Successful Blog

Top 5 Facebook Apps for Business Users

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A Tools Review by
Rahil Muzafar

cooltext451585442_tools

Top 5 Facebook Apps for Business users

Facebook is becoming of more and more assistance for both normal users, and more importantly, the businesses. Myriad of opportunities and apps exist for businesses to take advantage and make their stay at Facebook even more productive. Facebook is no more just a simple place for friends to hang around and share information, picture, and videos with each other, it has evolved into a place, where people can not only make friends, but they can also conduct lots of business activities, market their businesses, and so on. If you are running a business, and you happen to be an avid user of Facebook, then you should start using Facebook for purposes other than the much hyped business networking, a plethora of business apps can make things much simpler than you’d expect.

Let’s take a look at some of the most practical business apps.

1. Pagemodo

Not many people have the aesthetic sense, skills (or time) to create remarkable pages for their valued businesses. Pagemodo is for these people, providing the facility of creating professional looking business pages with incredible ease, sans any technical or graphic expertise, and an option to publish these pages straight away. The custom design and templates offer a wide variety of options. Pagemodo offers both free and premium packages; paid members can use many special features while paying a very small cost.

2. RSS Graffiti

For people who have multiple pages and feeds, there can’t be a better personal assistant than RSS graffiti (and it reminds you of that funny animal Giraffe, for me its reason enough to embrace this app). Apart from that, the application allows you to choose the combination between the feed that will be posted on the wall, page, profile, group, etc. You can choose exactly what shows up where, and how often. No matter who you are, or what type of business you are running, RSS graffiti will manage your feeds, in a hassle free and effective manner.

3. Facebook Files

This application lets you take your information wherever you go- which means you can access the files you need anywhere, as long as you have got access to your Facebook account. You can get up to 5 GB space for free which is extendable on demand. Share your files with your friends, colleagues, or subordinates, anywhere and everywhere. It serves like a mobile hard drive that you don’t have to carry physically, and the best part is that there’s no chance of losing it.

4. Networkedblogs

Blogging is all the rage these days, and this one is specifically meant for bloggers. Even though, there are a number of Facebook applications serving different purposes for bloggers, but this one is easily one of the best. This news reader application has the capability to pull up feeds from your blog, it lets you do stuff like adding a blog to your Facebook, read other peoples’ blogs and comment. It also lets you post feed on your profile or business page. In short, this app will enable you to make the most of Facebook community consisting of millions of people and create the much needed buzz for your blog.

5. I Endorse

In the online world, there is no asset as valuable as having the credibility, and when it comes to enhancing credibility, there’s nothing more effective than the testimonials coming from real people and real customers (believe it or not, but now the customers can differentiate between real testimonials and the bogus ones). “I Endorse” eases the process of accumulating testimonials (they call them endorsements).

Special mention – Facebook Lists:

Create and maintain all kinds of lists you can think of, no more sticky notes strewn all over the office, no more losing the grocery list, no more forgetting birthdays, and you can also share your lists with friends, and they can add/ update/ manage things for you.
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Rohail Muzafar

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Thanks, Rohail! Rohail’s website is Surf Clothing and you find him on Twitter as @w3whiz

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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7 Outstanding Web Tools to Organize 2011 and Get the Right Information to You

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A Guest Post by Lior Levin

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The Internet has put more information at our fingertips than ever before, and, at the same time, given us more to remember. As great as the digital age has been, it’s also been a nightmare for organization, giving us more mental clutter than we ever thought possible.

Fortunately, developers are finding new ways to use the Web to help people stay organized. In every area from finance to news, new Web-based tools are cropping up to help you stay organized and avoid information overload.

Though they target different challenges, their goals are are all the same: Filter out the information that one doesn’t need and ensure that the info you do need is available and easily accessible.

That is something all these tools do very well.

Contacts: Gist

gist-logo

Being on the Web means that we have an ever-increasing contact list and those contacts have an also-increasing number of means of contact. Between email, Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds and more, it can be hard to keep track of who we know, where they are and what they are up to.

