Newsletter Issue 176, December 2009

Sam Young Newsletter

Issue 176, December 2009

Hi guys,

According to Computerworld news and Symantec, in 2009, 87% of All Email was Spam.

Microsoft has really improved their new OS with the addition of Windows 7 Libraries. Read all about it below.

Word Auto Captions   TLAs for SMEs        Tips, Short & Hot Keys        Hot Linx

Don't forget, if you want to be taken off my mailing list, click here to send me a reply e-mail and I will remove your name.

87% of All Email is Spam

Spam accounted for 87 percent of all email messages in 2009, says Symantec.

According to the security vendor's December State of Spam and Phishing report, spam peaked in May, when it accounted for 95 percent of all email messages sent and was at its lowest level (74 percent) at the beginning of the year, just months after US ISP McColo was shut down.

Celebrity spam attacks continued to surge, especially since 2009 saw a number of high-profile celebrity deaths including Patrick Swayze and Natasha Richardson.

However, the death of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, generated the most celebrity spam in 2009. According to Symantec, the levels of Jackson-related spam accounted for just under two percent of all spam messages.

Symantec said it expects 2010 to be an active year for spammers, with botnets playing a heavy part in distribution of spam. The security vendor also revealed spammers will continue using tactics such as URL shortening services such as bit.ly and free web hosting servers to evade detection by antispam filters.

 

Thanks to Carrie-Anne Skinner London for that piece, from Computerworld's top news service at http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/46ACB2F370B8296BCC25768E000FABFA?opendocument&utm_source=topnews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=topnews

 

Windows 7 Libraries

If you use a computer music application, you will be familiar with the concept of a library - where the music isn't stored in your application, but all over your PC; the software just makes it accessible from one place for you to 'see', play, copy and delete. You can have your files in multiple playlists without you having to create another copy. You can search them as one group, you can add as many folders as you want wherever you want, and the application treats all your files as if they were in just one folder.

Microsoft's new OS, Windows 7, is using the Library concept for file management. Woody Leonard at Windows Secrets Newsletter wrote:

You start with four libraries: Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos. [T]he Pictures Library has your Pictures folder and the PC's Public Pictures Folder, Documents has your Documents folder and Public Documents, and so on. Very simple hooks let you add more folders to those Libraries or create entirely new Libraries.

When Microsoft reworked Windows 7's Library routines, the company also enhanced the OS's search function... searching a Win7 Library just plain works. Vista's search interface suffers from the late changes Microsoft made to the OS, which did away with some planned new features but retained vestiges that served only to bollix things up. By contrast, Win7's search interface benefits from a ground-up design and is much less confusing.

Here's the magical part: When an application running under Windows 7 looks for the Documents folder, Win7 hands it the entire Documents Library. If you start a graphics program and click File, Open, you don't go to your Pictures folder. Instead, you open up the Pictures Library.

Why is this a big deal? Imagine that you have a folder on another computer containing documents you commonly use. When you add that folder to your Documents Library, every time you crank up Word and click File, Open, the contents of that remote folder are staring right at you.

It sounds like it should be a big improvement. I guess time will tell if the expectation matches the results!

Thanks to Woody Leonard at Windows Secrets Newsletter (http://windowssecrets.com/2009/05/14/02-Two-big-reasons-why-youll-like-Windows-7).

Word Auto Captions

If you are writing any kind of formal document with graphics, diagrams or tables, you are likely to need a caption that explains it. When using Word you can create a generic label automatically on create or insert, by doing the following:

1. Go to the Insert menu | References | Caption (in Word 2007, click the References tab and then Insert Caption in the Captions group).
2. In the Caption dialog box, click the AutoCaption button.
3. Tick the object to be associated with an automated caption.
4. Go to the Use Label drop-down list and enter the text you want to appear at the start of each caption (eg "Figure ").
5. Go to the Position drop-down list and enter where each caption should appear in relation to the inserted item.
6. Click OK.

After setting up auto caption, Word will automatically include your specified label with each new table - or image, or Excel spreadsheet - you insert; then you can edit as required (eg adding a number and name details).

Repeat this procedure for as many insert items as you need to use.

TLAs for SMEs

Here are this newsletter's TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) for you:

• P3P, Platform for Privacy Preferences. A protocol developed to increasing consumer confidence in online transactions and specifying if a Web site's security policies meet a user's privacy requirements. When a user requests a Web page, that Web site's P3P policy files are sent to the browser, which compares the files with the user's privacy preferences and delivers an alert if there is a conflict between the two.

