I will be speaking tomorrow at a seminar here in St. Louis about the future of work, using my own humble example how I have evolved using technology, connectivity, and collaboration tools. You can download the slide deck here. This is part of my activities with BounceBackSTL.org.
When it comes to picking their own internal customer relationship management tools these days, the first place that many MSPs start with is at Salesforce.com. The cloud-based CRM company has made a name for itself in this marketplace by providing very capable tools that can deliver the automation needs of large and small businesses alike.
In this recorded webinar for MSPtv, I talk more about the issues and some alternatives to using Salesforce.com
I had a short conversation with Sam Whitmore about consuming new media on tablets as a result of getting my iPad this week, including how PR and editorial need to work together to produce better visual stories, and how social media presents information to consumers who are traditional newspaper readers (those few of us that remain).
It is worth a listen to, and you can download the podcast recording here.
Here are the places you can see me at work in the next month. Feel free to email me if you’d like me to come speak at your event.
This week, Paul Gillin and David return to the airwaves with the latest of their MediaBlather podcasts. They talk about the new wave of question-and-answer sites. The soaring popularity of Quora, the new social network that has people scrambling to deliver the best answers to each other’s questions, has created new interest in a tried-and-true metaphor. LinkedIn and Yahoo both have had its Answers sections for quite some time now. You can use these answer sites to build your professional credibility and visibility in the smallest of niches, but how do you know where to place your chips with so many options from which to choose? The duo discuss this growing trend.
Last month I was a featured speaker on a Focus.com Webinar sponsored by Juniper. You can watch the recorded presentation here.
In conjunction with the good folks over at MSPtv and Redmond Channel Partner magazine, I am hosting this event at noon ET on 1/18:
Are You Ready for the Cloud? How MSPs Can Dominate New Management Models.
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) need to assess how ready they are to provide complete managed cloud services for their clients. While Microsoft and other larger vendors offer a mixed message in terms of hosted vs. on-premises solutions, MSPs through the right partner such as Zenith Infotech can provide a complete range of cloud computing services. But you need to take the right steps and in this webinar, we will show you how. Register here.
As a professional speaker, I spend a lot of time polishing my presentations to keep them up to date and making more of an impact. Of course, the standard is Microsoft PowerPoint but over the years I have found three particular tools worthy add-ons to use. Let me share with you how each of these three can benefit your own presentations.
When I first started speaking many years ago, my slide decks were 100% text and boring as could be. They were more like speaking notes or an outline than something that should be shown to any audiences. After getting help from other speaking friends, I realized that I needed to completely rethink what I was doing. Now I start with the words but take things a step further and present a series of images and ideas, screen captures and other visual aids. You need the outline of your talk settled first so you can complement what you are saying with the right graphical images.
The easiest way to do this is to use a series of stock images from CrystalGraphics called PowerPlugs. For $100 subscription, you can download an unlimited number of royalty-free images from them. Your subscription lasts for an entire year, and if you need more than just a few images, it really pays to sign up for a subscription. They have a great search engine, and the site is very easy to use. Once you select your images and enter your subscription code, you get an email with links to download each image. In a matter of minutes your presentations can look very snazzy.
Once you are finished with your presentation, you want to share it with your audience. Some speakers don’t like to do this, claiming it is their property and work product. I find that the more that I share and give away for free, the more likely that I am going to get hired for my next speaking gig. And I also like to tell my audiences when I begin my presentation that they don’t need to be concerned with taking lots of notes and can just download the presentation from the Internet themselves.
There are a number of ways to share your presentation, including Google Docs. Google is great when you have two or three presenters that want to work together on the same slide deck. A better choice for general sharing is Slideshare.net. It is easy to set up a free account and within a few minutes you can upload your presentation. Slideshare also has add-ons that make it easy to publish your slides to your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts too, so that every time you upload a new deck it goes out to your Facebook Wall and main LinkedIn summary page. You can set restrictions on each presentation to just be viewed or also to be downloaded, to make them private for particular people instead of for the general public. You have an unlimited number of uploads for the free account. Slideshare has a paid Pro service where you can track and respond to leads of people who have viewed your work, look at other analytics, and remove ads from your account starting at $19 a month.
The third tool isn’t for PowerPoint, but is a new way to offer your presentations using an online service from Prezi.com. You can upload pictures or PDFs, type in text, and create a dizzy animated tour around a single canvas or surface that can be fun to view. I haven’t developed any presentations yet using this service but having seen a few live. It is worth considering, particularly for webinars where you want to keep your audience engaged and may not want to use all images for your presentation. A good example of what you can do with this service can be found in this presentation talking about teaching math to high school students.
The downside is that you need a separate tool to present offline. Like Slideshare, the basic Prezi account is free for up to 100MB of storage space. If you need more storage, want to work or present offline, or add privacy controls, you will need to sign up with one of the paid accounts starting at $60 a year.
Good luck with improving your presentations, and feel free to share your own tools here.
Yes, I know. Probably any day of the calendar you can find a social media conference somewhere within 50 miles of you. But pay attention, this conference is all meat and little fat. Sponsored by the Social for New Communications Research, it brings together top-flight researchers from around the globe in one place for two days. You will see original research results, thoughtful commentary by practitioners, and make some wonderful contacts with the experts. It is a small, very focused single-track event with some very bright people. You can find the agenda here.
I will be there, of course, and presenting some initial findings from a new study exploring the impact of social media on telecommunications service providers that is sponsored by HP. What, you work for a service provider and haven’t yet taken my survey? Click here now, please! You don’t want to be left out.
SNCR is a labor of love of Jen McClure, who I first met back in the good ole’ days when Ziff Davis ran Interop and when Interop had a lock on the Internet brain trust. Her non-profit has done some amazing work in the few short years it has been around.
Register for the conference here. It isn’t a free event, but well worth your time and money to attend.
This week Paul Gillin and I discuss some tools and tips to help augment your social media methods in our MediaBlather podcast. We touch on more than a dozen different things that you can do to be more productive in Twitter, You Tube and other social media outlets. You can find the podcast here, along with the links to the various services that we mention.
Here is my slide deck that covers similar ground.