Gist, however, makes it easy, by syncing up with your various accounts, it unifies your contact list into one easily-digested list that is sorted by importance and includes all means of contact.

Finances: Mint

mint-logo

As great as online banking is, most of us have multiple accounts and our finances spread across more and more companies. Fortunately, Mint makes it easy to view all of these accounts in one place, by accessing your various banking, loans and credit accounts and then displaying the information in one place, making it easier than ever to get a clear picture of your finances.

Best of all, since Gist automatically categorizes your purchases, you can easily see where your money is going and where you can save money.

Files: Dropbox

dropbox-logo

If you use more than one computer, the frustration of having to more files from one machine to another are well-known. Though flash drives and email can help, they are clunky and slow solutions. Fortunately, Dropbox can help.

Dropbox automatically synchronizes files between computers, without you having to do anything. It just runs in the background and when a file is changed on one computer, the other machines on the account get the update almost instantly. Also great for collaboration and backup.

Social Networks: Tweetdeck (Chrome App)

tweetdeck-logo

If you are like most people, you have at least a few different social networking profiles spread across several different sites. Keeping track of them all can be a huge pain. Fortunately, Tweetdeck’s new Chrome Application, which is a Web-based HTML5 app, lets you follow your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare accounts and more all from one multi-column pane.

Best of all, with merged columns you can get all of your private communications (IE: Twitter DMs and Facebook messages) in one stream, regardless of where they came from.

Documents: Google Docs

Though Google Docs is best known as a tool for editing and creating files on the Web, through features like easy sharing, folders and document upload, it is also a way to organize and access your critical files anywhere you need them.

While it isn’t ideal for all document types, most simple documents can be easily used with Google Docs, making it a natural way to keep your files handy, no matter where you are.

Incoming Links: Zite

zite-logo

Between our Twitter streams, RSS feeds and other sites we follow, many of us have far more links in our inbox than we could ever read. Zite, which is currently in closed beta, calls itself “Your Personal Web Filter” and it goes through all of that to find the stories most important and most interesting for you.

Most interesting of all, Zite learns from your behavior and is always honing its approach to what you find interesting, making it a tool that gets better the more you use it.

Task List: Producteev

producteev-logo

Busy people have a lot of deadlines but keeping track of those deadlines can be a real pain. Though calendars can help, especially with meetings and appointments, there are many tasks that just aren’t right for calendars like laundry or sending out birthday cards.

Producteev helps organize those tasks and, through integration with email, IM and an iPhone app, makes it easy to ad tasks and receive updates on them. is also great for managers who need to assign tasks and deadlines to a team as it has a built-in function for group management as well.

In the end, the Web has both done more to make our lives more cluttered and more to simplify it than any innovation before. We have more information being thrown at us than we ever thought possible and more ways to sort, organize and parse it than we did just a few years ago.

When it’s all said and done, the Web is just a tool and we’ll get out of it exactly what we put into it. If we let it drive us to insanity, it can do so. But if we make it a tool to organize and streamline our lives, it can do that just as easily.

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This outstanding review was written by Lior Levin who is a consultant to iAdvize, a live chat support software company. You can find Lior on Twitter as Liors

Thank you, Lior. You’re welcome back here anytime.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Cool Practice Review: Gratitude Challenge

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Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools, products, and practices that could belong in an entrepreneurial business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks in a business environment.

Cool Practice Review: Dialogue Exercise
A Review by Todd Hoskins

Earlier this year, Liz wrote on how gratitude is more than saying “thank you.” “Breathing” gratitude contributes to thrivability, both in oneself and extending to one’s friends, co-workers, and community.

But gratitude is very difficult in the face of pain.

Can I be grateful for my divorce? For my genetic condition? For a decline in income or revenue? For a dissatisfied client?

By finding gratitude within a challenge or hardship, it takes away my victim status, and allows me to see how suffering can contribute to my growth. My wound can become my strength, and I can grin (and weep) in the face of loss because I know a stronger foundation is being built.