Please feel free to email me with any TLAs that you want to get the bottom (meaning!) of.

Tips, Short+Hot Keys

Over the next few newsletters, we are looking at all the things you can do with Alt, Shift, Ctrl in Windows Media Player. This is our seventh section in this series:

• Windows Media Player "Open Help" F1
• Windows Media Player "Search specified locations for digital media files" F3
• Windows Media Player "Refresh the information in the panes in the Copy to CD or Device feature" F5
• Windows Media Player "Mute the volume" F8
• Windows Media Player "Decrease the volume" F9
• Windows Media Player "Increase the volume" F10
• Windows Media Player "Show the shortcut menu for the selected item" Shift & F10

Hot Linx

For an interesting view of ACC and its shortcomings, take a tour past http://www.macdoctor.co.nz/ and see what Dr Jim McVeagh has to say. Very interesting, statistics - look for the "ACC for FREE" thread.

For a bit of a laugh, head over to this blog to read the NY Post's contest winners on new meanings for old words, and the Washington Post's words with one changed letter & a new meaning contest winners at http://www.speakingtowin.com/blog/2009/05/2009-winners-of-the-ny-post-ne.html

Canadian anti-energy drink Slow Cow is positioned as a "relaxing, anti-energy drink”, promoting the benefits of de-stress rather than speeding up. Check it out at http://www.slowcowdrink.com/default.asp?no=1

Outside the UK, the Kiwi accent comes out top in a BBC reader poll of 5000 people to find the top 'fave accents' amongst English speakers - check out the results at http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10602759

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                                Catch you again soon!! E-mail your suggestions to me here

read more "Newsletter Issue 176, December 2009"

Newsletter Issue 175, November 2009

Sam Young Newsletter

Issue 175, November 2009

Hi guys,

In a post-recession world, how can we take better care of our customers? Check out Eco-Economy below.

I have some stats from Trendwatching that indicate we will be Online 24/7 by 2014. 

Detecting Wireless Freeloaders   TLAs for SMEs        Tips, Short & Hot Keys        Hot Linx

Don't forget, if you want to be taken off my mailing list, click here to send me a reply e-mail and I will remove your name.

Eco-Economy

Some coming trends to think about as the world climbs out of the current recession may make the difference between businesses that take off and those that crawl.

A few interesting pieces of news came across my desk this week, which got me thinking about about the new links between ecology and economics:

• Apple has apparently refused to repair PCs which belong to customers who smoke, advising that nicotine is on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (OSHA) list of hazardous substances and Apple would not require an employee to repair anything deemed hazardous to their health. A US Consumerist website claims to have received reports from two Mac users stating that US Apple repair centres have declined to fix 'Applecare'-warrantied PCs, claiming that the warranties have been voided due to second-hand smoke contamination under OSHA regulations (while it is entirely logical that nicotine and other toxic cigarette residues would seep into computers over time, providing a health risk for Mac techies when fixing them is a bit of a stretch). See http://apcmag.com/apple-wont-work-on-macs-owned-by-smokers.htm
• Bundanoon in NSW, taking inspiration from the Tasmanian town of Coles Bay which went 'Plastic Bag Free' in 2003, is Australia's first bottled-water free town. To put to rest repeated consent applications from the Norlex conglomerate, which wanted to drill for bottled water, the townsfolk responded by banning bottled water completely (http://www.bundanoon.nsw.au/bundy-on-tap.html), and installing filtered drinking fountains.
• And speaking of plastic bags, New Zealanders use 1 billion plastic shopping bags per year (a mind boggling over-consumption for a mere 4 million people), but China - with a population of two billion - knocks us into a cocked hat for green practices. They have reduced their use of plastic bags 66% in the first year of legislating against single-use plastic bags by an amazing 40 billion bags, from kick-off in June 2008 through to June 2009 (http://www.chinaretail.org/shownews.asp?id=766). Collingwood is Nelson's only plastic bag free town; although Wanaka and Kaikoura have now followed suit. However, the worst on the planet are the Americans, who throw away almost 100 billion plastic bags every year, only recycling between 1 and 3 percent. Hong Kong, Kenya, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Germany and the Netherlands are all plastic bag free. Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland and Ireland have a plastics tax.
• Soda stream is being advertised on TV again - probably for the first time since the 70s, by my recollection - with the pull strategy of the young Australian boy on the ad saying that they were not contributing to landfills by using soda stream, and that soda stream is an "Active Green" company as it consumes CO₂. Quite a different marketing ploy to the 1970s and early 80s (http://www.sodastream.com.au/earthfriendly).

