happy 4047 everybody!

It’s chinese year of the TIGER… grrrr. Came out of my house to see a dragon earlier – COOOL! Missed it the last few years, video below.

So for me, as usual, I set my resolutions at CNY – mainly because, the start of the years always a weird point to do things and there’s always lots going on.

Last years “no platic bags” was generally good, hard at first but worked out. The greener me went well, sold the car (saved bucks and the environment) and I made some good progress on a number of projects.

So what for this year?

1) No more Mr Nice Guy – I’m taking a much firmer, no-nonsense approach with companies that don’t pay up on time. Training is all paid up front anyway,  as it has been, but no longer am I going to tread gently with organisations that take months paying. My payment terms for project work remain 50% up-front, but I won’t do ANYTHING till that’s paid now (no strategy meets esp.) and 50% on completion –  BUT I’m adding a discount for people that pay within 7 days of the invoice… and using the EU 8%+BR+£30 per overdue invoice.

2) More Mr Nice Guy – I kept this pretty quiet, but I wrote an eBook and a publishing agent has got interested – if I can write a draft of a full book by april, he’ll take it to the London book fair – yikes.

3) More downtime – been working faaaaaar too many hours, saying no to a few things.

4) A charity challenge – any suggestions for this year?

Hey ho… not sure anyone reads here anymore – if you do, say hi.

Luke

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I’ve been considering writing an outline of some of the more popular social networking sites and tools for a while now and this weekend I’ve created a first draft which I intend to add to as time goes on.

With any business strategy, start first with the “Why?” and set some SMART goals to work towards, then work out which resource helps you to achieve it… hopefully start here, will help with the second part of that.

In part this page was also a follow up to last weeks presentation at the Poole Business Women’s Lunch Club where I felt I hadn’t covered all of the ground as thouroughly as I would of liked in the time given.

All thoughts, comment and feedback welcome.

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Allow me to explain.

It used to be that the status updates on LinkedIN were actually quite useful, to see what people were up to, get a snapshot of what they are/were working on… but alas no more.

Given the option to link a twitter account to LinkedIN (good) most people have chosen to send ALL tweets to LinkedIN (bad) rather than use the selective “#in” option which only sends selected tweets to LinkedIN (good).

The result?

The status updates are all RT’s (the twitter version of forwards) and off topic, no where near as useful as it used to be.

To me, it devalues the activity stream quite a bit – which is kind of a pity as the other things on there are still great – Q+A, groups, events…

Have you noticed this too, or is it just my network of people?

Please, if you link twitter and Facebook together use the selective updates function – make sure your messages are “fit for purpose”, does everything you tweet, really need to be on LinkedIN?

Select “edit my profile”, then click on the “edit” link next to your twitter username and select the option highlighted below.

Next time you want to send something to LinkedIn just include “#in” in your message.

Thanking you in advance… Luke.

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Luke Williams on LinkedIN – I run 1/2 day LinkedIN courses in London and Bournemouth if you’d like to make more of this great business platform.

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The habit is firmly broken! I try to always use re-usable bags when I go out – a few times I’ve slipped up – 32 times actually. I donated all £32 to Julias House that I raised.

Now that seemed quite a large number to me, being more than one every other week.. it did make me wonder how many I used before.

Time to start planning this years resolutions, as with most years I’ll be setting them on chinese new year.

Can’t wait till February… damn new years resolution swimmers were clogging up my lanes last night!

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Listed below are 5 links I think all businesses that use Facebook need, some of them are easy to find, some seem to move around and hide:

1) Set friendly URLs (pagenames), ie: facebook.com/yourname – facebook.com/username – Works for personal profiles and pages (once you have 25+ fans).

2) Widgets, fanboxes  and other cross site badges are all on the widgets page.

3) Link twitter accounts to pages or personal accounts facebook.com/twitter – also use this page to change the way your updates are linked and what kind of items are shared.

4) Set up your adverts at facebook.com/advertising – alos handy to see how large a given demographic is, try stepping throughmaking an advert up to the advert target seletion – it will tell you the number of users you could target.

5) Its also very handy to be a “Fan” of Facebook pages (or subscribe to the RSS feed) so you see any updates or new features when they’re announced.

One for my fellow geeks: If you’re thinking of customising the look and feel of your page, or would like to build your own applications, you’ll need the developer resources page for all things FBML.

Handy tip for mobile users: If you use the touch.facebook.com site, choosing friends and then pages gives you quick access to send out updates to your pages – any you are admin for will appear at the top of the list. On m.facebook.com (older non-touch-screen phones) this still works except pages you admin are not listed first… I don’t know why, they just aren’t!

If you find these links/hints helpful, please take 2 seconds to bookmark it somewhere (I use delicious) or share it on with someone else via email, twitter or courier pigeon.

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Happy New Year everybody, did you make any changes for the new year?

I’m making a few, one of which is a change i’ve pondered for a while – a split in my twitter persona.

@socialtech is now going to be purely web technology based hints, tips and discussion. It’ll also focus more on the startup and Magus things that I’m involved with.

@alukeonlife is for my personal messages, local info and other off topic stuff like #uksnow.

I’ve felt for a while that I needed a split for a number of reasons, mainly:
Some friends were reluctant to follow as the tech stuff made no sense to them and there wasn’t enough personal messages (where I am, what the snows doing, OT articles)… and conversly, whilst no-one had said it, @socialtech had more personal and OT messages than I’d originally intended and as such watered down what I had to offer (especially to people I’ve trained who just want tips etc).

I also had a lot of local messages sneaking into @socialtech which must of been annoying to tech folks who follow me, or people out of the area – these will all now be from @alukeonlife

Both accounts are open and I’m happy for anyone to follow either, @alukeonlife will also be information on my radio DJ alter ego (Luke Dubyah) with details of radio shows and gig dates.

This does slightly dilute the “Luke Williams” brand, but I think it offers the best of both worlds and I’m a big believer that a twitter stream should be useful – keeping it all together, I felt, had reached a point where it wasn’t as good as it could be for either – jack of all, master of none.

And yes… for the astute amongst you, I did used to use @warpsauce for Luke Dubyah messages, this will now purely be tweets about our warpsauce startup. (our music technology based project)

I’d love to know what you think, do you have one identity on twitter? Do you feel sometimes it dilutes your personal or business brand? Maybe you think I should leave it all as one? I’d love to hear from you in the  comments…. or on twitter!

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Wow… 3 months since my last post, how did that happen?

I will start using this again in the new year, I’ve finally nailed the techy stuff I’ve been struggling with and I’llupdate here soon.
All I have to add is that I’ve only used 32 new carrier bags this year, something I’m quite proud of.

What to resolve for 2010???

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