Businesses have had their share of pain, not just now, for it is a part of working within a living system where systemic needs are sometimes contrary to the people working within the system. At an organizational or group level, there is enormous power in sharing the individual and collective difficulties along with the growth that may emerge from the hardship. Try this exercise as a reflection on the past year, or use it in your annual reviews:

1. Each person writes down 2-3 difficulties and why they are grateful for them. Encourage your people to speak on behalf of themselves, and/or the team.

I am grateful for _____, because it has ______.

(i.e. I am grateful for John’s resignation, because it has shown me how I do not allow people who work for me to creatively experiment and try out their own ideas).

((i.e. I am grateful for losing our largest client, because it has demonstrated how much we compromised on our vision in order to keep them happy).

2. Each person shares their gratitude sentences, with no judgment or commentary from the group.

3. Offer thanks for the participation, but don’t try to solve anything. Give the exercise some breathing room. A discussion may ensue, but a debate, planning session, or analysis would be best saved for later.

Try it, and let us know how it went!

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 5/5 – Groups should be kept below 25

Entrepreneur Value: 5/5 – Want commitment and teamwork? This helps you get there.

Personal Value: 5/5 – For family, for friends, even your network of ambient intimacy

Happy Thanksgiving!

Cool Tool Review: FairShare

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Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools, products, and practices that could belong in an entrepreneurial business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks in a business environment.

Cool Tool Review: FairShare
A Review by Todd Hoskins

This is a good time to emphasize that tools in themselves are neither good nor valuable. It all depends on how you use them.

FairShare is a product from Attributor, a company that has been very important within the online publishing industry. Attributor works with publishers to help protect licensing rights across the web. They index the web and compare billions of content bytes with the content you publish to find the plagiarizers, copycats, and seedy content (re-)generators that proliferate across the web. This is a wonderful and valuable service to diminish the number of splogs and opportunists that are seeking clicks for cash.

If you blog or regularly produce valuable content (Bravo!, no matter what business you are in!), FairShare will find where your content is being reproduced and whether the correct attributions are being made. Simply state what license exists with your content (or no license at all), set up a feed, and let FairShare feed back to you the other places where complete or partial content matches are occurring.

It’s a tricky question what, if any, license to pursue. If you get a FairShare account for your copyright attorney, I must ask the question, “Are you making the Internet a more democratic and free space?” I favor defaulting to the Commons – allowing your content to be reused with limited, chosen restrictions. We looked at Creative Commons months ago. Also, I recommend this book that gives you a historical perspective.

FairShare also offers a WordPress plugin and widget that are great ways to let it be known that you encourage people to use your content (perhaps with a link).

What if you find your content elsewhere (and you likely will)? The digital tap on the shoulder is recommended: “Hey, I see you liked what I had written. Tell me why you saw it as valuable? Would you mind linking back to me?”

You may make some friends, find some customers or partners. Even if you don’t, you’ll be contributing to a more civil and self-policed web.

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 4/5 – Please make friends, not enemies

Entrepreneur Value: 4/5 – Did I mention it is free?

Personal Value: 3/5 – Don’t publish your poetry without it

Let me know what you think!

Todd Hoskins helps small and medium sized businesses plan for the future, and execute in the present. With a background in sales, marketing, leadership, psychology, coaching, and technology, he works with executives to help create thriving individuals and organizations through developing and clarifying values, strategies, and tactics. You can learn more at VisualCV, or contact him on Twitter.

Cool Practice Review: Dialogue Exercise

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Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools, products, and practices that could belong in an entrepreneurial business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks in a business environment.

Cool Practice Review: Dialogue Exercise
A Review by Todd Hoskins

Credit: I learned the structure of this exercise from Leilani Henry who runs a great business that creatively helps organizations learn, develop, and collaborate.  She’s also quite the artisan.

A clear agenda and good leadership usually makes for a good business meeting. But sometimes, spending time exploring possibilities and perspectives is valuable for creating strategy, nurturing the connectedness of the team, and getting a break from the task-heavy day that can drain and dry up our creative wells.