So what do all these things have in common? That in our post-recession, hyped-up global-warming world, the human race is starting to think about becoming a whole lot less wasteful, and I suspect in the medium term we will be a lot more careful of what knock-on effects we create. Mr FastFoodChain and Ms Supermarket need to take into account that a few greener practices will get customers onside; being clever about not creating the waste in the first place, so we don't have to deal with it later, will stand businesses in good stead.

Time and time again it has been proved that the only way to change our profligate habits has been legislation. However, while New Zealand's Waste Minimisation Bill was a total fizzer, there is nothing to stop each and every one of us from doing our bit, personally and in our own businesses.

Individually we can all make changes in how we do things; which will in turn keep our costs down. We can pass on savings directly to our customers, or pass those savings on to causes that we - and our customers - are passionate about, such as those reported this week by Trendwatch in Holland - http://trendwatching.com/briefing/#embedded.

Something for us all to think about.

 

Online 24/7

I was just reading on Trendwatching's website some projections of our mobile data use (at http://trendwatching.com/briefing/). We are apparently going to be quite "well connected" by 2013 or 2014:

• Globally, mobile data traffic will double every year through 2013, increasing 66-fold between 2008 and 2013. Mobile data traffic will grow at a CAGR of 131% between 2008 and 2013, reaching over 2 exabytes per month by 2013 (Cisco, 2009)
• The number of Orange 3G mobile broadband customers had increased to 21.7 million at 30 June 2009, compared with 13.4 million in June 2008, an increase of 62% in one year
• The overall number of individual mobile users in Western Europe is set to grow to 344 million at year-end 2014. By 2014, a third of Western European consumers will own internet-enabled phones compared with 18% in 2009. Mobile Internet adoption is set to grow to 39% in Western Europe in 2014 from 13% in 2008 (Forrester Research, August 2009)
• 6.5 billion tweets sent from Twitter thus far

Makes you wonder where you can cash in, and what trends you need to be up with, doesn't it...

Detecting Wireless Freeloaders

If you have a wireless network that suddenly starts slowing down, you may have someone else freeloading downloads on your account. And when you suddenly want to find out who else may be tapping into your network, most of us are a bit stuck.

However, there is an easy way to see which IP addresses are connecting to your router - and that is to query your router.

What you want is your router's status page. Anyone with network access to the router can see the status page simply by typing the router's LAN address into their browser's address bar (eg D-link at http://192.168.0.1/). Some routers may require a bit more navigation to get to the page that displays who's connected, but it is usually fairly easy.

Hey presto! There's the information you're looking for.

On home wireless networks, just compare the number of PCs the router says are connected to the number you should have. If you should have two and there are three connections, you know there's a problem and you need greater security. You might find there is a car parked on the street with someone in it. You could try turning your router off & see if they drive away. Then get some advice on how to better secure your internet connection (or do it yourself by reading the following article at http://windowssecrets.com/2009/10/08/07-Take-steps-to-secure-your-home-networks-router).

For larger setups, turn on all the machines you want connected to the LAN, note their IP addresses, and scan the router's list for "alien" IPs.

Bookmark your router's home page (IE - Add to favourites). Then you can check for anyone who shouldn't be on your router with a single click.

:-)

TLAs for SMEs

Here are this newsletter's TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) for you:

• RTLS, Real-Time Location System. This is one of a number of technologies detecting the current geo-location of a target, which may be anything from a vehicle to an item in a manufacturing plant to a person (...and cellphones, GPS etc).

Please feel free to email me with any TLAs that you want to get the bottom (meaning!) of.

Tips, Short+Hot Keys

Over the next few newsletters, we are looking at all the things you can do with Alt, Shift, Ctrl in Windows Media Player. This is our sixth section in this series:

• Windows Media Player "Switch between the inner and outer areas of the Player" Ctrl & Tab
• Windows Media Player "Specify either a URL or path of a file" Ctrl & U
• Windows Media Player "Close or stop playing a file on the File menu" Ctrl & W
• Windows Media Player "Delete a selected item in the Copy to CD or Device feature" Delete
• Windows Media Player "Select the next item in the list" Down Arrow
• Windows Media Player "Play an item" or "Carry out the command for the selected item or button" or "Go to the selected link" Enter
• Windows Media Player "Hide the menu" ESC

Hot Linx

For instructions on how to back up and restore Outlook, there is a useful little How To page at "How To Outlook". Check it out at http://www.howto-outlook.com/howto/backupandrestore.htm

And if you would like a bit of a laugh, check out the Heineken ad on YouTube (shades of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, rinsed through Lerner & Loewe's My Fair Lady) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz9_YfIQaz4

A couple of newsletters ago I talked about MetLife International, and their study of International Employee Benefits trends. Some clients have asked about their survey tool; go to http://www.whymetlife.com/benchmarkingtool/criteria.asp (NB: use "North-West" US as your demographic area).

