goodies are mentioned again below) that have helped me become successful in 2015? Let’s dive in.

join.me

Ever needed to give a demo of a product and couldn’t travel into an office to give it to them? join.me is an amazing screen sharing tool. You simply give your attendee a URL and a dial-in number, and then use a lightweight app to share your screen or specific window. join.me integrates well with Google Calendar with a plugin, though you can also use their web interface to schedule meetings.

The only catch for join.me: it’s not ubiquitous enough just yet, as in not many people have used join.me before. This means there’s an education when you have to explain to someone that “you have to call the phone, use the access code, and ALSO access the URL on your browser so you can see what we’re talking about.” In due time, I hope this will be the standard.

Dropbox

I recommended Dropbox earlier (and that’s my referral link, though I have the paid subscription), but I’m throwing it in again. Dropbox consistently gets better and better, as if you’d think there’s no way to innovate on basic file sharing. Well, you can

I use Dropbox in many ways. For one thing, Dropbox is used to send large files to people where email doesn’t make sense. I do this with PDF files in particular. Dropbox has its own PDF viewer, which helps when the person I’m emailing doesn’t have one. I simply give them a shareable link and they can access the PDF without me having to attach it to an email. I also use Dropbox to automatically save my screenshots and my cell phone’s camera automatically uploads the pictures taken to Dropbox with the Dropbox mobile app (I get backup redundancy on camera uploads by using Google as well). Dropbox stores everything to the cloud, which is great. It also syncs those cloud files to my hard drive, so I have at least three copies (four if you count Google, and five if you read about my other backup tool in the next section).

A lesser known fact about Dropbox: the Carousel app, while not a productivity tool, gives me a new smile every week as it has a Timehop like feature that lets me see photos of “this week in history.” As a mom with three kids aged six and under, I love this as I can see years of photos, especially in watching my children grow up before my eyes. (And yes, I did start writing this post in March.)

CrashPlan

On top of Dropbox, I still use CrashPlan to back up every single file that is important to me. I have over three terabytes of data stored on CrashPlan across all my computers under the family subscription, so all my computers are synced up and that makes me content that I have pretty robust offsite data redundancy.

What about all those Missing folders in the above screenshot? Those are on backed up on CrashPlan but aren’t on this hard drive. This is more peace of mind to access files I may need later (but don’t have immediately accessible)

Why do I mention this in a productivity tool post? Because CrashPlan is great for being at home or on the go. Their PRO/family plan affords you multiple access points, so you can connect your home PC and your travel laptop or whatever else. If you’ve ever deleted a file and needed to get it back again, I bet you’ll find it on CrashPlan (Dropbox’s backup retention is not as long term). I even have a Linux server connected to my CrashPlan account.

I realize some people might think Dropbox and CrashPlan are overkill, but as you see, you do need both. One is more of a regularly-accessed folder, and the other is long-term backup play so you always have peace of mind.

Intercom

One of the coolest tools I see a lot of people using these days on many of their sites is Intercom, a tool that facilitates in-app (or emailed) customer communication, ensuring that businesses can easily communicate with their customers either in an ongoing fashion or based on some sort of time or activity. With Intercom, I can send a message to someone who has signed up 10 days ago but hasn’t logged in since, or someone who has logged in more than 50 times. These messages all get sent to a nifty user interface and pumped to the app Intercom is installed to unless you choose email, and the formatting of that is actually quite nice!

This type of interaction makes companies more productive, and ensures that businesses keep great tabs on their customers, but also saving a lot of manual labor. They have great mobile apps too.

It also may have had a better place in my top People-focused tools post, since it’s really a customer relationship tool, but it’s a productive one at that. It was a toss-up. And to be honest, I wasn’t using Intercom as much when I started writing this post in March

HappyFox

HappyFox Chat is a pretty awesome little live chat tool that I love because it’s super fast (response times are nearly instant, whereas other chat tools have delays in its sent messages of up to one minute between the support rep and the client) and it’s free for up to 10 representatives unless you need high profile plugins or enterprise access. That makes HappyFox an excellent addition for any small business needing to offer live chat. (And if you don’t, now you should.) Plus, I love the logo.

