Month: November 2005

As blogs continue to explode onto the internet the importance of RSS or Atom feeds is becoming more and more refined. I could see these one day replacing a good portion of the emails we receive on a daily basis. The best feature of them is that you are receiving only content you want WITH NO SPAM, I mean how cool is this.

The most user friendly one I have found so far is RSS Reader www.rssreader.com. It allows you to subscribe to any number of blogs and have the great content delivered right to your desktop without having to go through the hassel of serfing for it. The readers will just ask you for a feed of each site you would like it to keep you abreast of. Mine is http://chuckbrady.blogspot.com/atom.xml .

As blogs continue to increase in popularity those who use RSS to their advantage will be the ones who are able to best reap the rewards. Now is the time to be one of those people who will be looked at 5 years from now when people say “boy were you lucky to get in when you did”.

These are my two cents,

CB

Here is another great article I came across, I think it provides some great insite to review.

“Although Weblogs (blogs) are currently used by only a small number of online consumers, they’ve garnered a great deal of corporate attention because their readers and writers are highly influential. Forrester believes that blogging will grow in importance, and at a minimum, companies should monitor blogs to learn what is being said about their products and services. Companies that plan to create their own public blogs should already feel comfortable having a close, two-way relationship with users. In this document we recommend best practices, including a blogging code of ethics, and metrics that will show the impact of blogs on business goals……..”
For the entire article click here:
www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,35000,00.html

Bon Appetite,

CB

I found this great article about blogging from a business standpoint. It puts blogging into context and shows how you can include it into your budgeting.

Bon Appetite,

CB

www.clickz.com/experts/crm/actionable_analysis/article.php/3517546

I am please to announce that our BNI Terminal city club was officialy sanctioned today. It is my great pleasure to take on the role as president of the club. I have long thought BNI to be a great organization. With our proactive group of business people in our group we are excited about the future of our new chapter.

Vancouver’s business community has always been close knit and I think that BNI is still grossly under-represented in our fair city. I like to consider myself as someone who is well networked and would welcome anyone looking to network in Vancouver to come as my guest to our chapter or to any of the other many events that I am associated with in the city.

Cheers,

CB

While looking around my fair city of Vancouver, one known for its high tech community I was surprised to see that not many of the companies here have adopted the idea of blogging for business. I think Vancovuer is a great city that has the ability to lead the world as far as getting its business community to come together and market the heck out of something. With the upcoming winter Olympics in 2010 Vancouver has all sorts of revenue potential for companies.

I really look forward to playing a strong role in helping the local companies understand and utilize the effect blogging can have for businesses. I would welcome any local people or companies to stand up and be heard on this subject, after all Vancouver is the best city in the world to live in.

Cheers,

CB

Blogging For Business

A great resource I discovered for more information.

Cheers,

CB

Make sure you never miss another post with a free service offered by Bloglines http://www.bloglines.com/. This is a great service that allows you to track what is being posted on all of your favorite blogs; without having to visit a whole wack of sites. I have found it to be an incredibly useful tool for keeping track of what is going on.

Happy reading,

CB

With the popularity of blogs on the up swing many business owners are asking the question as to how they can best take advantage of this emerging trend. One of the questions that come along with this trend is asking how can business owners keep from being a victim of the blog wars which have caused many companies headaches beyond belief.

A few things a company should be aware of are that bloggers are going to speak their mind regardless. You can not stop news from spreading through the blogsphere so just make sure there is positive news spreading with your company attached to it. Be proactive and be ahead of the growth curve.

It is also a good idea to monitor the content that is spreading through the blogsphere on a regular basis. There are many monitoring systems out there; you can find a great list of them at http://www.atomenabled.org/ . Finally make sure you are adding good content on a regular basis and blogs will become your new best friend.

These are just my two cents on the subject

Cheers,

CB

By our nature we as humans have a defense mechanism built into us for survival. We have the inborn desire to survive and will do whatever we feel we need to do. However this is often driven by emotion and not logic. Once we know this we can then begin to break down the barriers and find softer ways to approach problems. Always be focused on the solutions and not the problems.

When I used to manage for pizza hut I was always amazed at the reaction of my cooks when a customer who complain. Pizza Hut always had a very liberal customer service policy, if a customer felt there was something wrong with his pizza then our attitude was there is something wrong with his pizza so we would make him another one. It always astounded sometimes when I would ask a cook to do a remake. Often time they would stand there and argue with me for 5 minutes that there was nothing wrong with the first one. My response was always the same, “it doesn’t matter what the first one looked like just make another one and get back to work”. These cooks were not punished or reprimanded for these customer complaints; it didn’t affect their wages or shift lengths. It really had no effect on their life whatsoever despite the fact that they now had one more pizza to make. They would just stand their arguing with me about the initial quality and waste time. The come the end of the shift I would always get the same excuse if some of the important tasks were not completed. “Chuck I didn’t have time to get that done”, as I have always said we all have the same number of hours in the day, it is what we choose to do with them that matters.

CB

“Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.” Thomas Edison

In the years I have spent managing people it never ceased to amaze me the number of people who were keeping themselves busy at work and could never understand why their peers were surpassing them. I heard all sorts of complaints such as “I have been here longer than him”, “I work much harder than her” or “she is just lucky”. Many years ago I stopped wasting my breath trying to explain to these people that just because they were busy did not mean they were helping the company in any way shape or form.

Throughout my life I have often been called lucky or very successful for my age. This was because at a very young age I picked up on the idea that it wasn’t the people in the world that worked the hardest who were at the top, it was those who worked the smartest. If it were the hardest workers at the top of the financial food chain we would see countless millionaires from the manual labour pools. The truth of the matter though is that very few people who do labour for a lifetime will ever be near the top. They are usually the ones putting in 12 hour work days and living pay cheque to pay cheque. It is a sad but true reality of this crazy world we live in.

CB