If you are interested in knowing more about Corporate Social Responsibility, check out Mallen Baker's site at http://www.mallenbaker.net/csr/definition.php

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                                Catch you again soon!! E-mail your suggestions to me here

read more "Newsletter Issue 175, November 2009"

Newsletter Issue 174, November 2009

Sam Young Newsletter

Issue 174, November 2009

Hi guys,

If you are feeling overwhelmed by constant interruptions, read Time to Stop the “Hard Stop” below & think about some changes.

We take a look at a new browser engine, Lunascape. 

5 Tips to Trim Outlook   TLAs for SMEs        Tips, Short & Hot Keys        Hot Linx

Don't forget, if you want to be taken off my mailing list, click here to send me a reply e-mail and I will remove your name.

Time to Stop the “Hard Stop”

In a recent AMA article, Sander Flaum, Chair of Fordham Graduate School of Business' Leadership Forum in the US contributed a great article on workplace interruptions (reportedly costing the US economy $588 billion pa), why they are so destructive and what you can do to avoid them. He has kindly allowed me to reproduce that article for you to enjoy here.

Have you noticed the American office is a shrine to interruptions?  Each day managers arrive at their desks, focused on their daily and long-term missions. And each day, they must swim against a tide of e-mails, ringing phones, pinging BlackBerries, and an army of subordinates knocking at the door. If it sounds difficult, it is.

No office is immune to the problem, and the majority of employees are affected by it, as either interrupters or the interuptees. The average worker spends roughly 28% of the workday—that's more than two hours a day—dealing with and recovering from interruptions, according to a 2006 study published by the management consultancy Basex.

Which workers must fend off more interruptions than anyone else?  Unit heads, because their ears are always in high demand.  The challenge for leaders is to filter out extraneous requests and to maintain the primacy of their own essential goals.  They must remain so focused that they allow nothing to steer them off course until they are certain their key priorities have been addressed.

Of course, a no-interruption policy is only as good as the leader who institutes it.  It’s all well and good to say, “Don’t knock when the door is closed.”  But if a direct report knocks and you answer, you aren’t teaching the right lesson.  As a general rule, leaders should not honor any interruption, except for a true emergency.

“Management is largely about interruption,” writes Henry Mintzberg, management professor at McGill University, in an article published in August in The Wall Street Journal. “But e-mail—and especially BlackBerries—really makes it much worse...”

Cognitive research conducted over the past 10 years indicates that the time cost of switching between two tasks is magnified when one of the tasks is unfamiliar or more complicated—a common scenario for the executive interruption.  So if you’re trying to stay focused in a meeting about how to execute a new project, an interruption can cause greater delay than the amount of time taken to attend to the new task.

The research goes on to say that if a task is actually scheduled with a division or department head, rather than sprung on him or her as an interruption, not surprisingly it will take less time, and in effect, demand fewer resources from management.

In many cases, an interruption does more than set back the meeting schedule. A poorly timed interruption may undermine the perceived seriousness of your intent.  Interruptions not only take your eyes off the prize; they send a signal to your collaborators and clients that you may not be all that serious about the prize to begin with.

Another common obstacle to productivity is the preemptive interruption, or the “hard stop.”  Too many critical meetings begin with the phrase, “I only have a half hour,” when a half hour just won’t do.  If an issue is important, dedicate the time necessary to deal with it effectively.  Piecemeal meetings waste time and accomplish little.  Focus your time on critical matters and don’t allow a hard stop to hijack your goals.

The consequences of permitting interruptions to control your business can be disastrous. The Basex study reports that workplace interruptions cost the U.S. economy roughly $588 billion a year.  Whatever your share of that money is, your firm can’t afford to lose it to managerial mistakes—especially during a downturn.

At Flaum Partners, we’ve developed several strategies to keep interruptions at bay.  I ask team members not to take their BlackBerries into our Brainbuster meetings.  Their e-mail and missed calls will be waiting for them on the other side, whether they like it or not.

I’ve also learned to ask the same of our clients.  I suggest to them that if we’re going create viable solutions to the pressing issues at hand we will need everyone's complete attention.  At that point, I recommend that we all shut off our BlackBerries and mobile phones.  My request may seem a bit audacious at first, but it conveys to everyone my seriousness about making progress on the project. It’s a sacrifice our clients are more than willing to make.