One more cool thing about HappyFox: I’m not always online to answer chat requests, but I’ve found inbound service requests increase nearly 200% since I have put it on my site. They end up emailing me and the conversation starts there.

Slack and HipChat

Want to do more internal collaboration these days? Slack and HipChat are where it’s at. With Slack having a $2.8 billion valuation, clearly, employee productivity is greatly enhanced by collaborative environments, especially within the remote workforce. I use both Slack and HipChat with different projects I am involved in, and while Slack outnumbers HipChat 6 to 1 (yup, I work with seven total environments utilizing collaborative technology), they’re both almost equal in my eyes.

I use both Slack and HipChat through Trillian, though Trillian doesn’t support chat rooms for either communications tool on the mobile interface. Fortunately, both HipChat and Slack send email notifications if I’m missing something when I’m not physically present in the room.

And if a “face to face” meeting is required, I typically find people preferring Skype and Google Hangouts.

youcanbook.me

I’m a huge fan of youcanbook.me, which is a great way for people to book a meeting on your calendar and to see what’s available. For example, you can have a look at my calendar. I work with multiple companies, so I have a few different email addresses and calenders, but at the end of the day, I combine everything into one primary calendar which ensures that I never double book myself–and youcanbook.me ensures that I don’t either. youcanbook.me operates on a premium model, so pay for what you need.

Sunrise Calendar

Who needs Google Calendar when you have Sunrise? In all honesty, it’s not much of a tremendous productivity saver; it’s just a calendar with a prettier interface. You can get visual information on the interface of who is joining your meeting, something Google doesn’t offer. It’s also cross platform (the Android/iOS app looks beautiful). I definitely prefer it to Google Calendar, though it isn’t perfect (e.g. the popup notifications before a meeting don’t go away unless you physically close them, so if I’m away from my desk for a full day and have a bunch of scheduled meetings when I’m done, I’ll have a dozen popups to close when I return, which you know is not an effective or productive use of my time).

Still, it’s nice, and Microsoft just acquired them. Plus, they launched this cool tool called Meet that makes it easy to schedule meetings on your phone. I haven’t used it yet, since clearly you can tell this post is desktop-driven (mostly!)

Remember the Milk + IFTTT or Zapier = Calendar Goodness

Back in 2011, I recommended RTM. But let me take that up a notch. I explained at the time that RTM was an excellent tool for task management, but I also use it for calendar management. Here’s how: using IFTTT (if this then that) or Zapier, which is IFTTT on steroids with a lot of super useful integrations. (IFTTT is a bit older, hence the more detailed integration here, but Zapier is also fantastic.)

Here’s how you’d do it with a Zap:

And then you’d connect your Google calendar and Gmail accounts to Zapier and provide the context into what the email should say down to the minute details (subject line, to:, from:, body, etc.) It’s much more customizable than IFTTT.

But since it’s been set up this way for a long time, here’s how you’d do it with IFTTT. Let’s say I create a meeting in my calendar. I created a recipe with IFTTT that notifies me via email:

This is what the email looks like when I receive it:

I also have an automated filter that forwards the emails I receive from this address to Remember the Milk (that email address is my personal calendar’s address):

(As a note, I could bypass this filter/forwarded email automatically and have the IFTTT email go directly to my RTM email address, but I prefer to make sure to get a copy of it in my inbox to make sure everything is working okay. So far, so good!)

The forwarded email goes into my Remember the Milk, which is embedded into my Gmail pane through an awesome plugin. Beyond meetings, RTM acts as it’s intended: as a to-do list. Since there’s a lot going on and I’m checking my email regularly, a combined to-do list with calendar the best way for me to keep track of everything–and it also means I don’t miss a meeting:

Everything I need to be accountable for is documented in RTM–places to go, people to see, calls to make, and things to do. It’s a blissful setup.

