DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

Archive for March, 2010

The more I do online the more understand and appreciate the relevance of email marketing. In the age of massive websites and communities such as facebook and twitter some would argue that these communities are more valuable but for me it really depends on the brand and the people you are trying to reach.

Email newsletters are still a great way to gently remind your user community of who you are and what your do. I’ve put together a collection of really solid articles which will give you some insights on how to build killer email campaigns, track your progress and improve automation.

Check them out. They’re in no particular order.

I know this is somewhat off topic for a business technology blog but its so strangely awesome that I had to share it with you so I hope you enjoy.

It’s not everyday that someone offers you one hundred trillion dollars so I took some photos to prove it.

My colleague has been tracking the decline of the Zimbabwean dollar from 2002 to 2009. The currency has been steadily and then very rapidly declining in value until it was finally abandoned in favour of the American dollar.

The photo is a timeline of bank notes between that period.

This wiki article tell how hyperinflation got so out of control in the first place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwean_dollar

ITnews have the story

http://bit.ly/aukSKK

Time seems to have run away with me this week so just a very quick post to share a neat little trick I learnt this week that might just make you life easier too.

The problem I had to solve was how we could use the Calendar in CRM in a way that was meaningful. By that I mean that each user had populated free / busy information in their CRM Calendar. My clients are heavy users of Gmail and google apps and are largely based away from their desk and sometimes work from their smart phones.

The real problem in that case was, how to match up data from SugarCRM to their Gmail accounts.

The solution was incredibly simple. An module on sugar exchange called MyCRM connector. It’s technically in beta but its production ready and stable when tested on my test account.

It was easy to install through the module loader but not that intuitive to configure without the provided instructions.

Screen shot - My CRM Connector

MyCRM Connector allows you to populate you gmail calendar from Sugar and visa versa. Fantastic. As well as meetings you can also sync activities such as phone calls.

I was at a networking event a few evenings ago and I got intensely irritated by the behaviour of one of the attendees.  He was working the room, walking around chanting. “I’ll do your adwords, your keywords, your SEO, yourSEM your PPC”.  It was clear that he had no idea what he was saying, could probably not explained it if he was put on the spot and intended to pull the wool over the eyes of other people at the event in order to get a sale – AGGHHH!!!

You see for many small businesses, as they grapple to understand what a successful website is and how it is achieved, there are plenty of people out there willing to take advantage.

Now I’m not knocking the majority of SEO specialists out there. There’s an enormous skill and a great deal of work involved in optimising a website (properly). What I am driving at is that if you own a website and you want it to succeed, you need to have a pretty good understanding of this yourself.

The sort of knowledge I am talking about is freely available and should be learned for no other reason than to stop an SEO company trying to pull the wool over your eyes.

A good place to go and get a grasp of the basics is at the comprehensive market samurai website.

While you there, sign up for the free trial. I’ve used three other keyword tools and this is by far the best

http://www.marketsamurai.com/

In recent months, with several office moves and a flurry of new meetings to keep on top of, I was starting to wonder if I would ever find a way of keeping on top of my meeting notes and business cards. I’m also big on lists, scheduling and writing things down when Ideas come to me in silly places.

The answer it seems was staring me in the face from the very beginning. I’d seen onenote on versions of windows mobile for a while but seen it more as a bundled annoyance that I would one day get around to evaluating. When I finally got around to firing it up on my laptop, I was annoyed I didn’t do it earlier (just as the blurb said I would be). Now I use it all the time and to be honest would struggle without it. All my notes get scanned and convereted into one note via the sheet feed scanner. Easy. If you haven’t tried it, give it a while, it comes with the more comprehensive versions of office. This post isn’t about one notethough, it’s about a little tip I learnt when I finally started using iPhone recently.

The power of onenote is in having access to your information and notes anywhere which is why iphone is a frustration. Luckily I found a solution that allows me to onenote on my iphone.

It comes in two form, cloud syncing and desktop syncing. I went for the desktop version because for a $10 fee it didn’t make sense to lock into an ongoing monthly contract.

There are essentially two apps, one downloadable from the istore and the one you install on your PC. There is a bit of configuration to do but nothing that can’t be done by the average user.

If you’re a user of onenote and iphone you might like to find out more at www.mobilenoter.com

Enjoy!