In the end, great leaders develop their own strategies for shutting out the noise.  Formulating that strategy needs to become a priority of its own.  Just don’t let anyone—or anything—distract you from it.

Hard Stop!
 

This article originally appeared in AMA's member ezine at http://www.amanet.org/training/articles/7281.aspx.

Sander A. Flaum is Managing Partner of Flaum Partners, Inc., and Chairman, Fordham Graduate School of Business, Leadership Forum. Contact him at sflaum@flaumpartners.com and view his new book - Big Shoes: How Successful Leaders Grow into New Roles - at http://tinyurl.com/http-www-amazon-com-Big-Shoe

Lunascape

There are devotees of all the web browsers out there; Firefox, Opera, Chrome , Safari, and even Internet Explorer. If you really want to throw the cat amongst the pigeons, you could ask them why their particular browser is their favourite, and get quite a lot of information!

However, there is a new piece of internet browser software wending our way; Lunascape. Originating in Japan, what is exciting about this application is that it combines the engines from all the major browsers into a single, easy to use app.

So why would you care? Well, regardless of what your web browser skin looks like, it's the engine underneath that determines its performance. According to Windows Secrets newsletter, the "engine for Firefox is Gecko. Safari uses WebKit, Opera uses Presto, and Internet Explorer uses Trident. The recently released Google Chrome browser also uses WebKit, as does Safari. That should alert you to the fact that different-looking browsers can share the same engine in much the same way different cars can have unique exterior and interior designs while using the same engine."

Like car engines, web browsers have strengths & weaknesses. Lunascape lets you swap your engines. Window's Secrets newsletter goes on to say "optimization is easy with Lunascape, because it can be configured to open a different engine for specified sites. Indeed, you can have multiple tabs open, each using a different browser engine. Swapping engines in Lunascape is easy: Just right-click a tab and select the engine you want".

You can easily import your bookmarks and customisations into Lunascape; they have made it easy to adopt. If you want to give it a crack, you can download it at http://www.lunascape.tv/. The initial download is 8.42MB, plus additional downloads for the Gecko and WebKit engines (if you want them).

And let me know how you get on :-)

5 Tips to Trim Outlook

If Outlook is starting to grind slowly - particularly if your .pst/.ost file is over the magic 2Gb size - then you need to think about changing your habits. Here are five things you can do to trim back the size of your bloated Outlook behemoth and reduce the risk of an all out Outlook failure:

1. Empty deleted items. Outlook stores everything in a single file - a .pst or an .ost file (the latter is an Offline Folder). That file includes the Deleted Items folder. When you don't empty your Deleted Items, you can end up with a gargantuan-sized mailbox. Empty it regularly by setting up Outlook to empty Deleted Items automatically on exit. Go to Tools | Options | Other. Tick "Empty The Deleted Items Folder Upon Exiting" & click OK.
2. Save large attachments elsewhere. Remember the last item, that Outlook is one single file? The same thing holds true for large attachments bloating Outlook's file size. Save any received attachments into a file folder and then dump the email. This will reduce the size of your Outlook file significantly. You can add a file size field to your inbox and sent items so you can sort your mail by size (right click on the header bar in your mailbox view, select Field Chooser and select Size)
3. Archive. Optimise Outlook by archiving mail regularly. Microsoft has set default mailbox quotas at 2Gb. Mailbox sizes over that are headed for vastly reduced performance, if not corruption or total collapse. Set up auto-archiving by going to Tools | Options | Other tab | AutoArchive button, then select your desired settings.
4. Keep it Simple. Dump the fancy stationery, the graphic signature, logos, badges, business cards and other fancy graphics - it takes lots of space, and if your receiver is viewing online, they are likely to only see a text-based version and won't see your stationery/signature/logo anyway. Stick to the fundamentals of communication: name, title, company name and contact information. Go to Tools | Options | Mail Format tab | Signatures button, then set your signature settings using text. Eliminate message, mailbox and server queue bloat.
5. Maintain Outlook. Outlook’s storage file corrupts every now and again, "just because". Microsoft has an Inbox Repair Tool which will analyse your mailbox storage file for errors and creates a backup file as part of the repair process. Ensure you close any other applications that you have running before you start this process, then go to Help | Detect and Repair. Ensure you UNtick "restore my shortcuts when restoring" and UNtick "Discard my customised settings and restore default settings", then click Start. Or you could run Scan.pst (or Scan.ost) monthly.