(P.S. This screenshot is real. I really wasn’t lying when I said I live in an inbox zero world.)

I feel immensely productive when I have no remaining tasks on my RTM pane and my Gmail inbox is empty.

Streak

Streak is relatively newish, but it’s a plugin that doesn’t get enough love (or awareness). As a Chrome plugin, Streak does a few things wonderfully:

• It lets you see when people have read your email (and where they’re from/what client they used).

• It has a pretty cool and completely customizable CRM that is embedded directly into Gmail.
• It lets you Snooze emails, which hides them from your inbox for a time until it needs to be actionable again. Let’s say you emailed Bob and you know you’ll need to chase him down next week. If he doesn’t reply by Monday, you can snooze the email by hiding it from your inbox until Monday, and on Monday, the email will show up again so that you can be reminded to follow up. This ties in very well with my Inbox Zero mentality. Why keep an email in your inbox that will just sit on your conscience for awhile? I wouldn’t.
• You can split emails into separate threads.
• You can Mail Merge.
• You can also send emails later like popular tool Boomerang does.

My only gripe with Streak is that I like to maintain a clutter-free inbox feel, so I don’t want “Snoozed” and “Pipelines” showing up with my primary folders.

Also, Streak isn’t plug and play–you get the whole suite of apps whether you want them or not. Those Pipelines are unavoidable, and if you’re using Salesforce and Streak, too bad. You still have to be forced to acknowledge their CRM features.

Trello

These days, the fight on task management tools does not seem to involve the frontrunner for nearly a decade, Basecamp. Instead, the fight is between Asana and Trello. In my eyes, using both together, I find Trello far more user friendly, both from a usability and interface standpoint. Trello is simply a user friendly collaborative team task organizer.

I primarily use Trello to document feature requests for teams I work with, with links back to the user requests (e.g. the tweet URL). I have also used it to create a content strategy and to manage advertising relationships with the rest of my team. The biggest downside of Trello (for me) is that it used to embed the tweet directly in the interface, but in 2013, they killed that functionality and won’t restore it. I mention this because there are a lot of tweets that are user requests, and it’s frustrating that Trello thinks of this as unimportant.

RescueTime

While I wrote about RescueTime for Lifehacker in 2007, it’s one of those tools that is amazing that people just don’t talk about. RescueTime lives in the background of your browser, your computer, and your mobile phone, assuming you have the app installed there too, and helps you manage your time on anything you’re doing, whether it is surfing a website or using an app on your computer (or phone).

You can also tie it to personal goals.

Pushbullet

Ever been so busy doing something on your computer that you wanted to send a SMS message from your computer without having to pick up your phone? Or perhaps you missed a phone call because you’re sitting at your computer? Or you were on your phone and discovered a URL that you want to read in depth on your computer? Pushbullet is a pretty awesome app that makes your mobile and web browsing activities seamless.

Here’s what my messages to my phone look like — I am constantly bombarded by popups so I don’t usually miss anything:

See the other two options next to Notifications, Push and SMS? “Push” lets you send messages directly to your phone. “SMS” lets you send SMS messages from your phone to a desired contact. (It does not support MMS.)

On the mobile side, you can communicate directly with your browser via a Push. You can send Notes, Links, Photos, or Files. I send a lot of URLs I want to upvote and share or read later.

Pocket

Pocket is Pushbullet’s missing link. If I find a URL I want to read later, I hit the Pocket icon on my toolbar. Pocket downloads the URLs so that I can read them either on the web interface or on my phone with the accompanying app. These are some articles I still have yet to read that I saved to Pocket.

I find Pocket a better version of the Onetab Firefox and Chrome extension, which prevents tab clutter by consolidating any tabs you’re not needing into “one tab” as the name implies. But for me, if I need to access the tab regularly, I pin it. (I have very few Pins!) If I don’t need the tab and it’s something I can read later, I Pocket it. I used to use OneTab far more often–but now I use Pocket, especially since OneTab doesn’t communicate with my phone so I can’t read those tabs when I’m away from the PC I saved the tabs on (it’s not cloud-based either). I’ve requested mobile integration of OneTab more than once, but they don’t seem to be updating the tool. Goodbye OneTab and hello Pocket!