This exercise in dialogue, based upon the work of David Bohm, is a wonderful practice that can be used in team meetings, executive retreats, or even board meetings.

First, sit in a circle so each person can see one another. This works best for a group (not a few people on a couch), and the intimacy would be lost if you have more than a few dozen people.

The group leader asks a question. The person to the left or right will respond to the initial question, then ask a follow-up question to the person to his/her left or right. Move around the circle until you’re back at the beginning. Time limits can be suggested or enforced.

Guidelines
1. No question “answering.” The temptation will be strong to give an answer. Instead . . .
2. Ask open-ended questions – nothing that can receive a simple yes or no
3. Share your stream of thoughts in response to the question being posed to you. This may begin with “That makes me think of . . .” Or, “I’m wondering . . .”
4. Do not try to “stay on topic.” You will not escape the direction of the first (or tenth) question. The suggestiveness of the initial question is important
5. No judgments on the questions or responses being offered
6. No decisions are made during the dialogue – it’s a process for its own sake

Outcomes
1. At the end of the exercise, you will likely have a pool of meaning in the midst of the circle.
2. The questions and responses can give you a new perspective on issues, possibilities, and people within the circle

Suggestions
1. Have one or a few people write down key words and phrases as they surface
2. Take a break, then at a later time ask, “What could we learn from this?”

Some possible questions:
What will our company look like in five years?
Why are we not meeting expectations?
How do we make decisions?
How do creativity and work go together?
How could we be more involved in the community?

Again, NO ANSWERING!

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 5/5 – Pushes people out of their comfort zones a bit, but in a good way

Entrepreneur Value: 5/5 – Great team-building

Personal Value: 2/5 – Family reunion fun? The principles apply. Adapt it for your personal relationships.

Let me know what you think!

Todd Hoskins helps small and medium sized businesses plan for the future, and execute in the present. With a background in sales, marketing, leadership, psychology, coaching, and technology, he works with executives to help create thriving individuals and organizations through developing and clarifying values, strategies, and tactics. You can learn more at VisualCV, or contact him on Twitter.

Cool Tool Review: Business.gov

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Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools, products, and practices that could belong in an entrepreneurial business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks in a business environment.

Cool Tool Review: Business.gov
A Review by Todd Hoskins

The Small Business Administration was created in 1953 with the charter to “aid, counsel, assist and protect, insofar as is possible, the interests of small business concerns.” Most entrepreneurs are familiar with SBA loans, but are unaware of the additional services offered by state and local SBA offices.

Business.gov is a collection of resources, designed to help small businesses (under 500 employees) get the help they need. This includes loan applications, tax information, licensing, and relevant regulations. Contrary to what many people believe, the SBA no longer offers loans directly to citizens. They act as a broker and guarantor for business owners seeking loans (currently numbering more than 240,000). But they do much more than that.

There are approximately 1,000 Small Business Development Centers across the US. The SBDC’s provide one-to-one counseling, educational programs, and financial analysis services. I was surprised when friend Mike Nolan joined the SBDC in South Central Minnesota. Mike is a serial entrepreneur and professor of entrepreneurship. Rather than launching more projects, he has chosen to help others expand and excel.

The site is much better than most governmental agency sites, but the online community could use some nurturing.

There are people who want to help you. And they also have something to gain – small business growth leads to tax revenue and jobs. Whether you are in the planning stage, survival mode, or a growth phase, find your local office and see what is available.

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 2/5 – A great way to inquire where to help serve your local business community

Entrepreneur Value: 5/5 – Why not? Free assistance!

Personal Value: 0/5 – Extraneous government involvement unnecessary

Let me know what you think!

Todd Hoskins helps small and medium sized businesses plan for the future, and execute in the present. With a background in sales, marketing, leadership, psychology, coaching, and technology, he works with executives to help create thriving individuals and organizations through developing and clarifying values, strategies, and tactics. You can learn more at VisualCV, or contact him on Twitter.