TLAs for SMEs

Here are this newsletter's TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) for you:

• QAT, Quick Access Toolbar. This appears at the top of Windows applications software windows, providing one-click shortcuts to commonly used functions (the defaults are Save, Undo and Redo). You can customise the toolbar by clicking the arrow icon immediately to the right.

Please feel free to email me with any TLAs that you want to get the bottom (meaning!) of.

Tips, Short+Hot Keys

In this newsletter, we are going to look at some hotkeys to use during a PowerPoint presentation:

• PowerPoint "Start a presentation from the first slide" F5
• PowerPoint "Run the next animation or advance to the next slide" Enter or Spacebar
• PowerPoint "Return to the previous slide Backspace End a slide show" Esc or - (hyphen)
• PowerPoint "Jump to the first (or last) slide" Home (or End)
• PowerPoint "Jump to a particular slide" Type the slide number and press Enter
• PowerPoint "Go to a black screen or resume the slide show from a black screen" B
• PowerPoint "Go to a white screen or resume the slide show from a white screen" W

Hot Linx

To send someone a shortened URL, go to http://tinyurl.com/ and paste in your long link. TinyURL will give you a shortened link to cut, paste and send in place of the long one :-)

If the Ribbon drives you mad in Word, you might want to add some tools to the quick access toolbar. TechRepublic has a great pdf download of the "How To" for that, at http://i.techrepublic.com.com/downloads/dl_10_commands_qat.pdf

How about a bit of tongue in cheek news reporting about people who want to opt out of our interweb lifestyle? All those new luddites out there might be interested in this onion news report at http://www.theonion.com/content/video/google_opt_out_feature_lets_users

To fully explore the capabilities of your camera, there is a whole lot of information that is trapped when you take an image. Check out just what info you can access at http://www.cellutips.com/how-to-read-exif-data-from-your-image-files/

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                                Catch you again soon!! E-mail your suggestions to me here

read more "Newsletter Issue 174, November 2009"

Newsletter Issue 173, October 2009

Sam Young Newsletter

Issue 173, October 2009

Hi guys,

In these less robust economic times, here are Five Tips to Be More Visible at Work.

There's a new piece of price comparison software coming our way called Shopsavvy. Read more below.

Creating a PowerPoint Pop-up   TLAs for SMEs        Tips, Short & Hot Keys        Hot Linx

Don't forget, if you want to be taken off my mailing list, click here to send me a reply e-mail and I will remove your name.

Five Tips to Be More Visible at Work

Scott Ginsberg has written a great article on making the most of your own skills during this less affluent time, which I have paraphrased for you all here.

If you want to prosper in the down-times, remember this three word philosophy: Anonymity is bankruptcy. To increase your visibility:

1. Assert your distinctiveness. Your net employee worth is how expert you are. First ask yourself three questions:
   • What are you known for knowing?
   • Who within the organisation already sees you as a resource?
   • What have you done TODAY to show your expertise in your organisation?
   Then think of yourself as a brand, and at every possible personal branding touch point (the answers you give, e-mails you write, meetings you attend, and conversations you hold), demonstrate your distinctiveness. That will attract more responsibility, which will increase your organisational 'net worth' - which will increase your job security.
2. Prepare to be vulnerable. Vulnerability is attractive, approachable and can be a strength; but the main point is to be honest.
   • Don't lie. Get out of the habit of mindlessly telling people, “Business is great!” No, it isn’t. Not unless you’re a foreclosure company. Stop putting on an act and start sharing your authentic experience. People will notice and appreciate your candour.
   • Own your lack of results. Try saying “You know, business is really slow, but it is providing a whole new challenge. I’ve been thinking about some new business growth strategies that will open up a new area for us.” The team will take notice of your balance between optimism and realism.
3. Be smart, not a smarty pants. Ensure you are sharing knowledge - not showcasing or trying to be the centre of attention. Smart people attract others and gain greater responsibility; smarty-pantses alienate people and are avoided. Consider these meeting strategies:
   • Bite your tongue. Don’t say anything until the last five minutes of the meeting. That way you can collect you thoughts, clarify your position, and speak confidently. If you look around, listen, and learn first, your comments will carry the most weight.
   • Come out of nowhere. When the meeting leader says, “Does anybody have any questions?” or “Any final thoughts before we finish?” raise your hand and say: “I have an observation…” All the people in the room will turn their heads, rotate their chairs, and look in the direction of the ONE person who hasn’t said anything all morning—you.
   • Articulate your idea. This is the best part. If you only say one thing, it becomes more profound because scarcity creates a perception of value. What’s more, the longer you wait to say something, the more everybody else will want to know what you’re thinking. Ultimately, your calmness, patience, and quietude will draw them in. In the words of the US mistake-friendly president, Barack Obama “Power grows through prudent use”.
4. Become THE most interesting employee in your company. Intensify your interestingness, and become “That Guy”—or “That Girl”. There’s an inverse relationship between how successful you are and how boring you are. Boring people are ignored. Those who are interesting get noticed. Those who get noticed get remembered. And those who get remembered get business. Consider these list strategies to become more interesting in the eyes of your co-workers and superiors:
   • Distil your stories; don’t just “tell” them. Stories are the most powerful way to get a point across, providing you can relate the lesson(s) learned, a universal human experience/emotion, or practical take-home value.
   • Be passionate. Invest your daily encounters with passion. You will engage, excite, and inspire everyone you meet because the fire inherent in any type of passion is irresistible.
   • Be predictably unpredictable. Position yourself and your actions so that people excitedly want to know what’s going to happen next. For example: What if every morning you posted a penetrating, though-provoking question of the day on the dry erase board outside of your office? People from departments you’ve never even heard of would start stopping by to meet you.
5. Volunteer to be a company blogger. Whether your company blogs internally for employees / customers or externally, the blogosphere is the perfect venue for sharing your expertise and elevating your visibility. Follow these steps for blogging brilliance:
   • First, learn the ropes. Equip yourself with the knowledge you’ll need to champion your blogging idea - read Naked Conversations (http://www.amazon.com/Naked-Conversations-Changing-Businesses-Customers/dp/047174719X) and The Corporate Blogging Book (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Corporate-Blogging-Book-Debbie-Weil/dp/0749927437).
   • Find out who’s in charge of the blogging function. Connect with them. Depending on the size of your company, blogging responsibility may lie in the hands of a team of writers, a few marketing people, or maybe just that 29-year-old wunderkind named Tyler who wears jeans and flip-flops every day.
   • Prepare a list of five ways to make the company blog more value-driven, more engaging, and more viral. Then share that list with key players. You might even consider writing a few sample posts to demonstrate your expertise and writing style. Management will notice. Management will listen. Most important, people’s confidence in you will soar.

When executed consistently, these tips will capture your manager's attention, who will increasingly realise the value you add to the company.

Scott Ginsberg is a regular contributor to the St. Louis Small Business Monthly, INSTORE Magazine, PR Canada, and Expert Village. His articles have appeared in online and print publications worldwide and in dozens of textbooks and resource guides. His books include The Approachable Salesperson, The Approachable Manager, The Approachable Frontline, Hello, My Name is Scott, and Make a Name for Yourself.

Shopsavvy

Dutch marketing gurus Trendwatching published a VERY interesting little piece in a recent newsletter of theirs about an phone application called "Shopsavvy", viewable at http://www.biggu.com/apps/shopsavvy-android

Called an "Android" app, Shopsavvy allows you to scan almost any barcode using your phone camera, then it searches over 20,000 online and local retailers to find the best price. Based on the Linux operating system, Android apps are an open mobile phone platform developed by Google and, later, by the Open Handset Alliance. Anyone can download an Android software development kit from Google and write an application for Android.

Once Shopsavvy has found the best deal, you can either purchase online, or use your phone’s built-in Google Maps feature to find your way to the bricks and mortar shop.

Launched in the US, UK, The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Poland and the Czech Republic, Shopshavvy won the 2008 Google Android Developers contest.

Roll over PriceSpy; I think you have been superseded by something MUCH bigger!

View the original article at http://trendwatching.com/briefing/

Creating a PowerPoint Pop-up

Sometimes in PowerPoint you want to hide info on a slide, then display it - if you need it - as a pop-up. To do this, you need two things:

1. A trigger is an object that executes an action or animation when clicked. This technique requires a graphic for you to click. If you’re lucky, your slide will have an appropriate graphic to use as a trigger. If not, you can create one by inserting and then hiding an AutoShape.
2. A callout is a quotation in a larger font (on the same page), to highlight a key point or topic - and in PowerPoint they are speech bubble - callout - AutoShapes. This tip uses the callout AutoShape for the popup window (NB: you could use any shape).