StayFocusd

StayFocusd is a Chrome extension that is absolutely amazing. It ensures you stay true to being productive every single day, blocking off access to websites if you’ve visited it longer than your specified duration. You can’t change the duration once the day has begun, so if you feel like you need “just 5 more minutes on Facebook,” well, too bad. Once the timer is up, you get a popup from StayFocusd that says “shouldn’t you be working?” Indeed, you should be.

Social media people: I realize Facebook is a time sink, but let’s face it: it’s also a business tool. Fortunately, you can whitelist your client pages. So while you won’t be able to visit facebook.com beyond the thirty minute limit, you’ll be able to visit your whitelisted pages, like business.facebook.com, or facebook.com/namecheap, or whatever else. It is the perfect solution to keep you focused on your work while still letting you exploit those little holes that clearly are for business use Best of all, it’s totally free and still, their social media support is amazeballs.

So there you have it: seventeen (mostly free!) tools that rock my socks off, making me more productive than I could ever be. I’ll venture you haven’t heard of half of these tools before.

How should I add to this list in 2016 or later? Sound off in the comments.

The post 17 Productivity Tools for the Ultimate Business Gain appeared first on Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg.

There were online communities. People participated on those communities. It became possible, all of the sudden, for marketers to participate within those communities because they saw an opportunity.

And so, all of the sudden, this pure network of sorts became a place for marketers, as they always do, to capitalize upon.

In the beginning, a core group of social media marketers were making waves on sites that have since shut down, creating the foundation for social media marketing as we see it today.

This very small group of social media marketers, of which I’d like to say I’m part, established conventions required of true social media marketing. Rules like:

• Don’t broadcast
• Build relationships
• Add value

Yup, yup, and yup. If you’ve heard those rules before, it’s because it’s a constant theme here. It’s been a constant theme of mine since I stumbled upon social media in 1993.

I live and breathe by these very words. It is, in a nutshell, the way to make a true impact. It also takes a hell of a lot of time and the cost for many small businesses is why I told people in 2013 to “stop their marketing,” because returns are not immediate in the relationship building spectrum–and many look for fast results that are simply impossible with the resources they have available. Still, by definition, relationships are at the core of what I do. I’ve written about it in books. I’ve spoken about it at conferences. I blog about it here. I should make “relationship” my middle name.

These early adopters in the age of social media who emphasized value and relationship building helped established groupthink. All of the sudden, a crop of bloggers who later called themselves social media experts started reiterating these very tenets. The outcome was viral. It was an education. Marketers would tell other marketers that the way to do social media the right way was to focus on the people process, something that takes time but is simply the best possible way.

I don’t disagree.

The thing is: no matter what kind of sound advice you tell someone, you will hear from someone unwilling to do what everyone else tells them to do. They want shortcuts (there are no shortcuts, says Adam Singer). These outliers will, possibly in time, fail.

But you know what? They may also succeed.

You see, doing something different, while possibly stupid, could still result in successes. On the other hand, while not necessarily calling it a “success,” it will help that person achieve his goal.

Let me share a story of a client I worked with in the past.

The article, Why Social Media Departments Fail, was inspired by a former client of mine and by conversations I had with many freelance social media consultants who experienced similar outcomes with their full time companies and clients. My client wanted to manage and grow their fan base, and they had big numbers in their minds.

The growth was slow and steady, just as anyone who actually understands social media would expect. Relationships were built with prospective customers, and products were purchased. Word of mouth was getting around.

Life was good.

But to the client, the process took too long. The client wanted more, more, more. Interestingly, the client didn’t have goals for that larger surge of growth, but didn’t want whatever he was after to take forever.