By using a trigger and a bit of animation, you can get PowerPoint to display the callout with a mouse click. You can use an existing slide graphic to trigger the callout. How to use the trigger and the callout:

• In Normal view, with the slide you want the pop-up on screen, choose Basic Shapes from the AutoShapes icon on the Drawing toolbar.
• Select and insert a square shape as your trigger. How big you make square is depends on how much of an area you want to cover. The advantage to using this additional square as the trigger is that you control the size of trigger area (callouts themselves are small and can be hard to click on during a presentation).
• Then select Callouts from the AutoShapes icon on the Drawing toolbar, selecting and inserting your chosen callout shape, and insert it inside your square. Enter your required text.
• To animate your callout:
  1. Right-click your callout and choose Custom Animation from the pop-up menu.
  2. The Custom Animation sidebar pane will open.
     • Click the Add Effects button and select Entrance | More Effects
     • Select (under Subtle at the bottom) Faded Zoom
     • Click OK. PowerPoint will add your animated callout to the effects list.
     • To set the trigger, click on the drop-down arrow at the end of your new "Faded Zoom" effect (in the effects list) and select Timing drop-down list.
     • In the Faded Zoom dialog box, click Triggers.
     • Click the 'Start Effect On Click Of' option and then select from the drop-down list your square that - when clicked - will display your callout. Your square is probably called something like 'rectangle 4'
     • Click OK
  3. To hide your square:

  • Right-click your Trigger square double-click it, or right mouse click it & select Format AutoShape from the pop-up menu
  • in the Fill section, move the Transparency slider to 100%
  • In the Line section, click the Color drop-down list and select "No Line"
  • Click OK

• Save your presentation
• To preview the slide, click the F5 key
• Click your hidden square to display your callout.
• To go to your next slide, click anywhere other than your trigger square.

You may not need a trigger graphic - you could use an existing graphic or even the callout itself (if it is big enough). Experiment with the shapes and timing once you’re comfortable with the technique to get the most efficient and effective results. You might want to add an exit animation as well. That way you can hide the callout if you want to continue to view the slide without the callout.

Thanks to TechRepublic for the original tip which can be found at http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/msoffice/?p=717&tag=nl.e056.

TLAs for SMEs

Here are this newsletter's TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) for you:

• CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility. Operating a business in a manner that meets or exceeds the ethical, legal, commercial and public expectations that society has of business, usually measured using one of two accounting methodologies; Triple Bottom Line or Balanced Scorecard.
• TBL, Triple Bottom Line [Reporting]. Measuring organisational (and societal) success using economic, environmental and social factors. In 2007 the UN ratified TBL as the standard for urban and community accounting, so TBL became the main public sector management accounting method.

Please feel free to email me with any TLAs that you want to get the bottom (meaning!) of.

Tips, Short+Hot Keys

Over the next few newsletters, we are looking at all the things you can do with Alt, Shift, Ctrl in Windows Media Player. This is our fifth section in this series:

• Windows Media Player "Open a file on the Skin shortcut menu or the File menu" Ctrl & O
• Windows Media Player "Open or play a file in the Anchor window" Ctrl & O
• Windows Media Player "Play or pause a file" Ctrl & P Windows Media Player "Stop playback" Ctrl & S
• Windows Media Player "Rewind (not available for all files)" Ctrl & Shift & B
• Windows Media Player "Turn captions and subtitles on or off" Ctrl & Shift & C
• Windows Media Player "Fast-forward (not available for all files)" Ctrl & Shift & F
• Windows Media Player "Play faster than normal speed (time compression)" Ctrl & Shift & G
• Windows Media Player "Autohide the menu bar in full mode" Ctrl & Shift & M
• Windows Media Player "Play at normal speed" Ctrl & Shift & N
• Windows Media Player "Play slower than normal speed (time expansion)" Ctrl & Shift & S

Hot Linx

If you are a Contact Energy customer, calculate your carbon footprint with their calculator at http://www.carbonzero.co.nz/ContactEnergy/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fcontactenergy%2fDefault.aspx

There is a new marketing tool in town - the facebook fan page. Learn about it at http://mashable.com/2009/03/30/successful-facebook-fan-page/ and create one at http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

If you like wine, go & check out the results of Liquorland's Top 100 wine competition for 2009, which have been posted on their website at http://www.top100.co.nz/#winners

If you have seen all those ads for losing ten tons of fat in three minutes and wanted a bit of a laugh, head over to Crabby McSlacker's blog site at  http://crankyfitnessreviews.blogspot.com/2009/01/one-rule-for-flat-stomach.html to find out all about it.

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                                Catch you again soon!! E-mail your suggestions to me here

read more "Newsletter Issue 173, October 2009"