He wanted numbers, not realizing that numbers don’t do anything for him if they’re not the right numbers.

BUT NUMBERS! WANT. NUMBERS.

It didn’t last. We parted ways. He ended up calling social media a smokescreen.

This is not an isolated story by any stretch. I took the approach of social media purism, didn’t align goals properly with the client, and lost him. No harm, no foul. A learning experience was had.

Fast forward four years to 2015, and it’s as if I’m talking to an earlier version of myself. (But perhaps my earlier version would have an open mind.)

Let’s revisit the concept of slow and steady for a moment. Slow and steady, while smart, may also exhaust the budget. Sometimes shortcuts aren’t ideal, but they are required.

I recently made a request to break a convention, one that I’ve touched upon several times already in this article. I have learned that while I can advise people not to do social media the way they want to, it actually makes sense to respect why they do want to do it their way. (And if you are an outsider and don’t know why, don’t assume.)

I had a request from a person who wanted to do something that you’d consider grey hat–they wanted to buy Twitter followers. Not an illegal request, not an unethical request, yet a very ill-advised request (and possibly one that violates Twitter’s Terms of Service–which, by the way, isn’t that bad, considering how many marketing types have more than one Facebook account, and you know what? That violates Facebook’s Terms of Service too.)

When asking this clearly controversial question to a “smart marketer group,” (though I may argue that the first word of this phrase is inaccurate) I made it very clear that the question was iffy and a no-no.

Let’s dig in. I recommend popcorn.

It’s actually a fascinating read of groupthink gone wrong. (Oh, and if you can’t tell, the post was pulled, but not by me. For the follow up conversations, see this and this.)

I appreciate that I helped establish a foundation for social media as we know it today. I appreciate that I’m a nobody in the social media space as far as most are concerned because I had the first of three children right after I published my bestselling book on the topic (which was fully written before three of the aforementioned users even joined Twitter) and intentionally withdrew from the spotlight. Yet I have learned, having worked in this industry for a decade, that I need to be respectful of other opinions. If everyone did the same thing, we’d never be successful because it would be another case of banner blindness.

Today, it’s social media. Tomorrow, it’s politics. It’s religion. It’s veganism. It’s LGBT issues. It’s anything that someone has an opinion on.

As an infographic guru once told me, social media groupthink and witch hunts marginalize opinions. The conversation above supports that entirely. There are, in every school of thought, people who initially drove a general direction. I take responsibility for helping drive the direction of social media marketing. I’m not embarrassed to want to introduce an opposing view once in awhile, especially one that actually is sound once you consider the rationale (which not a single person had/has, as I never volunteered that rationale).

I love this quote from this Vox piece:

On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.

Ever hear of herd mentality? You are reading all about it in the preceding blockquote and in the conversation above. Seventy percent of you are following convention and not thinking independently.

Idealized views are dangerous. Your purist view may make sense but is certainly not always right for every single circumstance.

Unless you’re working for a big brand where bucks are finite, time and money is working against you. You may succeed, but the most important person–your client, in this case–might view you as a failure.

And so, guess what? It’s not a bad thing to break the rules once in awhile. I doubt anyone would get called out for buying Twitter followers. In fact, this member of the media announced it to everyone.

Let’s not fool ourselves, people. Not every action in the social media space–or in any space–is smart. But going to extremes as in “it’d be a PR nightmare” for a small brand that doesn’t care is preposterous. And telling me to choose different friends? That’s insanity. You’re just as likely to be outed for that second Facebook account, or for that Facebook account that is a Profile but really should be a Page (yes, Dan’s Hair Salon, I won’t friend you, because you are the wrong type of account!)–or is it that people don’t really care?

So here’s my lesson for you: try not to care once in awhile. Worry about your professional growth and not of others. This is a public service announcement from someone who knows that being edgy is sometimes the way to be competitive. I’ll never do what I asked for my personal brand, but I certainly will respect it for others.

The post Social Media <s>Purism</s> Stupidity is what Gets You Fired appeared first on Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg.